The Magician
A visual metaphor for asexuality that genuinely connected with me is from Jess Sheridan’s webcomic “Demi” from 2017. Sheridan created it as a visual chronicle of her own journey into identifying as a Demsexual. Asexuality is shown as being like a jacket; once you find it, you try it on, and after looking in the mirror you realize how well it truly fits you. I wondered if the same would hold true for me. I imagined the gleeful excitement of finding that ace jacket: I’d pull it around my torso, weaving my arms into the sleeves, and I’d feel like I’d found a missing part of me that I didn’t know I’d even lost.
However, when I first decided to try on the label of “asexual”, I realized that it didn’t fully fit me in the way that I thought it would.
The way asexuality resonated with me didn’t seem to mirror how it resonated with others in my life who easily wore their asexuality; for them, asexuality fit them like a second skin. Like something they slipped into seamlessly. For me, asexuality was like an expensive jacket I once coveted at the menswear department of Hudson’s Bay — it looked absolutely gorgeous on one of my university classmates, but when I donned it in front of the mirror in the store, the proportions were all wrong. The body flared out in lines that were only just subtly askew. The shoulders sloped in angles that only just barely failed to match those of my improbably boney-but-chubby frame underneath. The sleeves extended just past my wrists, missing the perfect cut-off point by just a few fractions of an inch.
I feel like it’s somewhat arrogant to say that I forced asexuality to fit me, and yet, that’s really the best way I can find to describe it. The traditional definition of asexuality just missed me by degrees: I certainly did experience sexual attraction to others, but only just barely, and only in what seemed like weirdly inconsistent situations. A past partner I was with was someone I’d known for about two years before we became an official couple, albeit in a long-distance internet relationship (which lasted another five years). Another partner was someone who went from near-random stranger to close and intimate friend in the span of roughly a month. But outside of those and other blips, I seemed to check all of the boxes that would qualify me for my asexual membership card. However, my past attractions, and the potential for future attractions seemed to disqualified me from being a “real asexual”.
And yet I still felt like asexuality was something that finally fit me — in an awkward, close-but-not-quite way, sure. But it fit me far, far better than the conventional description of sexuality and sexual attraction that most people would describe as being “normatively sexual”.
I can’t say that I willed or manifested the term “demisexuality” or “greysexuality” into existence; those terms and the ideas underlying them had been discussed and developed far before my time. But in needing a way to better describe and give form to my tenuous relationship with asexuality, they came to me in the course of my further research into the asexual spectrum. Online quizzes and checklists further cemented the sense of certainty I started to feel as I learned more about what it meant to be a “grey ace”, or a “demi”. Reading the stories of others revealed to me that I was neither the only person to feel this way, nor the first.
As I started to learn more about the subtitles of the asexual spectrum, I discovered the galaxy of microlabels inhabiting what this strange liminal space between what is commonly understood to be “asexual” or “aromantic” and is what is, by normative default, called “allosexuality” (being conventionally sexually attracted to other people): Terms like Lithromantic, Aegosexual, Fraysexual and Aceflux are just the tip of the iceberg. All of which are identities willed into existence by those who, like me, felt like asexuality fit them, and yet, felt like it fully didn’t, all at the same time.
And to me, that is the energy of The Magician: manifestation. We like to laugh at such popular “New Age” concepts like manifestation, or the Law of Attraction — but as a spiritual-cum-religious person myself I feel compelled to say that there is something to be said about how our intentions can propel how we shape our world. In the case of those falling under the greater umbrella of greysexuality and the asexual spectrum, it was the intention and desire of finding the language to describe our specific asexuality. It was the intention to have a community to give that language form and material meaning. When we didn’t find the language we needed, we created it. When we didn’t find the community we sought, we constructed it.
And this is also historically true for the communities that have arisen around asexuals, aromantics, marginalized aces/aros and the wider queer community itself. Much of queer history lies in the quest to find language, identity, and community in a world that offered none of those things to those who needed it the most.
That is what makes The Magician so powerful as a symbol for queer people, and doubly so for ace people. It is the spirit and drive to say that if I can’t find what I need in the world, then I will just have to will it into existence myself: Whether it be a supportive group of personal friends encountered over social media, a chosen family, a bank of online and print information and resources for others, or a community to provide mutual aid and support. Some of these may involve actually creating what you want from scratch (like a reading list of blogs, websites and books on asexuality), while others may involve you contributing your focused time and energy to something that others have already started building (like a Discord server, a Meetup group, or an online forum).
I say, doubly so for ace people, because aces find themselves at the receiving end of two different layers of gatekeeping, misunderstanding/misinformation and exclusion: One one level, they get it from allosexual and allonormative society at large. On another level, they also get it from the queer community as a whole, who frequently finds it difficult to understand the concept of a person who may experience a vanishingly narrow range of sexual attraction, or even no sexual attraction at all. Such difficulties are rooted in how, at least in popular culture, queerness is often defined in terms of who you sleep with.
All the more reason why the meaning and energy of The Magician is so relevant to people on the asexual and aromantic spectrums. If we really want to see and live in a better world, and in a healthier community that lets us honestly experience and express our sexuality, we have to act in the here and now to actively bring that world, and that community into existence. No one else is going to do it for us. And waiting for it won’t make it come any sooner.
One of the important elements of the Magician as portrayed in the ubiquitous Smith-Waite tarot deck is their distinctive stance, with one hand pointed up above and one hand pointed down below. This is a symbol often associated with the phrase “As above, so below”: from a spiritual perspective, this tells us that whatever happens in the material plane — in our own lives here on earth — is mirrored in the realm of the spiritual. In other words, there is a direct connection between what happens in the macrocosm of the larger universe and what happens in the human world. Everything is connected.
For me, I see this in two forms: First, the connection between activism for the ace/aro community and activism for the wider LGBTQ2IA+ community; and, going further, anti-oppression activism, whether it be for BIPOC, the economically marginalized, or disabled/neurodivergent people. Second, it is the connection between the advocacy we do as aces and aros — whether it be as simple as posting articles about the ace community on social media, or as involved as facilitating a discussion forum — and the inner work we do on ourselves to process how we relate to our own sexuality, and what that means for our relationships.
As an extension of this, something I have thought about recently is how for queer people and other marginalized groups, “existence is resistance”. To be ace is to be by default set against a society founded upon toxic sexual, gender and romantic norms. In that sense, perhaps being ace or aro in and of itself is an form of activism.
The Magician reminds us that once we start on our journey, the work is ongoing. We cannot always wait for others to finish what we have started; sometimes, we have to see things through to the end. But we aren’t alone in our work. We are connected to others who share our oppression and our need for liberation. And that connection extends inward too. It means an ongoing process of checking in with ourselves and being inwardly reflective of what our sexuality means for us as we navigate the relationships we make in our day to day lives.
Previous: The Fool
Next: The High Priestess
