Reading Tarot Through a Mental Health Centric Lens
The symbolism in Tarot is old enough to have the glamorous reputation of boasting an unknown origin. A piece of persistent lost history that’s famous just for being itself: a simple deck of cards emblazoned with recognizable archetypes, a rudimentary numbers system, too, that places emphasis on medieval items: cups that resemble Lancelot’s chalices and wands–so many of them in fact they need a queen to crown them. These are the same symbols that have influenced queens and rock legends and poets, that housewives pull in secret against the curtains. Palm readers in New Orleans make their living off reading them and I’ve turned to them before like an online gambler caresses their beloved digitized slots. It’s addicting to put one’s faith in something so pocket-sized and slim, the only instructions being you make a wish. It takes a mind hard-wired to earnestly believe in the living theory of Luck–a conceptualization that most people, besides the Irish, scoff at. I’ve held my breath before when turning the Death card over and felt the sincerity of relief when something as prodigious as The Star showed up in a spread. These are ancient pictograms that remain not only recognizable but influential in a world so technologically removed from Tarot’s origin that it’s dizzying to consider: vellum versus industrial shards of black glass and a world where, depending on the news channel app you subscribe to, UFO sightings are a weekly occurrence. I have an image in my mind of some old, crone-like, early medicine woman sitting next to a nasty hearth, afternoon spilling into a room that’s filled with wood shavings. She has a wooden block in hand, chipping away at the outlines of figures with an expression of the sublime in her ruined face. Her life has been terrible to her–she’s hard-bitten and her teeth are rotten in four places and the only thing that saves her on a day like today is believing in the power of a symbol her grandmother made mention of. She allows herself to believe that pulling a card has the same tidal pull as having agency over one’s life, and that this bad world runs on an honors system, has some set of benchmarks set in place against her forced comfort with commonplace tragedy. Chaos knocks at the door every evening, she can hear the sounds of hooves and screams, and she’s managing to live next to it because of where her mind allows her to go. What I meant to say is that she places what little faith she has managed to hold steady against calamity into an idealism shaped around tenets similar to karma’s. She doesn’t know what Karma is–that’s being practiced halfway across the globe in a land she’ll never hear of–but she innately senses what can be done to an individual isn’t solely up to chance. And thank God for that. There’s something bigger in her belief and no, it isn’t about God or the law or the currently reigning monarch–it’s about the collection of circumstances that only adds up and never down, which surround a spiritual body like magnets. The Catholic Church calls it Dogma and she calls it Magic. She’s carving The World and hoping one day she’ll pull this card and things will begin to get better. She’s in hopes of levitation from this life, and the Wheel gives her enough courage to continue.
Mary Buchanan is from Mississippi whose writing flirts with topics centered on mental health, spirituality, and magic. She is a writer, educator, and occasional tarot card puller. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Mississippi, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Fiction from Louisiana State University, where she served as graduate prose editorial assistant for The Southern Review. She published her first collection of short stories, Shoulder Bones, in 2014 with Blooming Twig Books. Her graduate thesis, a hybrid novel, Rapunzel Has Insomnia, was a finalist for the University of New Orleans Publishing Laboratory Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming Bending Genres, Erato Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Hobart, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Tiny Molecules, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Razor, Psychopomp, Flash Fiction Magazine, Third Point Press, Sidereal Magazine, Mississippi Magazine, among others. Libre, X, BlueSky, IG
