Not the Usual Story
The way that stories like this usually begin is with a heartwarming anecdote about an elder friend or family member, steeped in ancient, time-honoured knowledge and wisdom, introducing our youthful protagonist to the mysteries of the cards. Perhaps they’re in a quiet, hushed room, away from the window overlooking the street beyond, the air heavy with magic and memories. It could also start with a story about a fresh-faced creative soul sitting in their studio, surrounded by the tools of their trade. They hunger for a new challenge to light their artistic fire…only to finally find it in the symbology of the Major Arcana of the tarot. Or it could start with a moving tale of someone with a notebook and a pack of cards, seeking a means to gain deeper understanding of themselves amidst a period of profound, seismic personal turmoil.
My story with asexuality and the tarot involves, to a degree, some of these elements. But it actually doesn’t start with any of these narratives.
Instead, my story starts with a trendy, dimly lit bar, crowded with cocktails, and people in business dresses and bassy electronic dance beats. It was an evening in what we can only now say was in the distant time “before the pandemic”, with a friend, a well-worn pack of tarot cards, some alcohol, and a lot of latex.
I was sitting beside someone who I’d known for many years (who I’ll call Rene here), clad in an immaculately set of holy vestments that, upon closer examination, were actually made out of latex. Rene was there for a public tarot reading event at a bar for what looked like someone’s private event; I’d been invited to come along for the ride. Someone in a fancy dress or in “business casual” attire would sit down in front of them — what tarot readers often call a “querent” — and with a mischievous look on their face and a glimmer in their eye, they would flip through their stack of tarot cards at what looked like supernatural speed. From the questions they’d ask, the tapestry of the querent’s life was laid bare for all to witness. With each card turned over, Rene would tug at the frayed threads at the edge of the querent’s anxieties, unravelling them, until they’d get to the interconnected threads at the centre of the querent’s true issues. As with all truth-tellers, sometimes my friend’s words were received with respect and earnestness. With others, not so much.
In the days before and after that evening, I’d witnessed some of my other spiritually-inclined friends giving each other readings, and when I was feeling brave, I’d let myself be read by them too. The enigmatic symbols on their cards were both familiar, and alien to me: doesn’t that cup look like a communion chalice at church? Why is there a blindfolded woman holding two swords? And what did that guy do to get attacked by six people thrusting sticks at him? The ambiguity of these scenes would give me a slight rush of creeping fear. I expected something sinister to come out of these pictures, something that was lurking unseen and unnoticed. I witnessed more reading sessions among my friends, the images flashing before my eyes, and that lurking fear later melted into a hungry curiosity.
A few days after the event, Rene offered to loan me their used copy of Eden Grey’s Mastering the Tarot. It was a book that looked like it’d lived several lifetimes on a shelf: The edges of the pages were still as sharp as they day they’d been printed, but were so yellowed with time and exposure to sunlight that it almost looked like they’d been written on parchment. I leapt at the chance to borrow it. I devoured it in the matter of a few weeks, reading and rereading it, filling a notebook with my copious notes on the personalities, themes, symbolism, and keywords of the Major and Minor Arcana. Not long after that, C took me on a long walk up towards a tarot and metaphysical shop tucked away in quiet corner of the city, so I could get my first tarot deck (The Fountain, by Jonathan Saiz, Jason Gruhl, and Andi Todaro). I bought my second deck a few weeks after that (The Linestrider Tarot, by Siolo Thompson). I was hooked.
Still reeling from the aftermath of two successively failed relationships, I was desperate to understand what had happened; why things went the way they did, and why I did the things that I’d done. I’d hurt and lied to people I’d loved. I’d also given others that I thought I loved the boundary-free reign to grievously hurt me as many times as they wanted. These were things that I hadn’t imagined myself ever doing to the people in my life. I needed, in words I’d later tell my therapist, to try to make up an exploded diagram of my self and my relationships, to figure out how all of their constituent bits and pieces fit and worked together, so I could fix what I thought was broken. In the process, I both discovered and rediscovered parts of myself that I’d repressed and ignored. And in addition to seeking guidance and insight from a mental health professional, a lot of meditation, journalling, and long walks spent alone, tarot was a constant part of that process.
Queerness, Asexuality, and The Tarot
The tarot is often associated with knowledge and spirituality that runs counter to mainstream religion, and given how it has historically occupied a realm at the margins of society, it only makes sense that queer people both have gravitated, and continue to gravitate, to the tarot as a vehicle to develop spiritual meaning, and both emotional and psychological self-understanding. The tarot then, represents a safe space for queer people to mentally and emotionally heal and express themselves. It is a place for queer people that can be separated from the external, marginalizing messages of our society. And this is important, as our society has historically equated queerness with mental illness. And it still continues to stigmatize both queer people and those coping with mental health issues.
Ace and aro people, of course, are no exception; a great deal of the negative discourse surrounding asexuality and aromanticness frequently paints them both as psychological disorders, if they’re not being trivialized as people just being “picky” or “prudish”. The tarot, then, presents a counter-cultural method of personal development, spiritual exploration, and self-examination that doesn’t purely centre itself around sexual or romantic normativity. It a spacious exercise: a space that exists for you to fill, with your own questions, your own insights, and ultimately, your own answers, free from external assumptions and restrictive norms. Cards then, like the The Lovers or the Two of Cups — often associated with normative paired dating relationships and sexuality — can take on meanings that can be genuinely resonant and empowering for people who often find themselves alienated from sex, dating, and relationships.
It’s no coincidence then that the tarot-slinging friend who left me spellbound with their cartomantic speed identified as asexual, and through them I was introduced to both the world of asexuality and the asexual spectrum, and to the world of the tarot; since then, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting other ace and aro-identified tarot readers in my online communities, and the tarot has continued to be a source of illumination in my journeys in the asexual spectrum.
A Statement of Intention
My objective with this series of writings is to open a conversation about how the tarot can be viewed and discussed through the lens of a person who identifies strongly on the asexual spectrum: These are a set of personal meditations I’ve written about what the 78 cards of the tarot can mean to people on both the asexual and aromantic spectrums, mainly in the form of personal and literary essays (including a few “Hermit Crab” essays). For these writings I’ve drawn upon my own experiences with relationships, religion, queerness, asexuality and aromanticness. I hasten to point out that I in no way intend to present my experiences as being indicative or representative of any “universal” asexual or aromantic experience. Despite their many similarities and parallels, every ace or aro person’s journey is unique and distinct. They reflect the wonderful diversity that exists among human beings in how we interface with our sexual identity, while illustrating the common bonds that tie all of us together.
I also don’t intend these discussions to be the authoritative or prescriptive ace/aro meanings of the tarot. Everyone’s journey through the tarot is as individual as they are, and I don’t expect ace and aro people to be any different. If anything, I hope that the personal meaning that I’ve derived from these cards will be a springboard for other ace/aro people to find their own selves in the tarot. If other aces and aros read these words and use them to find a completely different set of interpretations and meanings that make sense for them, I’ll have considered my ultimate mission to be a success.
Simply put, I’m passionate about the tarot, I’m passionate about writing, and I’m passionate about asexual and aromantic issues. It only made sense for me to engage all of these passions by writing about how the asexual and aromantic experience can intersect with the tarot, in ways that are at the same time challenging, meaningful, empowering, and impactful.
For this exercise, I have written about the one tarot deck and system of tarot meaning that is the most widely recognized and learned in North America: the deck commonly known as the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot (RWS). Without going too deeply into the history of the tarot, the RWS became the dominant type of tarot deck in North America, preferred by many over the timeless yet arcane Tarot de Marseilles from Europe. The third major type of tarot, the glorious Thoth deck, became a popular and beloved tarot system in its own right, but it never developed the same level of cultural penetration as the RWS.
I’ve split my writing into three major sections, corresponding to the major thematic and symbolic breaks in the RWS tarot deck: The first encompasses the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, the second contains the 40 numerical cards of the Minor Arcana, and the third deals with the 16 “personality” cards of the Minor Arcana, commonly known as the Court Cards.
People with knowledge and experience with the tarot will see that I do leave out one often big (and controversial) feature of readings: reversals (i.e. the meanings of cards when they are, after shuffling, drawn upside down). Reversals are often used to bring out the “shadow” aspect of a card — the oppositional qualities of a card that lie on its “B-side”; for myself, however, I feel that reversals can add an extra layer of complexity and cognitive load on reader and querent alike, muddying meaning. Context can bring out the contrary aspects of a given card, through the questions being asked, or the positions of cards in a spread.
A (not so) quick note about terminology
For over a century, the mysterious artist who gave directly life to the imagery in the RWS, Pamela “Pixie” Coleman-Smith, was eclipsed by the man who directed her, Arthur Edward Waite. Both belonged to a spiritual society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group that was highly influential in popularizing and spreading occultism and the tarot in the twentieth century. Amidst a more modern drive to recognize the cultural achievements of women in society, a new light was shone upon Pixie and the immense contribution she made to the modern development of the tarot. To reflect this, some have started to refer to the RWS as the Smith-Waite tarot — this is the term I will be using in these writings.
I use the terms “ace” and “aro” as shorthand umbrella terms to refer to the asexual and aromantic spectrum. By these terms, I’m talking about all of the sexual identities on the range of asexuality and aromanticness, apart from allosexual/alloromantic, up to and including asexual and aromantic. Here, I use a definiton of being asexual or aromantic that is not defined by a strict (sexual attraction vs. zero sexual attraction) binary.
Acespec and arospec are also used to refer to the asexual and aromantic spectrums respecively, so I use all three sets of terms (ace/aro, acespec/arospec, and asexual spectrum/aromantic spectrum) interchangeably. There is also the term aspec, which is an umbrella term covering both the asexual spectrum and aromantic spectrum.
I currently identify as Demisexual. Yet, I have made a conscious decision to be as inclusive as I can of both ace and aro people in my writing, by including them in my discussions of the tarot, especially in the light of such structures as amatonormativity and aphobia (hatred and discrimination against ace and aro people). In the current discussion around aspec issues, aro folx (folx used as meaning people who are part of the LGBTQ2IA+ community) are often left behind and erased. As a group who often face the same struggles and share the same experiences as asexuals, we can no longer afford to ignore their presence and their voices in the greater queer community. Being Asian-Canadian, and someone with a speech disorder, I’ve also tried to include disabled and BIPOC aces in my discussions as well. As a community we have much collective and personal work to do, to ensure that marginalized aces are recognized and heard: Both within the ace/aro community, and in the greater queer community as a whole.
In my own overactive imagination, I picture you, dear ace or aro reader, grabbing an Rider-Waite-Smith deck from your local bookseller or metaphysical shop, and playing along with me as we dance, stumble, and fumble our way through the 78 cards of the tarot deck. Maybe you might have picked up a guidebook from Rachel Pollack or Mary K. Greer, Theresa Reed or Melissa Cynova, too — maybe you might read their sage words, and nod knowingly as you read my own half-lucid scrawls, seeing the connections and making the links between the networks of meaning established between them, me, and the cards.
Or maybe you might shake your head and wonder what on earth I’m talking about. How could he be so wrong about all of this?
Either way, I thank you in advance for taking this journey with me. Below is a table of contents for all of the posts that will be included as a part of this series, which will be posted on a (roughly!) bi weekly schedule.
I hope you have fun.
Introduction: The Major Arcana
0 — The Fool
I — The Magician
II—The High Priestess
III — The Empress
IV — The Emperor
V — The Hierophant
VI — The Lovers
VII — The Chariot
VIII — Strength
IX — The Hermit
X — The Wheel of Fortune
XI — Justice
XII — The Hanged Man
XIII — Death
XIV — Temperance
XV — The Devil
XVI — The Tower
XVII — The Star
XVIII — The Moon
XIX — The Sun
XX — Judgement
XXI — The World
