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My interest in the tarot started over 40 years ago when I used to watch my mother reading the cards. Occasionally, on a Saturday night, she’d get them out for friends and, with a ceremonious air, she’d turn them over one by one. I loved the way they looked, their beautiful imagery – the haunting skull, eerie moon or romantic lovers. I found them compelling. As I grew into a teenager, reading the tarot became a party trick, along with the ouija board. At night, I would often disappear into the garden shed with friends to invoke spirits and do fake tarot readings, which terrified and thrilled us in equal measure.
For decades, the tarot disappeared from my life. Jobs, marriage, kids and owning a home took over. I was working as a journalist and training as a psychotherapist. Life was incredibly busy and full. Then, in 2021, things took a turn for the worse. In the space of about a month, I lost my life savings in a scheme that went wrong, I had to put my family home of 21 years on the market and I filed for divorce.
It was all pretty shocking and so, in order to provide me with much-needed support, one of my best and oldest friends came to stay. As we sat talking, she took out a tarot deck. ‘Shall I do a reading?’ she said. She pulled the cards – and there they all were, the big guns: number 13, the Death card; the Tower, representing destruction; the Ten of Swords, signifying betrayal or loss; the Nine of Swords, known as the ‘nightmare’ card; and the Three of Swords, which pictures a heart being pierced in three places. My friend and I stared at them. ‘Pretty accurate,’ she said.
In truth, I was shocked. There are 78 cards in a deck. My friend could have pulled any combination. As always with a reading, the pack was face down, but the cards she pulled accurately described where I was – sudden loss of money and home, shock, fear, heartache, pain, lack of sleep, nightmares, worries, fear, death of everything I held dear. It was in that moment that I started to take the tarot seriously. There was something profound in that reading. It seemed to make sense of my changing life in a way I was failing to. This is where my tarot journey truly began.
The journey begins
In a matter of weeks, I’d started training as a tarot reader, having found my teacher, Angie Banicki, online. She’s California-based, was once a high-profile entertainment publicist, has a kooky style – and is the ‘tarot reader to the stars’. She spends much time pulling cards at Hollywood parties and weddings, and (of course) for Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s also rather beautiful, with long honey-blonde hair and razor-sharp cheekbones, and she’s an astute businesswoman, charging £750 (or $1,000) for online tarot readings and £95 a month to be part of her Advanced Tarot Academy, which I joined.
Understandably there are those who think it’s woo-woo nonsense – at best, peddled by people who believe in something other than logic, or at worst, created by the manipulative in order to hoodwink the vulnerable. But I feel differently. I’ve seen how it has helped me – and others around me.
I’m not alone in being drawn to tarot right now. According to Lyn Araujo, director of communications at US Game Systems, tarot decks have been flying off the shelves. Occult bookshop Treadwell’s in Bloomsbury has seen a 50 per cent rise in sales of tarot cards since 2020. Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble, who set up Motherpeace Tarot in California in the 1970s, agree that sales are booming. Vogel attributes this to ‘alienation’: ‘People are lonely and angry. Tarot helps them deal with insecurities at these times.’
Banicki believes the recent rise in tarot popularity is down to people wanting to make sense of their lives at a time when so much else feels out of control. ‘I don’t think many of us know what to believe in now,’ she says, ‘and the tarot restores that sense of belief. It connects us to something higher and older – a spiritual place.’ She adds: ‘It is also a self-care tool. It helps people feel more secure at a time when our political leaders are not doing that for us.’
My 20 fellow students, who log in for weekly live sessions with Banicki, are not what you might expect – we’re an eclectic mix, many of us professionals, aged 18 to 60, and we beam in from around the globe, from Wyoming to Italy, Ireland to Greece.
Learning to read cards is a complicated process – each of the 78 cards have meanings in the upright position and in the reverse position. The basic concept of the tarot is as a fortune-telling device. You ask the tarot a question and it gives you an answer – ranging from advice on a certain situation to how the year might pan out. The way you spread the cards depends on the question. To look at a year, 12 cards are placed like a clock, one for each month, while a more traditional spread involves just three cards – past, present and future.
Each card needs to be read by itself and then in conjunction with all the others, and you also have to interpret what the numbers mean and how to calculate timelines. Banicki has taught us everything she knows and helped us master the art of pulling the cards together to make a coherent story. Some of it can be learnt, but some is instinct. Banicki’s own instinct is impressive and at times, when she manages to peer into someone’s soul and reveal a hidden truth, it can be deeply moving.
From the shadows to high-society
During the pandemic, tarot even made its way into the world of high fashion. When Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of Christian Dior, released a short film to show the house’s spring 2021 collection, tarot was the theme. And Selfridges now has in-house spiritualists, the Psychic Sisters, who do readings at its Oxford Street store; founder Jayne Wallace counts Kim Kardashian West, Kate Hudson, Charlotte Tilbury and Tracey Emin as clients. But she says she sees people from ‘all walks of life’: ‘We have multibillionaires to A-list celebrities and plenty of “normal” people, too.’
The Queen’s Gambit actor Anya Taylor-Joy said recently that she carries her tarot cards around everywhere. Of course, famous and powerful people looking to seemingly ‘alternative’ sources for help and guidance is nothing new. The Tsar and Tsarina Nicholas II and Alexandra had Rasputin, Ronald Reagan had links to Nancy’s spiritualists, and Princess Diana looked to psychic Sally Morgan for guidance. But with social media, mystics and psychics are more accessible than ever.
There are now endless tarot influencers on Instagram, including Biddy Tarot (146,000 followers), The Moon Tarot (963,000 followers) and Abby Cliff, aka Dunkitlikeabby, who is also the go-to reader on TikTok (267,000 followers). On YouTube there’s Intuitive Tarot by Nicholas (316,000 subscribers), Queen of Cups (137,000 subscribers), Intuitive Gems (78,000 subscribers) – the list is endless, as are the views. Plus, there’s now a slew of podcasts – Sassy Tarot, The Antifragile Tarot Podcast, the Wildly Tarot Podcast – where people talk about the tarot and mysticism and everything in between.
From being so far left-field, tarot is becoming much more visible. Dalston nail salon Still London offers a reading with your manicure, and astrologist Zoe Hind, who runs the Tarot Club, which meets up every month in a secret London location, now has a waiting list of hundreds.
A booming industry
It’s not just tarot that is booming in popularity. Emma Lucy Knowles has become big in the crystal healing world – Victoria Beckham is among her clients. In the US, Laura Day, an ‘intuitionist’, has become the go-to for alternative financial advice and has six bestsellers under her belt. She doesn’t describe herself as a psychic but says, ‘I just get a sense of the right thing to do.’ We British have always been more resistant to these ideas, but you need only look at the Sunday Times bestsellers list to realise there is a shift underway, with Roxie Nafousi’s book on manifesting in the top 10 in 2022. Would that have made it up there even a few years ago?
I often get asked if you need to be psychic to read cards – a question I don’t know the answer to. All I can say for myself is that, when I am doing readings, I feel something – a heat, a buzz, a tingling – and I pull the cards with a feeling of certainty that every one is the exact right one for that reading. I cannot explain it more than that.
I know some of my friends find it bonkers, and I’m sure that when I start going into my tarot zone, which involves concentrating on the cards very intensely and asking questions out loud, they think I’ve gone barmy. But once I started practising, everyone wanted a reading. I’ve unintentionally disrupted dinner parties, business meetings and school PTA gatherings as I’ve absent-mindedly brought my cards out and started shuffling them. (They have become like a comfort item that I reach for without thinking.) In just a few months I have done more than 50 readings and have now started charging for my tarot services, starting at £100.
It’s opened my eyes to the fact that deep down everyone has similar fears and desires, whether they are the head of an international bank or a penniless artist. I’ve read for them both – and everyone in between. People want to know: what will my future look like? Will I find or stay in love? Will I be financially successful? But it can also become an obsession. Banicki has Hollywood clients who consult her to decide which party to go.
As a psychotherapist, I find it fascinating how tarot links to Jungian archetypes. I offer readings to clients and find cards can help trigger conversations. The archetypes – the Hanged Man as life in limbo, the alchemic qualities of the Magician and, of course, number 13 the Death card – can also help people open up about areas that are hard to reflect on.
I have known my sessions with clients to shift profoundly through the use of the cards. For one woman who was lonely and longing for love, the cards identified a mixed-race man who was going to come into her life. ‘Why are you trying to give me hope when no hope exists?’ she said to me at the time. A month later she joyously told me a person from her childhood had contacted her and they had begun a romantic journey. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘He’s mixed-race – and I haven’t heard from him for years.’ When this person contacted her, she remembered what the cards said. ‘That’s why I agreed to meet him in the first place,’ she said.
Of course sceptics will say that tarot readers are preying on those looking for messages anywhere but within their own selves. This may be true. And you could suggest that any intelligent person can read body language and take it from there. But my view is that there is more to it. And I’m not ashamed to say I believe in the cards’ mystic quality. Banicki explains it in terms of ‘spirit’. She believes it’s not her choosing the cards but some form of higher power. For me, the tarot is an incredibly helpful way to understand the world and put things into perspective. And from the banker who didn’t know whether to walk away from an investment, to the artist who was desperate to sell out a show, in my experience, the cards have turned out to be uncannily true. Make of that what you will.