Voices like Marguerite Porete, a French mystic who was burned at the stake in 1310 for the radical book she wrote titled The Mirror of Simple Souls that reveals the seven stages of her spiritual transformation by the Love she found within her, a Love she knew as God. I wanted a deck that included all the forgotten voices of women throughout time and throughout the world religions. The deck I really wanted to use though didn’t exist yet. The more I used the Round Tarot deck, the more I trusted that inner guidance, and the clearer it became to me. What began to happen over the years is that I trusted more and more that small, quiet voice that felt like a gentle yet unwavering knowing inside me. And this is the part I can’t really explain, but I just knew, or I sensed, the card or series of cards that I was meant to turn over and then read as my answer. And just slowly hovered my hand above each card. What felt natural to me was to simply hold the deck in my hands, take a deep breath, and just get very clear on a question or issue I might be dealing with at the moment. The concept of spreads for reading my cards just never made sense to me. I wanted a deck that was rooted in the feminine, since I was studying the divine feminine in world religions at the time. ![]() It was the MotherPeace Round Tarot by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel. I bought my first tarot card deck right after my first reading. And there was no reason, I realized in that moment, that I needed to experience that power once removed, via someone else. There was power laid out in those cards on that cloth that stretched between us. I didn’t want a middleman between me and some sort of vision of how my life might unfold. Whatever he was doing, whatever he was seeing for me, I wanted to be able to do for myself. And what I was expecting even less was to suddenly feel disempowered. I wasn’t expecting to hear a prediction about my entire life from one spread. He stared at the cards for what felt like a concerning amount of time and then he lifted his head and said, “You should be a lot happier than you look. After I did, he shuffled the cards and carefully placed each card on the cloth that stretched out between us. Then he asked me to place my hand on the tarot deck before he drew my cards. He saw this and told me to take a deep breath. I felt vaguely nervous as I sat down in front of the man who would read my cards. ![]() There were crystal balls and tarots galore for sale on the shelves, and a whole mess of shining objects I didn’t recognize, like a statue of the god Thoth, and accessories for being witch-y… incantation bowls, pendulums, phases of the moon jewelry: all the essentials. There was a haunting, sort of mystical music playing in the background (heavy on the flute), and a very odd, not gross, but odd smell, like dried out, dusty rose petals. I passed through these dangling beads and felt like I was stepping into an alternate reality. I wasn’t sure what to think, but I was studying world religions in graduate school, and I wanted to be open. ![]() ![]() A close friend had booked the appointment because she had heard that this particular card reader was really powerful. I remember walking into my first tarot reading as if that moment remains in present tense.
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