I'm remembering who I am.

The world wants women to forget who we are. Pamela Colman Smith's life is a love letter to living life on your own terms.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

I bought my first tarot deck on a whim one cloudy afternoon.

I sat in the parking lot of a local metaphysical store and took deep breaths, trying to work up the nerve to enter a space that felt both alluring and inaccessible—a secret society that a sheltered former church girl would never be welcomed into. I went inside anyway.

I felt like I was getting away with something as I opened the heavy wooden doors of the armoire that housed rows of tarot cards. I reached inside and selected the only deck I recognized: the Rider Waite tarot.

At home, I reverently unwrapped my new deck. I fished my fingers inside of the cardboard box and pulled out the folded guide, which was printed on a single piece of tissue-thin paper. I began to read.

And I was disappointed. Each card in the deck was listed and defined by one line of abrupt, minimalistic words written by a man: A.E. Waite, an occultist, member of a fin de siècle secret society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the credited creator of what is arguably the most famous tarot deck in the world.

Reading Waite’s descriptions felt like pressing my back against an uncomfortable pew in a completely darkened church. I knew something holy was there, but I couldn’t see it. I didn’t know how to even begin to try to see it. In some ways, I wondered if he meant for me to see it at all.

But once I held the cards themselves in my hands, everything changed. Reading the tarot with Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations is like praying in front of a light-filled stained glass window, one that is saturated with colors and ever-shifting as time passes. Because of her vivid interpretations, the 78 cards are transformed from static words on a page to a living, breathing invitation, an offering, and a portal—one that I have stepped through again and again.

I owe my relationship with tarot to a woman. A woman who was labeled as “strange” by the men who did not understand her yet wished to capitalize on her creativity. A woman whose name was erased from a deck that arguably owes most of its legacy and longevity to her. A woman who wore flame-colored robes, who doodled in the edges of the letters she wrote to her friends and owned a stuffed alligator.

I want to tell you about Pamela Colman Smith. This is my antidote to the helplessness and exhaustion that I feel in the wake of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. The greatest danger we face as women is forgetting who we are. Forgetting our magic, our creativity, and how we can resist by living in ways that counter patriarchal norms.

I know that this feels nearly impossible right now. But I hope her story helps you remember who you are, who we are, as women when the world wants you to forget.

Pamela Colman Smith¹ was an Aquarius², born two days after Valentine’s Day in the year 1878. Pluto was in Taurus, ushering in a generation of logic and practicality, but she was brimming with unconventionality and fluidity.

Pamela was a changeling of a person, as adaptive and mutable as the air element that governed her sun, Mercury and North node placements. She was born in London but spent her childhood in Jamaica, a formative time that inspired her later work with Jamaican folktales and oral storytelling. She was a collector of people, places and jobs, moving lightly from one endeavor to the next. It’s easy to see why her dear friend Ellen Terry gave her the nickname “Pixie.”

Unlike the men she rubbed shoulders with (W.B Yeats, Bram Stoker and Debussy were a few of them), Pamela’s life is not well-documented. In her most prolific years, her name appears enigmatically in newspaper articles about the London art scene and in letters written by long-dead men whose poems were required reading in my British Literature course.

Despite the lack of information about her, what little is known about Pamela Colman Smith is fascinating. The lessons gleaned from her life act as a roadmap to resistance that women today can unfold, smooth out and follow.

She didn’t listen.

In 1903, Pamela, frustrated with the rejection of her work from male-dominated literary magazines, decided to establish her own publication. Her longtime friend, the famous Irish writer W.B. Yeats, offered her some suggestions for success…and Pamela rejected every one.

He told her to name her magazine after one of his plays. She instead named it “The Green Sheaf,” a name equal parts mysterious and evocative. She dedicated her magazine to “pleasure,” ignoring Yeats’s contribution of “the Art of Happy Desire,” a move that feels radically feminist of her. And instead of curating her magazine around a unifying theme, as Yeats encouraged her to do, almost none of the 13 issues she created had one. She preferred instead to offer a wide range of content, filling the pages with everything from ballads to advertisements for her friend’s costume shop.

If she was going to make her own magazine, she’d be damned if it looked like it belonged next to the ones made by men.

She was sassy.

Pamela’s letters make plain on the page exactly what kind of woman she was: one who spoke her mind. In between sketches and her sprawling handwriting, she regularly decried the male-dominated publishing sphere, at one point writing to a friend and calling publishers pigs.

When asked about the music of German composer Wagner, which enraged her, she said it made her “want to crack the heads of people together like nuts,” which feels like a really sick burn for the early 20th century.

And the first time she met W.B Yeats, she was wholly unimpressed and said that he “seemed most stupid and had on a tea party air.” Way to knock him down a few pegs, Pixie.

This didn’t win her many male fans (a truth all outspoken women know), but I’m pretty sure she didn’t care one bit.

She wasn’t easily defined.

Scholars and her contemporaries alike debated Pamela’s racial origins but struggled to categorize her, something that likely delighted her nonconformist Aquarian nature. Some thought she had Japanese heritage, while others thought she had Native American or African blood in her.

Circa 1912.

A very weird article in a 1912 magazine said that Pamela was like “a brown squirrel, and a Chinese baby, and a radiant morning,” which is possibly the rudest and witchiest description I’ve ever read. She trailed magic everywhere she went, right down to her person—she favored flowing orange cloaks and often shocked people by being younger than she actually appeared…a true old soul.

Living life as a woman who didn’t fit into any of society’s boxes, especially in the early 20th century, is an act of resistance.

She said, “Fine. I’ll make my own, then.”

One of Pamela’s major struggles in her life was not feeling included in the spaces where she shone the most brightly, such as in her art and writing. Instead of giving up, she was determined to create the life she craved.

She hosted art salons in London, where she regaled her guests with her storytelling prowess and irresistible charm. She established her own printing press and prioritized the publication of underrepresented voices, especially those of women. And when the suffrage movement started, Pamela used her art skills and her printing press to create posters and handbills advocating for the right to vote.

Considering her work’s emphasis on the agency of women, this is unsurprising—she regularly depicted women in seductive and wild postures, a narrative that ran quite counter to the post-Victorian sentiment of the time.

She embraced her gifts.

Pamela had synesthesia, a crossing over of the senses that allowed her to see images when listening to music. Instead of shying away from this odd way of seeing the world, Pamela leaned in: she was often found huddled in corners of concert halls, sketching away as she listened to the compositions of Debussy, Chopin and Mozart.

She was never classically trained in art (she attended the Pratt Institute of Design briefly but found it stifling), but she drew unapologetically anyway. Many of her depictions in the tarot have odd proportions or unconventional linework, but this quality is exactly what makes her work so arresting.

Many men, including A. E. Waite, the man who commissioned her to draw the 78 cards in the tarot, said that Pamela was uneducated in the areas of art, writing and mysticism (in a rage-inducing quote, Waite said that Pamela would have to be “spoon fed” some of the more complex occult ideas), but she never let that stop her from tapping into the obvious gifts that were innate—she knew, as all women do, that the words of men cannot capture the raw, unbridled magic that exists within a woman.

She remembered, over and over again, exactly who she was. Her work is a testament to a life lived on her own terms.

I wish that I could tell you that Pamela Colman Smith lived an illustrious, celebrated life and died a wealthy, well-known woman. But the opposite is true. Though Margaret Atwood would tell her to not “let the bastards grind you down,” towards the end of her life, exhausted by continual rejection, Pamela slipped from the public eye, ceased to make art and became bedridden.

She died in 1951, alone and in debt. She was buried in an unmarked grave in an unknown location, a final chapter in a story that is written about artistic, unconventional woman far too often.

As I write this, four men and a woman who has forgotten who she is have just handed down legislature that seeks to write a final chapter for women who seek to dictate their own paths. They wish for us to fade into obscurity, faceless bodies without hopes, without dreams, and without magic.

I reject this. I reject the notion that we must mind our manners and that we must bow our heads silently and do as we are told. I know that Pamela would be sitting right alongside me, her paintbrush in hand, ready to draw the first lines of a poster that proclaims boldly that men need to shut the fuck up about women’s bodies and what to do with them.

I suppose this is what Pamela Colman Smith’s legacy is. When men tried to tell her what to do, she simply…didn’t.

Perhaps my favorite piece of Pamela’s art is of a character in a Bram Stoker novel named Lady Arabella. She is a tall, pale, androgynous sort of figure, clad in pearl-colored fabric and emitting an ethereal light. In Stoker’s novel, Lady Arabella has the ability to transform into a serpent and to create chaos in the lives of everyone she encounters.

Below her famous serpentine signature, located in the lower left hand corner, Pamela captioned the illustration with the words “Lady Arabella was dancing in a fantastic sort of way.”

If you identify as a woman, I hope that you make space to dance in a fantastic sort of way, whatever that means for you. I hope that you realize that you hold within you the power of a serpent and the fluidity of a woman.

I hope you, like Pamela Colman Smith, remember exactly who you are.

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✨Cards for Humanity: The Empress✨

Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.

I had a hard time choosing just one tarot card to link to this week’s newsletter, so I decided to practice what I preach and to listen to my gut. And my gut told me to write about the Empress, the mother of the tarot and an earthy goddess who has total autonomy over her own body.

The fourth card in the major arcana is one that nearly always gives me good vibes. And I’m not alone: when asked, many women I speak with say that they connected with the Empress almost immediately when beginning to read tarot.

It’s easy to see why: the Empress is a model of a serene woman who is in control of her destiny. Seated on a luxurious red-hued throne (the color of personal agency), the Empress is swathed in a white robe studded with pomegranates, a symbol of fertility and containing multitudes (if you’ve ever opened a pomegranate, you know that it’s filled with an interminable amount of seeds).

In her hand is a wand that is much different than the often-phallic depictions held by other male-presenting major arcana figures, such as the Emperor and the Hierophant—hers is decidedly feminine, with its curved edges and shorter length.

What I find to be the most notable about the Empress is her location. She is far removed from any sort of civilization and has chosen to situate herself in the wildest part of the Earth, surrounded by trees and next to a flowing river, representing the fluidity of her creativity and intuition. She defies the common structures that the patriarchy leans on to display success and control—she has no need of them, preferring to embrace the wildness of her spirit, which is reflected in her choice of kingdom.

When the Empress appears in a reading, it is time to come home to who you are. To remember that, at your core, you are a wild thing of beauty and magic, one that does not need the validation of anyone but herself. She creates her own space unapologetically because she believes that she is worthy of a home to call her own.

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✨Prompts | The Empress✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ What spaces can I create for myself?

☀️ Where can I cultivate wildness in my life?

☀️ How can I exercise autonomy over my body, even when others try to control me?

☀️ Where can I channel my divine feminine energy in my life?

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.

I remember who I am: a magical being who is creating my own destiny.

1. Most of the information I include in this piece is from Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story by Stuart Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor and Melinda Boyd Parsons (2018).

2. An earlier version of this essay mistakenly identified Aquarius as a water sign—it’s an air sign. I always mix those two up.