Embracing What's Coming: Tarot and Power

Megan Hamilton (00:02)
I'm Megan Hamilton and this is the Embracing Enchantment Podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad to be here. And if you're tuning in when this episode comes out, it was recorded the end of November, 2024.

If you're listening later, then you know, some of what we might be talking about might be different and hopefully it'll be for the better. But for now, we're sort of in this strange limbo place and it feels especially important for me to talk to you about what I'm going to talk to you about, which is tarot.

It is my favorite form of connecting with myself. It's a tool I use almost every day. I am a professional tarot reader. read for other people. And I think that it is an incredible bridge between tangible archetypal symbolic stuff and whatever else lives beyond.

our current human way of noticing the world. I would like to say that if you hear squeaks, I'm in my grandparents old chair and it squeaks. I really enjoy having old pieces of furniture and stuff. I'm wearing one of my grandmother's rings and another of my grandmother's rings. I really like old stuff and I like to keep this stuff around. So,

So you might hear squeaking and creaking. And actually, some of you might know that I'm a musician and I there's nothing I love more than recording an acoustic guitar and a voice and hearing the creaks of the chair or, you know, making noises on the strings before we get into things. And I will say that I I'm going to have to calm down a little bit because I feel I feel so intensely strong.

about the fact that I think that what we're gonna talk about today is incredibly important. However, this is my second time recording this episode because after recording it the first time I had the chance to sit back and think.

and go back in and reframe things a little bit. I am not a fan of doom and gloom. I am not a fan of, now that's not to say that we are love and light only around these parts or that we are good vibes only. Hell no. No thank you ma'am. You can take that bullshit somewhere else. However, I do think there's valuable about

looking at things in a more positive way for your nervous system. Let's just say that. So before we begin, I'm making this microphone a little bit hot. I'm getting a little too close to the mic here, so I'm going to hang back. Before we begin, I'm going to pull us a card. Now, the card I pulled a couple of days ago was Night of Wands Reversed. And what are we going to pull today?

Okay, interesting. Almost no very similar vibe actually. Four of Wands for those of you listening. If you're listening, just know that I'm putting this on YouTube as well so you can you can watch if you want to go see what we're doing here. Four of Wands. We're waiting. We're taking our time. We're thinking things through. Sometimes it means we're feeling stuck.

or trapped, or we have to work through some thoughts or fears before we can take action. But what's really interesting about this card, and of course I use the Rider-Waite Smith Deck, which we will also talk about today. This came out in 1909. Okay, so we take our modern lens and run through the filter. But what I find very interesting about this card is the person who's lying down

We can see that they're not sleeping, right? They've got their hands in that sort of position of like, tapping their fingers. Hmm. I'm thinking about things, but they're in sepia. And we have this beautiful stained glass window in the top corner that is full color. And so color is available. But for the person lying there contemplating, it's not there. Now, one of the cards or one of the swords is also in sepia.

So what does that tell us? That we're not seeing the clear full picture yet. That we really need to take our time. This person is lying down. They're not getting up anytime soon, as opposed to the Knight of Wands, even though it was in reverse, but we would have been able to see that that is a charging card. So we're gonna take our time and think things through before we communicate. Which is actually, hilariously what I think I said.

couple days ago. for this message just wants to come through. Okay. And I will say as well that I think that's incredibly important going forward into this world where Donald Trump has just been elected as president again. And we're already seeing a lot of a lot of shit come through. We're seeing hate on the rise.

We're seeing danger for especially our trans friends, but all of us within the 2SLGBTQIA plus community. We're seeing emboldened hatred. We're seeing absolutely bonkers people who are about to have positions of power and we're all thinking, what does this mean for us? And so I want to say that on

the morning after that election. And even though I live in Canada, it's coming here. We've been seeing it with Pierre Poliev for a little while. The people he's consorting with, the ideas that are sort of getting teased into out into the open. We're starting to see what what's really underlying everything and it ain't good. But the thing is we don't we cannot

work with anything until we know what we're working with. And so we had to and have to be able to see with our own eyes. A lot of people have known about this for years, have experienced the oppression, have experienced the hatred, have experienced hate crimes, racism, ableism, right? People absolutely ignoring disabled folks.

especially since the pandemic started. And if any of this stuff is bugging you, then this is not going to be the podcast for you. Okay. And that's fine. Unless you're interested in learning a new perspective, then please stick around.

and what we are going to have to do going forward because those of us, right, I am a woman. And so that is my area of like understanding in terms of stuff that, you know, was not built for me, has not been afforded to me, et cetera. I'm a speaking coach. I can tell you that the majority of people I see are women and there are a lot more.

challenges for women when it comes to speaking up in my experience and there's a reason for that.

but I also know that people have found a way.

through the hatred, through the destruction, through the...

folks who try to control.

That doesn't mean that a lot of folks are not gonna get hurt in the process. And so I think that our jobs in whatever position of power we might hold are to take on a leadership role and ensure that those people who are not afforded the same freedoms are protected by us purposefully, even if we are also within a group that falls under the category of oppression. Okay?

So that's all out of the way. Let's talk about tarot. Just kidding. We're going to get back to that for sure, but.

Tarot is part of what we think of when we think of the occult. I've talked about this before recently where I had the very strange experience of offering tarot readings at a couple of different public forums. One was a friend's CD release party and the other was in Kingston. We do something called the Merch Market, which is where you can sell your CDs if you're a musician and other cool stuff. And it's all sort of Kingston local and you can come and

and buy from your favorite musicians. And so I was also offering free card readings to folks who bought my CDs. I'm also a musician in case you're new around here. And a couple of people who bought CDs, I said, would you like a guitar reading? It comes with it. And they did not want one. And in fact, one man actually backed away and said, no, no, no. And did like the sign of the cross. I was like, are we really here in the year 2024?

And I realized that, you know, there are a lot of people who still think that having a tarot reading is going to invite evil into your home is going to sort of provoke, you know, bad energy or, you know, has the same qualities as an evil eye or something. This is it. If you had a tarot reading with me before it, you'll you'll know that that is it's almost comical to think of because if anything

my readings tend to be uplifting and again, not ignoring the challenges because tarot is going to call you out on your shit. But the delivery on my end is gentle and and you know, we're here to help you figure out how to be the best you. But there's no devils, there's no evil spirits that are coming in through the cards and yet.

This has been a story that's been passed down at this point for centuries about tarot, about mediumship. By mediumship, I mean people who are able to have conversations with spiritual beings. Anything that is sort of counterculture to organized religion. Well, isn't that interesting?

Where did that come from?

going to take a look today because again I think we might be facing similar issues. And so I was very curious about what does the word occult actually mean? I know what it means to me. I can think about you know like I have a picture in my mind when I think of the occult. But what does it mean?

And I'm also now sort of deconstructing everything I thought I knew about anything alternative, Witches, witchcraft, magic, pagans.

Taking a deeper look, where might some of these?

know, where's the conflict? How come I feel very positive and enlightened and uplifted by this stuff? Whereas, you know, sort of culturally, we're it's it's considered, you know, dark black evil. Isn't that interesting? I might be saying that a lot. OK, so the occult is from the Latin word occultus, which literally means clandestine, which is a word I love hidden secret, right? Knowledge of the hidden.

Well, I wonder, it got me thinking. I wonder why this stuff was hidden.

I genuinely wondered that and then I thought, well, if we think about witch hunts and we know the Salem witch trials. And of course, I'm grouping all of this stuff together. OK, but this is also stuff within the interest group for this podcast.

Are tarot readers witches? Not necessarily. They can be. Are witches tarot readers? Not necessarily. They can be. But there these, you know, sort of groups that live outside of that have an understanding of a world beyond the tangible, the empirical or organized religion because organized religion also believes in a world beyond the empirical and yet one is considered protected.

And the other is considered evil, damaging, you know, something to look out for. So where does all this stuff come from? Why might people have to practice in, why wouldn't it be hidden? Well, cause there were consequences. So with public speaking, I often talk about the challenges that, women and non-binary folks might face, which is witches, which is that we know from the Salem witch trials that

Those women did not consider themselves witches. They would not have said, I'm a witch.

which is what we would call a witch today or what people call themselves, which is those that was not a thing until, probably the early part of this of the last century where the religion of Wicca started to become popular and it became a known organized religion. And you can thank Phyllis Curat for that.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The folks who were burned at the stake, drowned, measured, had these, you know, quote unquote trials. They didn't walk around calling themselves witches. They probably weren't even practicing herbal stuff in the back room. They were strong women or they were doing things that other people didn't like. And what's the easiest thing to do? Call them a witch.

say they're evil, going against the religion and have them killed. And then they're not bothering you anymore. I am probably not telling you anything new with that, but.

You can start to see where anything that goes outside of what society has deemed appropriate in terms of the paranormal.

possibly as a way to control people.

starts to get a bad rap. And so tarot cards, as far as we know, everything we've been able to uncover about them. And I'm sure there's more to the story. But this is just as far as we know, in terms of, you know, pieces, bits and pieces. The known full deck is the Sola Busca, which is from the 15th century. And it would have been

within the within an Italian family. so tarot cards were were a game back then as far as we can tell to the best of our knowledge. They were not being used for divination. They were a game and there was a structure to them.

And that structure lives today in lots of different types of cards, actually, including our modern playing cards, which are 100 % based on the minor arcana within the structure of tarot.

very interesting. It wasn't until, you know, and there's a lot of different schools of thought on this, but let's say the 19th century.

late 18th century, pardon me, is when we think that the idea of cardamancy, which is sort of divination through cards, began. so, cart, I'm assuming this actually comes from the French word cart, which is like card, right? If you are Canadian, you probably took basic French. And around this time of year, around the holiday season, we would learn about carts. So,

Carto Mansi and Mansi is when you have the ability to divine, look into the future, commune with the spirits, get other worldly knowledge about something. So you have a tea reading. What are the other kinds of Mansi's out there? I can't think of them off the top of my head, but you're starting to get the idea, I'm sure. And so people would start to use that. And let's also just for a second.

really think about why specifically tarot cards might have been considered evil. So we already know that this concept of witches

was basically something that other people did in order to control people.

The Salem witch trials are very different than the Scottish witch trials, which are very different than the current witch hunts that legit happen in other parts of the world, where again, people are trying to be controlled. We know that there's medicine people. We know that there's people who have been using bones to try to read the future. We know that people have been using

herbal medicines for way before modern medicine. Modern medicine is based on herbal medicine. We know that there's spiritual and herbal and, you know, earth and spiritual practices, all of it from many, many different cultures around the world. This is a thing long before, you know, colonizers came around, I guess, before Christianity became a thing.

But if we think about people who have been oppressed or who have been maligned through the years, one of the people that we can think of specifically when we're thinking about tarot are the Roma or the Romani. And I promise you, I'm going to talk about the actual structure of tarot. But this is just so important. I think right now that we all get on board in terms of preparing for

the possibility that we might have to be fighting for our rights and freedoms in the coming months and years. And again, if you're listening to this and that has not been the case, so glad. I think this stuff is still important. But anyway, let's look at the Roma slash Romani people. A displaced people. People kept losing their

country, their boundaries, no home.

Those folks were also not allowed to work.

There's a very racist name for this group of people that you might recognize more than me saying Roma or Romani, and I'm not going to use it. And I invite you to go to Google and check it out if you're not sure what I'm talking about. Okay. So this group of people became wandering nomads because they had to be and were not allowed to be hired to work.

So what are people supposed to do? Okay, they're gonna come up with alternative ways of earning a living, of making money so that they can, you know, eat, maybe have a warm place to live, support their family, God forbid, thrive. If you watch the movie Coven, which is really great, by the way, it was here at our film festival last,

year.

Or was it the year before? Anyway, it was screened in October and it's it's fascinating. But if you watch the section where one of the women goes back to Romania to her roots, you get a sense of the culture. And again, again, it's two sort of slightly different things, but you get a sense of the culture. And so. Cardamansi became a thing that.

people would be charging money for as they should. But the Roma way of practicing tarot is a closed practice by the way. I had a reading done by a good old friend of mine who is Romani and her grandmother taught her this way of reading the cards and it's lovely. Not scary.

Like not doom and gloom at all. And yet, all of a sudden...

Taro, which used to be part of very rich and well-to-do families because they would they would have been hand-painted cards as a game. All of a sudden, Taro is evil. Right. Interesting, because the people who are using it, who are using it to thrive, who are using it to earn a living because they have been displaced. Because, you know,

people have very racist ways of looking at them.

suddenly it's considered evil. And so I encourage you if tarot is thought to be evil to you, if you've been sort of avoiding it because it's scary, then I encourage you because you're here, because you must be curious to take a look at where that might come from and see if it can help you realign with what you might, with a tool that might be really cool for you to start working with. I don't care if you work with tarot, you don't have to.

Not even a little bit. But if you're curious about it and you've been holding off for fear of inviting some kind of evil or bad luck into your home or into your life, then let's look at the origins and where those rumors even started from. And so if we start to look at how we might look at tarot now, we really need to look at the onslaught of spiritualism.

Which is, okay, so we're sort of framing everything now, like late 1800s into the early 1900s. There's a lot of things happening. Theater is really becoming exciting. We're starting to have theater stars. And in fact, Pamela Coleman Smith, who designed the Rider Waite Smith deck, that is the one that we most likely associate with tarot, and there's so many different decks out there. And I really encourage you to find one that

reflects how you feel about life, right? I use it because it it's the one I know, it's the one I was given. My best friend gave me a tarot deck for my 23rd birthday. And I've been on and off sort of taking a look at it ever since, but probably more seriously in the last seven or eight years.

So we have rich theater culture happening. There's a lot more mixing of cultures, Like travel is becoming easier. Boats are being sent off and they're coming back. We're either printing press so we can share knowledge. This time is quite exciting and...

We're also diving into something called spiritualism, which I would imagine is as a sort of revolt against organized religion, which could be incredibly controlling, especially for women and non-binary folks or folks who did not fit within the regular, quote unquote, norm. And you'll find that at the time, a lot of the leaders within the spiritualist movement were women. Interesting, eh?

And so the idea of spiritualism is or the spiritualist movement is that there is a spiritual world of people who shared earth with us that go on to that realm and that some people are able to communicate with.

And then you start to get sort of like different groups of people who practice all kinds of different things like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. So, you know, and the Masons and sort of all these other like interesting groups. And this is where the occult part comes because there's a lot of practice that was happening in secret, right? There's people and, and also, yes, like there is Satanism. There are people who, you know,

would might worship the devil there, you know, that it's not to say that that doesn't exist. I would argue possibly that it's not in the way that we have thought that it is.

But if we're gonna be deconstructing our thoughts on stuff, then let's just take a look at everything and go, wait a minute, I think this, is that actually true? Where does that come from? So fast forward again to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where we have a guy named Arthur Waite, who's hanging out with a woman named Pamela Coleman Smith in the Order.

And she is very involved in theater. does set design. She's also doing lots of illustrations for different magazines. And he wants to do a tarot deck. So around that time, we believe that Pamela Coleman Smith would have seen the Sola Busca deck at the British Museum. And you can tell that a lot of the cards are similar. The images are quite similar, especially I remember, I think the Three of Swords is just, you know.

very evocative, but what Pamela Coleman Smith did with her illustrations was she created movement. She created a scene. She gave you so much access into interpreting the cards. The symbolism is bananas. And me, I read the cards every day. And not only that, sometimes you read them several times a day for different people. I'm still finding new things. The other day I was looking at, what was it? The Knight of Swords, I think.

and there's a little bird that I just hadn't noticed before or an upcoming guest who we're going to talk about Tara with as well. She was talking about the magician and then she was mentioning, you know, that his belt is an Ouroboros snake and I had never noticed that before.

I love that there's new things to find almost every single time. So let's get, let's get to brass tacks here. Tarot, what's the structure? 78 cards divided into two categories, the major Arcana and the minor Arcana. Arcana means mystery, right? Going back to the occult. Major Arcana is 22 cards going from zero, the fool, all the way to 21, the world. And it's a journey.

Right. We think of those as sort of like big energy, possibly like life changing energy, not all the time, but sometimes. Then you've got the minor arcana. Minor arcana are divided into four suits. You have swords, cups, pentacles and wands. All related to the four directions, also related to the four elements, fire, water, air and earth.

And within those four suits, have a structure ace all the way up to king. Sounds familiar, right? If you've ever played with modern playing cards, those are directly replicated and each of the four suits has a corresponding tarot suit.

This is, I know there's gonna be people listening going, but, but, but, and I get it. I have had to figure out how to say this in a very easy to understand way. If you're learning about terror for the first time. The cards have meanings.

And also the cards can mean whatever you want them to. How's that possible? This is why embracing enchantment exists because I have really enjoyed being able to explore these different modalities without feeling the rigidity of a structure that I have to adhere to. Now that doesn't mean it's not important to learn the origins of something.

It also does not mean that I am that I'm able to go into every single modality because they're not all available to me. There's a book I read. gosh, I won't be able to think of it. But if I if I remember, I'll put it because you'll you'll tell that on the spot, my memory is not always amazing. it was about witches. Anyway, it was people who are exploring magic and.

There's like lots of different people coming together to talk about something and there's an indigenous group of people and they've got, you know, magic. And one of the women says to another woman, two women who are not within the indigenous group, like, they know this, but she won't teach it to me. And then the indigenous woman says, not everything is for you.

Right. And that's really important. I am never going to touch the Roma structure of tarot. I am never going to look into Kabbalah, which is Jewish mysticism. It's not for me. I don't mean it's not for me. Like, I don't like it. I mean, it is legit not for me. I am not allowed to practice it. And there's also, you know, there's some folks don't mind. Some folks do.

I always err on the side of...

not going where, you know, I might not be it might not be for me because I already have practices that work for me. Part of where this all came from was me having Scottish roots and being really curious about paganism and diving into what might have been, you know, old, old, old ancestral practices. I also recently learned from my Germanic side that

There was a period of paganism in Germany. I think it was the 15th century. And I started to feel really excited about that. Anyway, do you what else I did? This is funny. I'm going to share this with you.

I was thinking to myself, I was thinking about the 15th century and like this paganism in Germany. I was like, was Christianity around by then? I was like, when, when was Christianity, when did Christianity start? Okay. Right. But for those of you like me who don't always put two and two together, of course, Christianity began when Christ was born, which is, you know, in terms of the calendar, we most, most of us follow around the world.

you know would have been zero so 2000 years ago approximately is when Christianity would have begun so and yes I know there's way more to that story than what I'm saying we're trying to stick again to the basics so when you're starting to look at tarot you might use a book that comes with your deck or you know you might want to

follow along with somebody else at the beginning. And if I could encourage you very strongly, then I would start with 78 Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollock. It's my favorite Tarot book. Rachel Pollock put an incredible spin on how we were reading Tarot up until that point. She passed away recently and her legacy is

for so many reasons. So powerful. She did comic books. She did tarot decks. If you get a chance to look into her, she is massively cool. Going back to Pamela Coleman Smith and Arthur Waite designing what we now call the Rider Waite Smith deck. And by the way, it's been called the Rider Waite deck for like almost a century. It's only when people were like, who actually did the illustrations? it was a woman and her name was left off.

The name of the deck isn't that interesting, but now we call it the Rider Waite Smith deck. So I have this book as well, which is the Bectorial Key to the Tarot by A.E. Waite, Arthur Waite. And sometimes I like, I like to look it up just for the historic element, but it's also like, I don't love it. It can be really,

too intense for me and sort of too negative. And again, I don't mind negative. Tarot like calls me out on the regular.

But I don't need it to be, you know, like you're gonna experience financial hardship or like something bad is gonna happen to you. I cannot stand that shit.

And if you like that stuff, guess what? It's okay because you are allowed to like this. However, where you like it, which is why I like it. Probably because, I don't like authority even still, even still. So.

How do I practice tarot every day? And anyway, so like how do you get used to the cards and what they mean? You can do it whatever way you want. I strongly encourage you to just start to develop a sense of what the cards mean to you. Go through them, pull them. What does this card feel like to you? What symbols do you notice? How do you relate that to your life? Because you're allowed to have a relationship with the cards that is as individual to you as it is to anybody else. And if you wanna use the cards,

in a way where you get the magician and that means to you that you need to, I don't know, clean your house, whatever the case, you can do that and that's okay. And that is allowed within this practice.

But you might also want to do some learning about, you know, what the suits mean. We know that wands are related to fire. We think of them as spark, curiosity, passion, drive, right? The hotness of fire. Cups are in the realm of water. So we associate them with emotions. Like that stuff is pretty standard.

And the symbolism is we sort of understand the symbolism, right? We know kind of what a snake means. We know what a rainbow might mean.

can see the difference between somebody who's quite wealthy and wearing clothes that are put together versus people who are in threadbare clothes, maybe not dressed appropriately for the weather. That kind of stuff comes up quite a bit. But what I do every day is I pull up my journal, I pull up my deck. I draw three cards and a shadow card. Shadow card is the bottom of the deck. I read reversals. Some people do some people don't.

Reversals have a different meaning to the card than the upright. there's I really love the bitty tarot version of looking at the reversals because it gives you a lot of different options again, because some folks look at reversal sort of like quite negatively. And I don't always like that. And it also, you know, I would start to pull reversals and think like I just.

I'm not feeling that today, not like I don't want to feel it, but like I don't feel that energy today. So what am I getting wrong here?

And then I journal. I journal about what the cards mean. I journal about what they mean individually. I journal about what they could mean altogether. And I look at the shadow card as the work, right? Where do I need to take a deeper look into my shadow? And you all know that I have a shadow work workbook, but if you don't know, you can find it at ubuskills.com in the tool section and it's free.

And shadow work keeps me in touch with myself. It keeps me grounded. It keeps me making sure I'm not glossing over anything that needs attention. Whether I've been hurt by other people or whether I've been hurting people. My approach is really compassionate because for me, anytime I'm hard on myself, it just makes things worse.

the more loving and kind I am to myself about even where my shitty behaviors come from, the more I'm able to get past that and really love myself and as a consequence, have more compassion for others, maybe have a deeper understanding of where their behaviors might come from, maybe not be so triggered by their behaviors. Not all the time.

And I tend to also do rituals on the moons. So on the new moon, I will do a sort of a manifesting ritual of tarot and thinking about what I would like to bring into my life. And on the full moon, I think about what hasn't been working or and what I'm ready to leave behind, what I'm ready to release. I love working with the moon cycles because they're there in nature.

And they remind you to keep in touch with yourself because listen, years can go by and all of a sudden you think somebody says, hey, what do you want out of life? And you go, man, I don't even fucking know. I have not taken the time to sit down and really think about this. I was noticing that in myself. And that's when I wanted to start developing this as a constant practice to stay in touch with myself.

I'm already at 40 minutes. promise myself this one would be less. So let's let's just let's just cut to the chase here. If you're finding that you're spinning out with the news, right? We've got genocides. We've got wars. We've got oppression. We've got the potential for some pretty messed up stuff coming down the tubes.

We can control ourselves and how we handle things. And that's about it. And even then, not every day. And so if you're finding that you're feeling really massively stressed, and if you don't have a spiritual practice, or if the one that you usually use is not working for you,

Welcome to embracing enchantment. Welcome to exploring different kinds of spiritual connection that might help you feel grounded, that might give you purpose, that might help you find meaning in this world that might seem bleak and difficult. That's why I'm here to look at all this stuff. I'm so curious about it, but I also like to invite it into, you know, give it a try.

See what works for me. And practicing tarot, shadow work, ritual, learning about astrology, human design, and many other esoteric or occult practices helps you connect to nature, community, and the world in general. Because when you are in deep relationship with yourself, when you've done the work to know who you are, the good, the bad, and the ugly, to fight for what you believe in,

and to use your voice for something bigger than yourself, your power is immeasurable.

and I am not just talking out of my ass. I have seen this in practice. I've seen it with myself and I see it with others.

Thank you so much for listening. You can find all of the information and takeaways from today's episode in the show notes or at embracingenchantment.com. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review, leave a voice note. My tarot readings are currently open and you can find them at ubuskills.com. We have some incredible guests coming up and we're gonna talk about shamanism. More on tarot for one of my favorites.

whether or not magic is real, some thoughts on pagan holidays and where a lot of the modern festive seasons borrow from ancient practices. And until then, here's to your power and here's to building an enchanted life. See you soon.