Lost in Transit: How Tarot Found Me – and How It’s Helping Me Find My Way

Rhonda shares her experiences of the centuries-old practice at a time of transition.

It’s perhaps significant that I’m at Sydney Airport, a liminal space of transition and departure, when I fall upon a magazine article by CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife – a brilliant memoir about choosing to live a non-conventional life beyond the self-effacement and perhaps even self-annihilation often caused by marriage or many relationships.

Reading Hauser describe how pulling a daily tarot card made it possible for her to ‘talk to herself’, I have an epiphany. Like Hauser’s, the ‘voice in my head’, I realise –the voice that I consult with about pretty much everything in my life - is actually the voice of other people. I value their opinion or approval more than my own, and make decisions, it appears, based on what I imagine others will think.

Tarot, I understand from the article, can be a way of checking in with yourself, of taking your emotional temperature and working out what you really think and want. 

I’ve come to Australia somewhat broken. The pandemic temporarily nuked my career as a travel writer and made separating from my husband – as I’d realised I wanted to –financially impossible. I’m also deep into the peri-menopause and all that that entails physically and mentally.

Tarot is supposed to find you - and so is the tarot deck you use. And that’s exactly what happens. Arriving in Melbourne, I remember the friend I’m visiting after 10 years apart happens to be a long-standing tarot reader. She whisks me to one of her favourite shops a couple of blocks from our hotel, Spellbox. Its choice of tarot decks is huge and bewildering.

I finger a few. Some I like, others less so. Then I turn and see on a display table a card that makes my breath catch in my throat –  the Temperance card by Nicolas Bruno – part of his incredible, surrealist Somnia deck. This deck doesn’t just speak to me; it screams at me. Alas, it also costs more than £70. Half-joking, I tell Nicole I’ll ‘wait for a sign’ as to whether to buy it or a £5 deck, and we leave.

Later that day, entering a trendy artisan boutique, I catch sight of a trio of shop dummies and gasp. ‘Oh my god’, exclaims Nic, who sees it too: one of the dummies is in the exact same pose as the figure in the Temperance card. Its long pale-pink robe is similar even down to the folds in the fabric, and the arms are raised in the same gesture.  

In Spellbox, the sales assistant looks at me intently and tells me that the first card I pull will tell me why the Somnia deck has ‘found me’. 

Back at the hotel, I pull the King of Swords - a card that acts as a catalyst and a ‘wise counsel’. 

Time for change, time to start listening to my own feelings.

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Invented in Italy in the 1430s, tarot is having a modern resurgence beyond its rather woo-woo image as a form of seeing the future. For some, it’s a real therapeutic tool that’s particularly relevant at those sticky, tricky turning points in life such as midlife crises, divorces and menopause – times when you might not, as I don’t, feel the need for an actual therapist but you do need something more than a long-suffering friend’s ear or shoulder.

In one episode of This Jungian Life, a fantastic podcast by eminent psychoanalysts Lisa Marchiano, Deb Stewart and Joseph Lee, tarot is discussed with expert T Susan Chang as a serious tool for accessing the unconscious. Rather than an occult oracle, it’s a portal to our innermost desires.

Accordingly, I generally reach for my deck when I’m feeling conflicted or confused about what I want or expect out of a situation. It may be a person – perhaps a friend, or perhaps a potential date about whom I feel slightly uneasy. I ask a question of the deck – in the case of a person, it might be simply, ‘Who is X/Y/Z to me?’ But the answer I get comes not from the cards. It comes from me, because in some part of myself, I already have all the answers. 

I pull a card, study its symbolism in the light of the question I’ve asked, and start free-associating from there. Pretty soon my hopes and misgivings start spilling out onto paper and I am able to have a debate with myself - taking my real feelings and gut instinct into account without the filter of others’ opinions. It’s clarifying.

I also pull on particular occasions – for instance, around the full moon or at New Year. Indeed, my card pulled to ‘set the tone’ for 2023 was the Seven of Cups, a card often seen as a warning about bewilderment, temptation and losing oneself in fantasies. As I went on to pull this card again twice in the following month, and as a Libran I’ve always found it hard to make a hard choice between options, I decided it was worth paying heed to– especially in the context of my newfound singledom.

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The year after the deck finds its way to me, Tracey and I walk part of the Camino de Santiago – the network of pilgrims' ways leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in Galicia. We do it not as a religious pilgrimage, but for the reasons mentioned above, to do with being at a time of transition. Many people walk the Camino at a time of change - loss of a loved one, divorce, deciding whether to have children, retirement…

Starting out on our journey, about which I do feel somewhat nervous (we’ll be walking up to 35km a day – that’s a shitload of thinking time), I pull a card to ask what this Camino is for me. The answer comes in the form of the Page of Cups: a card that tells you that “It is alright to have a new beginning – to welcome the new you”, according to Labyrinthos, a modern witchcraft resource. Labyrinthos insists that tarot is not about divination but is actually a mirror to help you interpret your own inner world in order to create your story. 

And accepting that despite or perhaps because of life’s uncertainty, you are creating your own story – that you are the author of your own life – is surely the greatest superpower of all.