her: inverted 8 of swords
cross: knight of coins
moving from below: ten of cups
pushing from below: inverted 6 of coins
moving from above: inverted strength
pushing from above: four of wands
circumstance: the world
origin: inverted devil
obstacle: inverted star
goal: unnamed/death
I made this deck at the end of my first semester in college, in the art studio on top of Moho's mail and copy center, with a girl named Izzy who everyone knows is crazy but who I always knew was quite sweet and kind. Izzy had an untreated concussion and, when we were strangers, got me home from a woods party (my first woods party, when I was a hapless and wasted freshman and the last bus home was canceled) by taking me and my roommate first to Amherst center and then back to campus. I don't know if I was drunk, or just in such an unfamiliar enviorment everything was like a dream. I made these cards in a hopelessly shameful time in my life, when I had just lost the only friends I'd made in college in a violent group dissolution and I felt alien, alienated, and (I thought, but was unsure) victimized. They were stream of consciousness, based just on card interpretations I'd found on labrynthos.io and about whatever the words made me want to write or draw.
Today, a friend of mine who I made in a very vulnerable time in my life (bruh they just keep happening) told me she felt abandoned and betrayed by my distancing from her. She behaves the way I used to, and when I see the panic in her eyes at my withdrawal, I know exactly what she's feeling. I don't know why I can't empathize anymore-- I don't know what happened to make me stop feeling that way, but maybe it's this shame. I don't know why, but so much of the shame I had picked up in my decade of teenager-hood dropped away this summer. I suddenly knew who I was, I knew what I wanted, and I knew there was nothing wrong or unlovable about me. This was lucky timing: my codependent inoperably-toxic lesbian relationship had just ended, I had friends I didn't want to lose and friends I wanted to make, and there was a beautiful girl I didn't know yet who talked the same way I did and wanted to meet another girl. And I know that I can love her right, and I know that I couldn't have a year ago, and I don't know why. But maybe it's this shame that I don't feel like I used to.
I think I knew from the beginning that this might be one of my last spreads with this deck, or at least that it was going to be a closing one (I'm sure I'll do more spreads with this one before/as I make another). This deck was made with shame, because I felt shame so deeply I couldn't see from the perspective of anything else. I was alone and confused and thought I was different from everyone in the world. I don't think I've pulled any card from this deck as often as the eight of swords (which, you'll notice, was invereted in the center of this spread)-- it was the first inside joke I had with the deck. I was trapped and the key was dangling in front of my face, I was self-victimizing and I was so confused I couldn't look it in the face. I do think-- perhaps this will sound ridiculous to those of you who aren't interested in tarot-- that having something confront me with this self-vicimization that I was trying to hide from myself, over and over again, was one of the most siginificant influences on me slowly pulling myself out of the pit I was in. I think it makes sense that me finally looking that shame in the face and doing a tarot spread to interrogate it would be the spread that feels like a goodbye.
Sorry, I know the picture is about five pixels; I just cropped the full image. Like I mentioned in my intro, the 8 of swords is a very resonant card with the last couple years of my life. I was willfully ignorant of the way I enabled the bad things which I let other people do to me, yada yada. Flipping this showed me the spread was not fooling around: the deck was as interested in talking about shame as I was and it was going to be direct and sharp. Crossing it is the knight of coins, the young adult who might (right-side-up) make good investments and be stable and reap the opportunities he's set up for himself, or (inverted) may self-destructively bet the farm. This is the cross my shame offers me: the material rewards of taking control of myself or the material punishment for hiding in insecurity and refusing the consequences of autonomy.
Both I and my tarot-reading friend have been pulling the ten of cups a lot, especially together. It's an interesting card in this deck, and seeing it made me kind of sad: I've drawn a girl in college, dreaming happily of being back in her hometown. For fairy-tale endings card, the card about ultimate belonging, what I thought to draw was a girl who was far from home, who only felt like she belonged in her nostalgic dreams. Of every card in the deck, maybe this is the one which I feel the furthest beyond. Certainly I have not reached the success of the 10 of cups, but I no longer feel like it's in the past. pushing the 10 of cups is the inverted 6 of coins: if the 6 of coins is charity, its inverted form is conditional generosity, the power dyanmics which come with gift giving (which reminds me:The Traffic in Women" di Gail Rubin). I do feel like this in conjuction with the 10 of cups is commentary on my friendship, which I won't go into. In general, though, the bottom's upward draw shows that some of my shame around belonging, the thing which made me draw my unhappy 10 of cups, is driven by this feeling of catches in intimacy, that generosity isn't true. It makes me sad for the part of me which made this deck-- makes me wonder how I would redraw the 10 of cups without the conditionality.
The 4 of wands is the other anti-Moho card in my deck. Again, it's a card about belonging with no catches: the community passion gives you, the feeling of friendship. When I draw this card and wrote welcome Mohome I knew what it was supposed to mean, but I drew a woman looking out from this nest of arms like she's trapped and afraid. She does not belong in this place she's supposed to belong. And that feeling-- that girl, alienated and shamed-- pushes weakness onto the 8 of swords.
The inverted devil is another very shame-pointed card. The devil is addiction, loss of control, tumbling into a bad life at the devil's whims. What makes something sin is the shame of it-- the knowledge that it isn't what you would be doing if you could do differently. The inverted devil is freedom from that, and it pushes the final card of the major arcana: the promise of the world. (A silly aside: after doing this spread, I did another on a similar note-- and on a girl, duh-- and that spread felt amusingly provacative, so I pulled a trio of cards to verify if I was reading it right. The first of those three cards I drew was the fool, she who makes her way to the world.) Without being ashamed, you can stand on the real world. If you take the key, you can escape the academy and see the world as it is. The world in conjunction with the 8 of swords does, admittedly, remind me of Adolescence of Utena which I just rewatched. Anthy takes the key to the card from her abuser and with that key she can "turn utena on" (Ikuhara is, as always, pleasantly unsubtle with his euphemisms) and drive away from the false consciousness she's kept herself trapped in. Awesome.
I think I have pulled unnamed only one or two times in this deck, and always inverted. It really does feel like a goodbye: the smallest sprout shows there is really no death, and the cycle will begin anew, but here is the end of one rotation. To have it in the same spread as the world, the last card in the major arcana, just underlines this. It was a really pleasant way to end the spread, and makes sense around shame: shame is repression and so in its way it is just an attempt to cover up the truth of death. everything will end in its way, and we can only appreciate what we have in the moment instead of getting caught up in what it might be or ought to be or will one day cease to be. Between this truth and where I am now is the inverted star: faith is there but maybe it is blind or maybe it is ignored. This is a challenge almost more than the knight of coins from the cross is-- can you walk the tightrope of belief, neither too confident nor too skeptical? One can only hope!
Anyway, I really enjoyed this spread. It felt acute and interesting, hopeful without being coddling. It does seem like so much of tarot is about asking the question you want answered, and on the few occasions where you can be honest enough with yourself to see what that question is, you'll get the best results.