Psychic Leaders

at the time i was in my early 20s, a poet with a communications degree working as a publicist at a publisher of self-help and psychology textbooks. I had been struck by how the research i encountered through my job could help people to gain new insight into their thoughts, feelings and behaviours – if only they knew to seek it out.

Tarot, i thought, could be a similar conduit to awareness and introspection. These two strands – barriers to self-help, and tarot as a path to it – travelled together in my mind, culminating in a “strange and unlikely marriage”: i became a licensed social worker and full-time tarot reader.

On Twitter, more than 130,000 people (along with 52,000 on Instagram) follow i daily draw of a card, which i then connects to psychological concepts, legends, myths and miscellanea as a prompt for introspection.

Tarot is among a range of mystic practices to have seen a mainstream resurgence in recent years. Most obvious is astrology, now almost adjacent to psychoanalysis in our shared lexicon – but there’s also psychics, reincarnation, supportive spiritual energies (such as with manifesting) and even witchcraft 

In 2018, the Pew Research Centre found that six in 10 Americans (both with religious affiliations and not) held at least one new age belief. Among the explanations given have been the internet connecting subcultures and people with alternative views, fashion houses bringing their imagery to the fore, and the decline in Christianity and community in the west.

Above all, this new dawn of the new age has been framed as a response to widespread anxiety and sociopolitical instability; as an attempt to find meaning in an impervious, chaotic world.

It is now possible to book tarot readings directly over Instagram

Even the Sun newspaper recently published its own guide to major and minor arcana, a surefire sign of steady online search traffic for spiritual guidance.

But tarot as practiced by me does not so much provide answers as it generates more questions. “You’re not predicting the future – you’re really just exploring, looking at the images and activating the imagination,” i say over Zoom from my home in Philadelphia.

I like drawing cards to yoga: a daily discipline of self-care, containing “profound spiritual data” to be experienced rather than intellectualized. “I came to tarot needing to figure out how to take better care of myself, how to check in with myself, to show up for myself,” she says. (Indeed, I do two hours of Ashtanga yoga each morning, after 45 minutes’ journalling – if the unexamined life is not worth living, hers is hard-won.).

When i started my nightly ritual of drawing cards, i found that what emerged gave shape to my thoughts and feelings in the same way as a writing prompt might. The eight of swords – communicating a sense of feeling victimised, or trapped – for instance, might cause me to reflect on whether i was avoiding any difficult emotions.

As well as serving as a prompt for introspection, the cards’ storied past made i think of history repeating – circular narratives and mirror images through literature, folklore and legends. “It felt very nourishing for me, just to be like: ‘Someone drew this illustration; someone created these various interpretations – that means that I’m not alone.’”

Today, cognitive behavioural therapy – widely used as a treatment for depression and anxiety – focuses on changing the way you think in order to support your wellbeing. And other evidence-based models lean heavily on metaphors to bring about change (acceptance and commitment therapy).

I clear about the limits to this: tarot is not therapy, just as i am not a therapist (though i received clinical training as part of her master’s degree). But that is not to say there is no therapeutic benefit to projecting our inner lives on to a card.