Several years ago, I stopped going to therapy. I no longer trusted myself to tell the story of my life in a way that felt forward-moving. I harbored a suspicion that the therapist held some knowledge of me that she would one day reveal — like whether I should switch careers or move — but she never did.
I’ve always wanted to believe in a magic that transcends the human-constructed world, a universe that sees me, that can hold me when I fail to hold myself. But then again, it’s possible that wanting to believe in magic is a projection of my own laziness, my desire to cheat the system, to skip the hard work of living and summon the answer.
Instead of therapy at $100 a week (I was on the low end of a sliding scale), I invested in an astrological session every few months; at about $200 a session, I saved roughly $3,000 a year. With the astrologer, I didn’t talk much at all, and I wasn’t allowed to give a back story, which made the shocks of recognition that much more delightful when she got the details of my life right.
It was a relief to have someone talk about me in new, abstract terms. I surrendered to information that felt larger than my construction of self. If my sense of foreboding darkness could be explained cosmically, it didn’t have to feel so personal. This gave me the pleasureful illusion of control, and a confirmation of some deeper intuition. It felt like a companion; I wasn’t alone in my experience. It took away the sting of individualized humiliation, of being lost.
It seemed that I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. According to the Pew Research Center, 30 percent of U.S. adults say they consult astrology or a horoscope, tarot cards or a fortune teller at least once a year. However, only 1 percent say they actually rely “a lot” on what they learn from these readings to make major life decisions. Recently, my husband, a carpenter, showed me the vent he had installed on the exterior of our house and asked whether or not it was too close to the kitchen window. I can pull a card for that, I joked.
During the past decade, I have explored energy work, deep trance channeling and, most recently, Tarot, and I have developed a new emotional language that feels rooted in something far from the Westernized psychologisms of talk therapy. With Tarot, I see life themes as symbolic, not endemic. Perhaps what seems like emotional distance is not unresolved trauma from watching my father die in front of me as a child, but an ethereal, intellectual aloofness as indicated by my moon in Aquarius.
We each come around to our own logic in our own ways. While many people think of astrology or Tarot as woo-woo, it’s also true that early Babylonians used astrology to predict seasons, help with agricultural planning and advise their leaders on matters of politics and war. Tarot cards have been said to play a large part in popularizing Plato’s philosophies in the 15th century.
Our means of interpretation and analysis keep changing. Even my financial adviser describes the stock market as emotional. And ChatGPT is a kind of contemporary, oft-hallucinatory oracle. It’s all in asking the right questions.
“What is the safest plan?” I ask my financial adviser.
“Am I on the right path?” I ask the Tarot cards.
Last weekend, I saw a listing for a large, dilapidated house that would take years to fix up. I wrote to a Tarot reader with whom I’ve been in correspondence lately and asked her if she would draw a card for it. She pulled two Major Arcana cards, proof of a powerful question. “The Fool,” she said, “leaps in a state of play and an act of clarity. Strength is the knowledge (that trust) that you are living inside a long, deep and beautiful story.”
I was the fool, projecting meaning onto houses. When I read this to my husband, he was not amused. “This is not what I need right now,” he said, grappling with the mudroom electrical wiring.
If I’m being honest, when it comes to big decisions, I want someone to tell me what to do. It’s embarrassing. But ultimately, the reading about the house gave me the answer I needed: I had to reframe the question. It wasn’t, “Should we rush to buy this house?” but, “Why am I looking at this house?”
Because I want adventure.
According to Pew, most people who consult esoteric practices like Tarot do so “just for fun,” or they say they do, anyway. I’ve been asked to hold off on an agreement (I work in publishing) until Mercury goes out of retrograde. Apparently, if a contract is signed the day after Mercury goes direct, the universe will rev behind the deal. When I mentioned this in passing to an astrologically minded lawyer friend, she said it wasn’t a bad idea. But, she added, it would depend on which house and sign Mercury was retrograding through in the person’s chart. “Mercury” is not the same for everyone.
It’s enjoyable to toy with fate. If we can play with it, we can control it. Or we can play at controlling it. And if telling ourselves something helps us believe it, maybe it can change how we see ourselves, and therefore the world. The cards, or the cosmos, can act as an objective witness when the psyche becomes jumbled with its own miscalculations.
The soul is ever-changing. And the idea of self is unreal, a jumble of truths and lies. When I pull a Tarot card I ask: What is my costume today, what is the role I am playing? Today, I am the King of Coins. Tomorrow, the Devil.
While in therapy, I got too good at telling one story. But Tarot is full of many stories. In that way, Tarot is a text. But it is not fixed; each time a new combination brings a randomness that complicates the narratives we think we know. If a situation is dark and perplexing and the cards express a similar feeling, there’s also a powerful mirroring effect. My friend, a regular Tarot practitioner, calls this a “confirmatory system”: when the cards line up with other senses and intuitions. Check, double check.
It’s possible, too, that Tarot perpetuates a narrative of entitlement. We see what we want to see. We ask leading questions. I’d rather interpret it like a child playing — the child knows the doll is not a real baby, but embodies it as an idea. Similarly, Tarot cards speak not of “mother issues,” but the Mother. Maybe Tarot makes artists and children and writers of us all.
The big, dilapidated house sold right away, and it was good to release the dream. To remember I was still on the right path: That was exciting. To remember that there was only one path, and it was the path I was on: That was exciting.
Makenna Goodman is the author of “Helen of Nowhere” and “The Shame.” Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, White Review, ASTRA Magazine and other publications.
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