Shuffle, Cut, and Deal: The Random Wisdom of the Tarot

By Stephanie Mills
Sun contributor
I can’t remember when, exactly, I first met the cards. Maybe I was in high school, or perhaps just out of college, enjoying some good 70’s in the Bay Area. I didn’t start going steady with them until about 1990, after my divorce. I was back out in San Francisco for a visit, staying with some longtime bio-regionalist friends, Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft. One night after we’d had a good cheap meal out in the Mission District and Peter and Judy had probably heard enough of my fulminations on marriage gone awry, they offered me a Tarot reading.

I remember sitting in suspense and fascination at the kitchen table, flanked by two consummate storytellers, watching and listening as each of the 10 cards comprising a Celtic Cross spread showed its face and assumed its position and interpretation relative to the others.
I don’t remember much of that reading except that the Star, one of the loveliest of the major trumps, showed up. The Star can mean a coming of clarity, peace and relief after tribulations. It may not be the brightest object in the sky, but the Star shines with its own light.
At that point I became a Tarot junkie. “Seventy-eight Degrees of Wisdom” Tarot scholar Rachel Pollack calls these cards in her two-volume work of that name. Pollack’s books obtained on that trip at Field’s, alas a defunct occult bookstore, were my first guides to Tarot interpretation … the beginning of my studies. Wisdom, coming from a venerable, impartial, and, I will say, pagan source was something I sorely needed.
The use of the Tarot cards is a practice of gaining wisdom through acceptance about both the inner and outer dimensions of this life. The images on the cards are often challenging and sometimes baleful. Along with cards like the Star, which betoken light and shining, there are cards whose appearance in a spread causes me to flinch, wince, and brace myself. With its appropriately ambiguous and abundant portrayal of existential possibilities, the Tarot is a kind of Shrink in a Pack, a good ally in the work of maturity.
The Tarot emerged in western Europe about 500 years ago, not long after playing cards themselves, which are thought to be of Arabic origin, showed up. There are two parts to the Tarot deck, the minor and major arcana, or major trumps. Arcana means secrets, but the secrets of the Tarot are hidden in plain — or second — sight.
The minor arcana corresponds to the familiar playing card deck, with ten “pip” cards and an additional face card, the page, making a powerful little court for a total of 14 cards in each of the four suits, thus the first 56 degrees of wisdom. The Tarot suits — cups, wands, swords and pentacles, correspond with the hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds upon whose presence or absence in a hand has hinged the fate of many a poker player.
The luck of the draw is a large part of the power of a Tarot reading. Consulting the cards is a raid on the random. Once that deck’s been shuffled and cut the requisite nine times, it’s fully mixed and the universe alone decides what to show you.
Last February when Glenn Wolff and I began our project to make a Tarot deck with commentaries on each of the cards, we shuffled one of the classic decks, the Rider Pack, to let it determine the order in which we’d create our variations on the themes of the Tarot. Every week I’d turn up a card and write a letter about it to Glenn, who would then draw the card, in the pen and ink sense. Thus the work progresses.
“Guard the mysteries! Constantly reveal them!” said the late Beat poet Lew Welch.
In future issues of the Glen Arbor Sun, we’ll talk about the history of the Tarot, the symbolism of the suits, the pips and the court cards; we’ll introduce the major arcana and continue the excursion through this venerable pasteboard realm of wisdom.
Stephanie Mills is a journey gal, cartomancer and author whose books include “Epicurean Simplicity” and “In Service of the Wild”. Glenn Wolff is an artist and illustrator whose work appears in books, periodicals and public places too numerous to count.