Queering the Tarot with Cassandra Snow
Happy Pride, MPA Community!
Although Covid is still precluding the usual parades and festivals, I hope that you've all still had the opportunity to safely gather with your family of choice to celebrate Queer culture and liberation.
With Pride in mind, I highly recommend you check out a book called Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow. Snow looks past the traditional stereotypes of the tarot imagery (i.e. hetero, cis, male, etc) and focuses on how the base archetypes of the cards can speak to non-heteronormative experiences. Her viewpoint is patently gay, but what I love most is that she also expands her lens to communities like kink, poly, gender non-conforming, and many other facets that can make up a person's unique sexual identity.
There are a ton of kick-ass tarot decks out there that celebrate queerness, but I haven't come across many books that give an explicit how-to guide for applying the traditional tarot imagery to a queer context and queer-specific issues in readings.
For example, Snow's read on The Hermit -
"This is a very important card for those of us who are queer. On the most basic level, those with unaccepting families will find themselves walking The Hermit's path before falling into a chosen family, and while this is not exclusive to queer experience, it is all too common in our community. If a querent's question revolves around how the coming out process will go, The Hermit serves as both a warning that the conversation may not go ideally, but also as a reassurance that the wisdom and peace needed for dealing with this blow are already present with oneself. Along the same lines, that first queer breakup, standing up for ourselves to friends or family who judge our lifestyle choices, and periods of questioning our gender or sexual identity may lead us to a time of the Hermit."
I don't know about you, but I definitely find that there's a glorious Venn diagram overlap of people in my life who ID as pagan AND queer AND kinky AND poly AND a rainbow of other awesome things that raise a big middle finger to the straight cis monoculture. Where you find one "deviation" from the norm, you usually (and delightfully) find more! So I really dig this intersectional look at tarot, and I hope you will too.
