How to figure out the way
Someone left their tarot cards and a book called Narcissism: Denial of the True Self in my room after a party at the old house. Both items felt spiritually charged, connected to the darkness I’d seen at the party that night, where people got sick and broke things. I remember the wafting smell of vomit and the feeling of smashed glass underfoot.
I suspected the ghosts in the house were angry at us for taking our guests on tours of the basement, treating their sacred place like a tourist attraction. There was a shrine down there with a picture of a man in a holographic bodysuit, and strange hieroglyphic art. Someone came by once looking for the old woman who’d lived there—a Spanish witch. No one asked the question we all wondered: where did she die?
I threw out the book on narcissism but kept the cards. Holding onto them tied me to the old house, since I had found them there.
I’m bored in my room at the new house, and I feel the box of cards staring at me from where it sits neglected on my shelf. Everything in my room is alive. Isn’t a thing alive if it’s haunted? I take the box off the shelf and wipe dust from its cover.
I’ve always been wary of stuff like tarot. I don’t trust fate to work in my favour, and I worry that having my cards read will set my bad luck in stone. But tonight, I’m feeling risky. One of the upsides of the luteal phase is enhanced spiritual powers—a.k.a psychosis.
The set comes with a deck and a small guidebook called Motherpeace Tarot, written and illustrated by Karen Vogel in 1996. There’s a $2.00 op-shop sticker on the back, which means it's already passed through at least one other life. Its history feels important.
I don’t have a question in mind for the reading.
Maybe my question is, “What am I asking?” or, “How do I figure out the way?”
Lately, it feels like I’ve been keeping secrets from myself.
Reading tarot for yourself is like having a conversation with your own mirror selves. You ask questions and are so gullible you actually answer them, pretending it isn’t just your own voice in an echo chamber. I’ve always been suspicious of people who play solitaire. Do you ever feel watched when you’re in your room alone at night?
In the guidebook, it says the first card is the significator—the card that tells you who or what you are. I draw the Four of Wands. It shows four women dancing in a circle, linked by flowers, a bird flying overhead. Communion, ritual, a feeling that I am one among others. I keep finding myself in circles, speaking in tongues. High even when I’m not.
The next card reveals the atmosphere, the catalyst behind the question. Eight of Wands. Arrows shoot across space, linking Earth and sky. A fantasy of mastery over symbolic distance. What moves too fast cannot be possessed, it’s the drive circulating around the object that shields it. I think dimly of Cupid. Being in love is like getting killed.
The crosscurrent, writes Karen, is the lesson you’re learning which may reveal a skill you need to acquire. Five Discs: a woman kneads bread while five discs hover above her, each patterned differently. No structure can protect us from loss. All things are absent at the centre. We must shape the formless into something sustaining. You won’t know if it’s working until it does.
The root is what you’re standing on or what you feel in your body. The Daughter of Cups shows a woman bathing in a waterfall, a tree leaning toward her in embrace. The cup is the vessel of the self, she uses it to wash her body. The child fuses with the mother. The mind retreats to a fluid, playful character to defend against the lack.
A headache builds behind my eyes. Meaning is draining from me like blood drawn by an invisible nurse.
The fifth card is about passing away.
“What does it mean?” I ask aloud, not expecting an answer.
“Passing away refers to an event in the recent past, important to the reading,” a voice says.
“Who said that?”
“Who do you think?”
“Karen Vogel?”
Her silence confirms it.
“Are you dead?” I ask.
“No.”
I can feel her presence behind me on the bed as I draw the Two of Swords. A naked woman holds a rope in a figure eight, balancing on one leg like the crane beside her. Time moves around us while we remain still. The mind causes things to look different so it would appear that time has passed.
“Karen, am I right?”
“Two of Swords is balance, decision, stillness, a moment of suspension before action. You must maintain two truths without collapsing into one or the other.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Remember to pay attention to the direction of the card.”
“It’s sideways.”
“Then your balance is in motion—actively negotiated.”
The sixth card is the sky. I don’t need to read the guidebook anymore; Karen is here to guide me.
“The sky is your head, your conscious self, or spirit connection,” she says.
“My soul?”
“Maybe,”
“I don’t know if I believe in the soul. I think we’re all the same.”
“I don’t know either. I just made the cards.”
“Okay, sorry,” I say. I have to be polite, like I am speaking with AI chatbots. I know if I say anything wrong, she might disappear.
The card is XVIII Moon. Two crescent moons and a sun with a child’s face hang above a woman beside a circle of rings that look like a tree’s cross-section. It speaks of psychic tides: the menstrual cycle, a story that repeats unless new life begins. The subject confronts the instability of meaning, the uncanny return of repressed material and illustrations of the self.
“Karen, is this accurate?”
“You ignored the direction again.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s less accurate.”
“If I get the answer I’m looking for, does it matter?”
“Don’t you want the right answer?”
“Will the right answer even help me?”
“Maybe,”
“What’s the next card?”
“Read it yourself.”
The seventh card is about the near future. The Ace of Swords: a woman sits cross-legged, one hand holding a sword, colours bursting out of her. A butterfly hovers nearby. The phallic signifier cuts through the confusion of the moon. Language, insight, and symbolic order are reasserted. The subject learns to speak her desires.
“Karen, is this wishful thinking?”
She doesn’t say anything. Maybe I’ve been calling her by the wrong name. I picture her much like the Spanish witch—robed, beaded, unruly. I'm afraid to look behind me, in case there’s nothing there.
The eighth card is self-concept. It’s about how we think and feel about ourselves. My card is the Priestess of Discs. There’s a woman stretching on a mat, a baby beside her on the grass, mountains in the distance. A hand with an eye floats above. The mother combines the material and the spiritual. She stands for the maternal Real, the grounded, nurturing aspect of the feminine that cannot be entirely symbolised. The subject reclaims embodiment as sacred, not lacking. Healing the Five of Discs.
The ninth card is hopes and fears. Karen wrote that it could be both. I wish she’d come back.
Five of Cups. Crabs fill the cups, but two have spilled. The fallen crabs are splayed on the ground. Mourning not for a specific object, but for the loss that defines subjectivity. The subject must accept that desire is perpetual; mourning becomes a ritual of transformation.
The tenth card represents the house. This is the social or spiritual environment.
Three Discs shows a brick wall and three women. One is removing bricks, one climbs, one helps from above. The wall represents the symbolic order: language, law, social structure. The ladder is the means by which the subject imagines movement between orders. A fantasy of ascent. The hole is the Real: a void opening within the symbolic, the unspeakable gap allowing desire to circulate. The one removing bricks tries to open the Real within the symbolic. The helper mediates between levels. The climber is the desiring subject, caught in the act of becoming, attempting to traverse fantasy and move beyond limitation.
The eleventh card is the outcome. If it is a major arcana, it reveals resolution. If not, you can draw more to reveal steps to the outcome.
My card is the Shaman of Cups. A woman in a white mask pours liquid into a boiling pot while sea creatures drift behind her. They seem to be in an underwater palace. The image suggests a dream encounter with the emotional archetype, a figure representing the integration of desire and emotion through symbolic mediation. An attempt to speak the unspeakable, to bring unconscious affect into the realm of signification without drowning in it.
I think of Karen as I turn over the final card. I know I should respect her wish to stay inside my head, so I don’t call for her. She’s in my DNA. Through her, it feels possible to know everything. My voice sounds like hers.
The fourteenth card is XI Strength, a major arcana. A woman holds a yellow flower, surrounded by animals: wolf, rabbit, fox, snake, crane, scorpion, spider, lion. The moon is visible in the distance behind the branches of a tree. Strength here represents a momentary reconciliation with the lack—the understanding that desire never ends, that vitality lies in inhabiting the lack with grace. Rather than seeking to complete oneself, this card endorses living through desire and embracing its animal pulse as the source of life. Your wholeness is a dream you need, but also a disguise for the truth that desire never ends. Strength is not about becoming whole, but about being at peace with your un-wholeness.
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