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This is an impression of me reading the tarot for myself: Shuffle the deck while tuning in to the energy of the situation I’m asking about. Shuffle the deck some more, and pick a card. Study the card briefly, and look up the meaning. If the message is positive, give myself a high five and go about my day with a spring in my step. If the message is negative, repeat above steps until I get a good one.

Thing is, more often than not the cards I pull in my admittedly amateur divinations suggest confusion, difficulties, and strife. They show misunderstandings up ahead or suggest that my own motives might be less than noble. None of which I really want to hear—and one of the reasons I’ve been slower to embrace the tarot when in search of insight, clarity, and self-knowledge.

In fact, when I first began to connect with the cards in any kind of meaningful way a few years back, I put them down again almost immediately. The Pisces had bought me the Rider Waite tarot a few Christmases ago, until recently the most famous and popular deck, and both the imagery on the cards and the descriptions of their meanings were often downright scary. Take the Devil card for example—which shows the classic “horned beast” punishing a naked couple bound by chains with a scepter of fire. I remember giving a “practice” reading to my niece after our holiday feast, and the look of abject terror on her eleven-year-old face after I pulled this card for her.

Not for me, I told myself, internally accusing the makers of the Rider Waite of scaremongering and manipulation. I would stick to astrology as my preferred method of cosmic weather forecasting, which felt so much more expansive and open to interpretation (i.e., easier to put a positive spin on things—after all, even a heavy Saturn transit is really about helping you build some rock-solid karmic muscle).

Plus, if truly understanding astrology is a lifelong study, akin to learning a whole new language, then the tarot appeared to be equally dense with meaning and tradition. I was well aware that perhaps my less than expert readings were the reason I wasn’t able to glean anything but a face-value fear factor from the more “difficult” cards—but did I really have time to tackle a “minor” in tarot, when I’d already committed a large chunk of my study time to my “major,” astrology?

Talk about lack mentality! What I’ve since discovered is that, in fact, astrology and tarot can be used to complement each other (more on this later), and that it’s totally possible to dip a toe into the tarot here and there and still get plenty from it. I just had to ignore the impatient, perfectionist part of me (another trait of Sun and Mercury in competitive Aries, go figure) that was putting pressure on myself to learn the tarot overnight. Plus, I found I couldn’t walk away from the cards that easily. If astrology had always been fascinating to me, the tarot held a similar allure. And, as I began to develop The Numinous, it also seemed to be gaining popularity in real time, with all sorts of beautiful new decks appearing on the scene.

To bring it back to basics for a minute, a tarot deck is composed of seventy-eight cards, divided into the Major and the Minor Arcana. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana incorporate “characters” such as the Devil and the Star, but also “concepts” like the Tower and the World. The fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana are divided into four “suits”—Cups, Swords, Pentacles, and Wands—numbered Ace through King (a bit like a pack of regular playing cards). In a reading, the cards are shuffled and those selected by the person getting the reading, laid out in what’s called a “spread.” The positions in the spread usually relate to different elements of the inquiry—for example, the past, present, and potential future outcome of a situation (this is a classic three-card spread).

TAROT IS NOT FOR FORTUNE-TELLING BY LOUISE ANDROLIA

I believe we’re most empowered and feeling our best when we’re fully in our mind, body, and spirit. To get here, we need to be really clear about what our journey actually looks like. What is the ground we’re walking on, and how connected do we feel to all the different elements of our self?

I use the tarot as a way to communicate with the most loving and truthful part of myself. When you turn a card over, if you see it as a reflection of your subconscious, then it can only be showing you something that, deep down, you already know. Using the tarot for myself, I often get a hit of, Yes, I knew that. And this in itself can be very comforting.

I see working with tarot as making a commitment to yourself. To paying attention to what’s making you uncomfortable, to listening to your intuition, and exploring what’s really happening in the present moment.

In this sense, the tarot is an incredible self-help tool—I don’t like to use it for divination and fortune-telling. It doesn’t serve anybody to be constantly trying to predict the future, since it leaves the present moment sort of flapping around, not knowing what to do with itself. Because also, the future is completely fluid and only NOW is real.

This means that the present moment is the only place we can act from, and our most empowered actions lie in our ability to take a risk and take a beautiful, brave step forward. The cards can show us what steps to take. This is often a humbling and heartbreaking process, because it often comes with a huge leap of faith and trust in our journey. Of surrender.

I’ve come to see that my misconceptions about tarot as a tool (an often scary one) for fortune-telling are shared by many. And based on the above depiction of a tarot “reading,” it’s easy to see why—for example, the Devil card appearing in the “future” position in a reading is enough to scare the bejesus out of anybody. Until, that is, you learn to interpret the tarot the Now Age way.

My dear friend Louise Androlia, an artist and mentor and one of the first people I shared my vision for The Numinous with, has been working with the tarot for almost twenty years, on both a personal and a professional level. And the first thing she will tell anybody is that, rather than a way to “predict” future events: “A reading is a perfect reflection of your subconscious.” And as such, each and every card contains a valuable learning to help us navigate whatever stage we’re at in our personal evolution. Yes, even the Death card—which corresponds with the energy of Scorpio, the sign embodying the cycle of death and rebirth (Lou’s Sun sign, and one of her favorite cards). The Devil, meanwhile, points to addictive behavior patterns that may somehow be enslaving us—pointing, therefore, to an opportunity to recognize these and escape the “hell” of addictions.

Scary since: “Change and the unknown are two of the things humans are most afraid of, and as such learning how to change our habits is one of our most important lessons,” Lou told me when I asked her more about it. “The Death card, meanwhile, is just a reminder that change is our natural state, since everything in nature goes through cycles of death and rebirth. There’s something so comforting in that for me.”

And so when Death shows up in a reading, it’s not a sign you’d better watch your step since there’s a body bag out there with your name on it. Rather, it can be read as an invitation to acknowledge where in your life an ending is occurring, to allow a new relationship/project/mind-set to come into being.

Lindsay Mack, another reader whose work I’ve come to know and love and who currently writes the monthly Tarotscopes on The Numinous, reads this card as a death of the ego—what she describes as “the sacred fertilizer that’s needed to help bring forth the new.” See how this changes the energy around the card from scary to exciting?

And then there is the multitude of new decks blossoming like spring blooms all over my Instagram feed—what Lindsay describes as “evolved” decks: “meaning they’re more feminine and holographic. A deck like the Rider Waite was created by men and based on Christian imagery. Motherpeace, the Medicine Woman Tarot, and the Starchild Tarot are great examples of more feminine and holistic decks.” Lindsay even thinks the Wild Unknown deck, featuring the inviting yet mythical black-and-white artwork of Portland-based artist and yoga instructor Kim Krans, can be held solely responsible for what she sees as the tarot currently having a moment. “People are really drawn to Kim’s style, which is so visually accessible and modern,” she explained to me.

I also feel like tarot is gaining in popularity because it’s kind of like Google for your soul. We have access to sooooo many answers in the Now Age, since regular ol’ Google means we can get instant access to all the information that’s ever been plugged into the Internet about every subject in the world, ever. But since very little of the information has been shared with our specific needs, questions, or journey in mind, things can very quickly become misleading—resulting in yet more confusion. The tarot, on the other hand, is a tool for tapping back into our own inner knowing.

Another deck I love is called the Thoth deck, named for the Egyptian god of writing, magic, and science and designed in the late 1930s by the famous occultist Aleister Crowley. And here’s the thing: in the past, that reference would have just reinforced my fear of the tarot. “The Occult” sounds dark and scary, right? But the word occult actually just means “hidden.” And what is the tarot if not a tool for excavating the hidden truths—truths our higher Self wants us to become aware of—of a given situation?

As for my personal practice? I’m still more inclined to celebrate and carry the message of the “positive” cards with me, but I’m learning not to shy away from the harsher-seeming messages too—just like my numinous journey overall is helping me accept and embrace every messy aspect of being human. So read on for twenty empowering Now Age lessons about the tarot that have helped me get to this place and incorporate the cards as a valuable component of my numinous toolkit.

Tarot is a tool for tapping back into our own inner knowing.