Everyday Woo (Volume 14)
Are there good and bad cards in tarot? Plus, a fun way to connect with your tarot deck without having to know the meanings of all the cards.
Everyday Woo is a place for the woo curious to learn a little more about tarot and spirituality in a not-too-serious way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…
✨ Beyond the Binary: Rethinking a Good/Bad Approach to Tarot
As a kid, I loved reading the women’s magazines that my mother sometimes bought from the grocery store. You know the ones: the splashy, neon-pink headlines that scream about Janice from Kentucky who lost 90 pounds by starting her day with grapefruit.
A woman is pictured on the cover, standing in an oversized pair of pants with an expression that simultaneously conveys triumph at having conquered her food demons and a thinly-veiled disgust at the idea of ever having been over a size 10.
I always flipped to that story first. Even from a young age, I was desperate to know the secret to the beatific, lipsticked smile that Janice and all of her fellow cover models possessed.
I knew, without the magazine spelling it out, that it was thinness. To be thin was to be good. To be anything else was bad.
And that’s where my binary thinking began.
Food is the easiest place to see it. Lists of “red light” and “green light” foods that a self-purported mindful eating program offered. Coded language like “guilt free” paraded across packaging. My own subtle emotional reactions when I grocery shop and put something in my cart that would make Janice shudder and point to her former pants, as if to say, “do you want to be a before, Katie?”
Binary thinking and assigning worth based on categorization is dangerous. But here’s the thing: we as humans LOVE to categorize. It’s biological: way back in the timeline, when we still dealt with the everyday threat of being, like, eaten by a wild animal, our brains worked hard to categorize things as either potential threats or harmless objects.
But in today’s society, the ability to categorize isn’t exactly helping us avoid life or death situations. Instead, we use it to make sense of the world around us. This can be useful. But as with most things, it’s helpful until it really, really isn’t. Some of the worst parts of our society (racism, eugenics, diet culture, sexism) have roots in binary thinking, labeling and stereotyping.
So it’s not surprising that the same is true in the spiritual world. Even in a realm as ephemeral and ever-shifting as spirituality, there is still an inherent need to categorize. To know whether we are on the “right” path, the one that will lead us from “before” to “after.”
As a tarot reader, I have read for many people who, upon seeing a certain card, have asked, “is that a good one?” This is often said with a tremor of fear. What they’re really asking is for the cards to speak in the language that we understand: one that is rooted in good or bad.
My take? There are no good or bad cards in the deck. Assigning human binaries to a spiritual experience won’t capture the intricate and infinite complexities of our journeys.
It’s certainly true that some cards in the deck are heavier. Pulling the Tower (a card that represents sudden destruction and unexpected endings) and then trying to put a positive, sunny spin on it can be a form of spiritual bypassing if we’re not careful, and even more frustratingly, it lands us right back in Binary Land when we try to root it firmly in the “good” category.
We’re humans. We can’t necessarily escape our DNA, which means that, in order to conduct a tarot reading, we must think in categories. Cups versus swords, Kings versus Queens, major arcana versus minor. Sorting like this is essential to giving us an entry point into a spiritual conversation. But from there? It’s up to us whether we want to speak only in binaries or explore the rich soil of the earth in between those two points.
When I read, I am careful about my language. It’s so tempting to tell a client that their cards are “good.” But I’m working on shifting my wording to more of a light and shadow conversation. Those two words, while opposites, hold more nuance than good or bad. All light has shadow. All shadow has light. We can’t understand one without the context of the other.
Though a card can carry more light than shadow or vice versa, it’s important to read in a way that lets people know that there is still room for agency: pulling a difficult card doesn’t mean that your experience is automatically going to be difficult. A non-binary approach means exploring other facets and factors of the situation and looking for approaches to help navigate a challenging time.
Telling people that something shitty is going to happen and leaving it at that? That just isn’t cool, folks. And on that same note, telling someone that life is all roses and butterflies also isn’t helpful.
Tarot is meant to help us grow. It’s not supposed to be some sort of diagnostic test that gives us a printout of all the parts of us that are good and bad without any sort of guidance of where to go next. It holds infinite nuance, if we let it. Moving beyond the binary invites those wonderfully complex elements into the conversation.
Adding a Non-Binary Lens To Your Practice
If you read tarot, I encourage you to try out this way of confronting your own categorization and biases around certain cards. This is especially essential if you read for others.
First:
Find a flat surface like a table and pull out 22 the major arcana cards.
Designate a “good” side and a “bad” side to your reading surface.
Go through the cards and sort them. Don’t overthink it. Use free association and don’t spend more than a second or two considering where to place it.
Take a photo of the results or write them down.
Then:
Start a practice of pulling one major arcana card per day. After pulling it, look at your binary list and see where it fell for you.
Ask, “what light does this card carry?” Journal, meditate or even draw some more tarot cards (from the remaining minor arcana cards).
Ask, “what shadow does this card carry?” and repeat.
Finally, make a list of questions that help explore the two sides. Strive to use language that isn’t rooted in the binary. In your readings, return to these questions as ways to explore the “in between” and to understand both the light and the shadow of the card.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think. Do you think that some cards are good and others are bad? Where have binaries showed up in your own spiritual journey?
✨ A Low-Stakes Tarot Spread for Affirmations
One of my favorite guilty pleasures are the memes that float around the internet that encourage you to do things like “find your superhero name” or something else equally ridiculous. I do them every time.
So because I wanted to contribute to the genre (it is, after all, multifaceted), I decided to come up with a version that uses tarot cards and leaves you with a complete sentence than can act as an affirmation or a perspective to explore.
How to Use It:
This is pretty simple. Separate the major and minor arcana cards (if you did the binary-busting exercise above, you’ve already done this. Score!). Draw one card from each deck and plug it into Ye Ole Generator, which is pictured below.
For example, let’s say I drew the following two cards:
My affirmation would be “I am committing through mindful community.” Thought-provoking!
Using the cards like this infuses a little bit of play into a practice that can feel pretty serious at times. The results aren’t meant to be more than fodder for reflection, and they certainly aren’t meant to be “accurate” interpretations of the two cards. But if you’re new to tarot or just curious, this is a low-stakes way to receive a message without having to know all 78 cards.
If you try this out, I’d love to hear your affirmation and how it connects to you! Send me an email, shoot me a DM or, I don’t know, send me a singing telegram and let me know how it goes. If you opt for the telegram, PLEASE don’t choose a clown. I do not like them.
Mantra for the week: I let my emotions speak without assigning values to them.
I’m changing up my structure for Everyday Woo a bit. Most of you know that I am a full time public school teacher, and this year has been, as Gwen Stefani would say, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I LOVE to write, and I want to make sure what I’m producing comes from a place of joy and a genuine desire to connect.
My most precious commodity is time, and folks, I don’t have a lot of it. Who does? So, starting in February, I plan to publish on a bi-weekly schedule (that’s once every other week, for those of you who are like me and never remember what exactly that phrase means). This will allow me to do a few things:
Create content more mindfully and spend more time on it.
Work on more unique offerings for paid subscribers. Think: collective readings, curated lists of things on the Internet that link to spirituality, and more.
I may transition back to a weekly schedule once summer hits, but for now, this feels like a good fit. Thanks for hanging out with me and supporting my lil creative side project (that I not-so-secretly would like to grow).
Send this newsletter to a friend and spread the Word of Woo. I promise it’s not a cult. Or just follow me on Instagram.
This was a fantastic post--What an excellent perspective. Thank you!