12/02/2026
Welcome. Thank you.
Not the hurried, automatic thank-you of a thousand newsletters, but a real one. From the hollow of my chest. Because you are here, in this space I have carved out with intention and a little trembling hope, and that means something. It means you are hungry for the real thing. And so am I.
The idea for this Tarot Study Group did not arrive fully formed, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It crept in slowly, on quiet feet, over many months of watching something precious slip through our collective fingers. I kept seeing the same pattern, again and again: Tarot reduced to a transaction. A quick flip. A three-card spread delivered at double speed, the reader's eyes darting not to the cards but to the comments, the likes, the relentless algorithm demanding more, faster, simpler.
Simpler. As if the seventy-eight doors of the soul were meant to be yanked off their hinges.
I could not unsee it. And I could not, in good conscience, remain silent.
So I built a room. A small one, at first. A study group, I called it, because that is what I wanted—not a classroom, not a stage, but a gathering of fellow travellers willing to sit with the difficult beauty of this work. Willing to be beginners. Willing to be wrong. Willing to read twelve pages of Rachel Pollack and then sit in the echo of what she wrote, letting it rearrange the furniture of the mind.
We are two weeks in. Twelve pages. That is all.
And already, the conversation in the study group chat is doing what I had only dared to hope it might. It is catching fire. Not the performative fire of viral spectacle, but the slow, patient burn of minds meeting in the dark. Someone shares a thought about the Fool and suddenly we are all re-examining the edge of every cliff we have ever stood upon. Another voice, tentative, asks what Pollack means when she says the cards dream—and the responses that follow are not answers but offerings, each one a small act of vulnerability.
There is a hunger here. A burning desire to go deeper. Not for certification, not for content, but for encounter.
And it is precisely this hunger that the noise outside cannot satisfy.
Because out there, in the vast and dizzying carnival of social media, Tarot is being hollowed out from within. Misinformation spreads like bindweed, choking the roots. Ancient symbols are stripped of their context and sold as aesthetic. Readers with ten days of experience and a ring light dispense pronouncements as though they are oracles, and the algorithm rewards them for it. The wisdom of the cards is watered down until it is thin enough to fit inside a caption, palatable enough to offend no one, simple enough to be consumed without digestion.
But Tarot is not simple. It has never been simple. It is knotwork and the ghost of every civilisation that ever looked to the stars for meaning. It is the Fool's bleeding feet and the Empress's swollen belly and the Tower's inevitable, liberating collapse. It is not a quick answer. It is a long conversation.
And part of that conversation—part of the depth we are so hungry for—is the willingness to hold complexity without needing to resolve it. Tarot is not Kabbalah. It is not numerology. It is not astrology. But it connects to these things, threads running outward like roots seeking other roots in the dark. The Tree of Life maps imperfectly onto the Major Arcana, and yet something shivers into alignment when you place them side by side. The numbers on the cards are not merely labels—they are echoes of Pythagoras, of sephiroth, of the old, old belief that the universe can be counted into meaning. And the planets, the signs, the houses? They do not live inside the cards, but the cards know how to point at them, how to gesture toward the heavens and say: there, look there.
To understand Tarot is not to master all these systems. It is to honour them as neighbours, as cousins, as fellow travellers on the same winding road. It is to resist the urge to flatten the landscape into a single, easy path. It is to stand at the crossroads and acknowledge every direction before you choose which way to walk.
This is what the charlatans cannot give you. They cannot give you the crossroads. They can only give you the illusion of arrival.
But here, in this small room, we are learning to read the map differently. Not for destination. For orientation.
We are two weeks in. Twelve pages. A chat thread that glows with the heat of sincere inquiry. A burning desire, in all of us, to go deeper than the algorithm will allow.
And if that sounds like something you have been searching for—welcome. Truly. You have not arrived at a performance. You have arrived at a practice. Slow, sacred, stubborn. We do not have all the answers. We do not pretend to.
But we are asking the questions. Together. And that, I am learning, is where the real magic begins.
