My Take on Tarot

I took my first Tarot class in 2003, with River Roberts, a Chicago reader and priestess trained by Diana’s Grove (a now-defunct mystery school in Missouri), whose reading style was rooted in Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. I know. It was a great class.

My favorite card in a Tarot deck is Death, the thirteenth Major Arcana, and a card notorious in books and movies. It’s less a card that means someone is going to die, and more a symbol of endings and beginnings and the cycles related to them. Sort of a shorthand way of saying that when one door closes, another opens. Not scary at all!

That energy of endings and beginnings is present in every life in some form or other – and the same is true for the rest of the symbols in the Tarot deck, too. Pulling cards for a reading presents us with these symbols and ideas we’re bound to relate to, and interpreting them gives us a way to consider and process our circumstances from a slightly outside perspective.

Personally, I tend to think every card has the full range of possible meanings (since the meaning is in the eye of the beholder), so I don’t read reversals (this is when the card shows up upside down, which many Tarot readers believe gives the card a twist).

Tarot Readings

I offer a basic or extended reading, which has nothing to do with the number of cards drawn or how I lay them out, or how many questions you ask, but merely with the amount of time spent and depths considered. A basic reading is up to 20ish minutes long. An extended reading is up to 60-ish minutes long; when we’re done, you should feel like your questions were addressed to your satisfaction.

I work fluently with a number of spreads when reading, including the good ol’ Celtic Cross (workhorse of the Tarot reader). If there’s a particular spread you’d like me to use for your reading, that’s something I’d love to know about in advance, so I can familiarize myself with the spread and how it works before throwing a live question into the mix.

By default, I read with the Rider-Waite-based Hanson-Roberts deck (it’s a good size, and the pictures are pretty), but I can also work with a number of different multi-cultural and social-justice-oriented decks that I’ve picked up over the years. If you prefer a particular deck (or style of deck), just let me know – and click here to start setting up a reading!