The Major and Minor Arcana

Must be nice to be able to read tarot cards

Since I got back from my retreat, I have been trying to figure out how to carry forward the learning and gifts I was given there.

I have always feared being a person whose life is mostly bereft of joy and who accepts the daily grind as the price to pay for two or three weeks out of the ordinary run of things. I think the equation should work the other way. It’s not that I believe that I am above grubbing for a living or eschew the washing up with a firm hand (although that would be nice), it is that I believe we should find ways big and small to make our lives good enough that we don’t need to run away from the daily misery of them. I have tried to live my life with this as a guiding principal. It hasn’t always worked, but it has worked more than if I didn’t. Even in the times when things have been as bleak as fuck, it has provided the means to create the cracks that have let the light in.

The difficulty for me, is and always has been, balance. In the Big Blue Book of AA, there is a sentence that describes alcoholics that says: ‘Half measures availed us nothing.’ I am not an alcoholic, but I am in recovery from other behaviours that at first saved and then began to quietly ruin my life. When I read this sentence I knew I was one of the ‘us’ it describes. I am an enthusiast with obsessive tendencies. I am a person for whom a lot of life has been lived believing that if one is great, ten will undoubtedly be better. I have a wonky brain that doesn’t thrive by being contained within straight lines. I am a person who has had to walk back from the ledge of excess countless times as the dizzying excitement that led me there turned, when I arrived, to gut twisting fear that hollowed me out.

One of the things that emerged from the retreat was the importance of tarot cards in identifying and finding ways to balance the equations of my life in a more timely, less fearful, crash and burn type way. I’ve never been able to read for myself like I read for other people, but I learned some vitally useful things from

Caroline Donahue

that have given me a way in to helping myself, and I have been thinking about the cards a lot since I got back.

I realise that the beginning of this work started way back in January when I wrote this post. I knew then that I had to find a way to unlock my own magic. Since that time I have been trying to do that in different ways with varying degrees of success. The magic of making the cards fully my own had eluded me though. Coming out of the retreat with the knowledge of what to do for myself is the culmination of that work.

A tarot deck has seventy-eight cards. Twenty-two of these are known as the major arcana. These are the cards that even people who don’t ‘do’ tarot, will know. The rest of the cards equate to the four suits in a regular deck, running from the ace at the bottom to the face cards at the top of the suit. These are the minor arcana.

The major arcana are the show stoppers. These are big in every sense. They represent significant events, dominating emotional landscapes and huge shifts. They are the cards for high days and holidays. The minor arcana deal with day to day life. Did you pay the milkman? What day is bin day? Are you still arguing with Jeff about that parking space? That kind of thing.

Most people secretly and not so secretly crave a major arcana kind of life. You only have to look at Instagram and the relentless rise of the influencer as a thing to see that. The Kardashians seem to live a major arcana life. Everything is a drama, but it’s a drama worthy of building a television series around. People want to know what Kourtney and Travis do in their downtime. Nobody cares to know that Jason and I spend 90% of our leisure time binging Only Murders in the Building while hoiking biscuit crumbs out of our vests. All Kardashian parties are the Met Ball, not the church hall, and every dreary thing can be outsourced to staff. Kim Kardashian is not living a life full of seething resentment because North has lost her school cardigan for the fourth time this week and now she has to schedule in time to reply to the passive aggressive email from a form tutor she despises. She has people for that.

All of this sounds tremendously appealing and it looks great. The reality however, may be very different. A major arcana life, no matter how much money you have, is very difficult to sustain. Like anything we do over and over again for long periods of time, the novelty can wear off, and what looks like freedom can actually turn into a prison. You only have to think about someone like Matthew Perry to get that. The problem is that everyone starts off thinking that they’re smart enough to avoid the Matthew Perry route. The reality is that any life that is so relentlessly one note and which does not allow for nuance, runs the risk of going a bit Perry.

We all have people in our lives who are one note, or one note adjacent, and if we are honest, even though we may love them dearly, they can be a bit much. The difficult thing for us to understand is that if they’re a bit much for us, they are so much more than that for themselves. I write this as the person who has been and sometimes continues to be a bit much. The hard thing is to know what to do with that knowledge other than punish yourself for it, or feel ashamed of it. Shame is a prison that can maintain us in a major arcana cycle.

The problem with a major arcana life is that once it is established, it’s powerful. Of course it is. If you’re only playing in the sandbox of the twenty-two, key elements, cycling through them only reinforces and strengthens the spell of them. It takes a strong person to break away in favour of a four of pentacles type day, cleaning out the spoon drawer and remembering to pay the window cleaner. Where’s the excitement in that?

And of course, the point is that it isn’t exciting at all, but excitement is a drug that hits all our dopamine buttons and even though it makes us tired and exhausted and prone to hurling thoughtless gifts at the kitchen wall, our bodies and minds tell us the answer is not that we have too much of it, but that we don’t have enough. Living a major arcana life for too long makes us forget that balance is even possible. We must have all of it or none of it. We believe that we can never be satisfied with just some of it, but we can. A tarot spread can really help with finding the perspective and freedom we need.

The worst thing about this kind of imprisonment is that it doesn’t make sense and therefore it is very difficult to explain to either yourself or others. Nobody wants to hear how hard it is for you to go to another red carpet event. It’s a problem they think they want as they fantasise about hobnobbing with Anna Wintour over this season’s split crotch, ‘every hole’s a goal,’ trouser collection by John Galliano to take their mind off the fact that they need to figure out how to get welded Pop Tart out of the toaster without electrocuting themselves. ‘It must be nice’ they think, to have to decide whether to go and see Robert Downey Junior open an envelope in Tribeca or air kiss Lady Gaga as she launches her new, small plates restaurant where every dish is actually a shoe. ‘I wish I had that kind of problem,’ they sigh as they scratch their head and immediately wonder whether little Jimbob has brought home nits again and panic in case they gave them to the MD when they were forced to stand uncomfortably close to each other in the lift last week.

A major arcana life seems like a fairy tale, except we all know that fairy tales are as often as not, stark warnings in a nice frock. Don’t go off the path or predatory men with hairy hands and big teeth will eat you up. Don’t follow that nice old lady, she will slam you in the oven. Fairy tales warn us to look at what we see and then look again. Girls who become queens pay a terrible price for power. Poverty is undoubtedly bad, but being ruled by a ruthless man who wants you to keep spinning all his straw into gold to prove your worth, is worse. Stories teach us that absolute power costs dearly. We are right to be cautious.

But we can be too cautious. A minor arcana life is not the answer here, either. Very few people thrive on a diet of double entry book-keeping, Zoom calls and, to use another fairy story, an email in-box like the magic porridge pot, endlessly refilling itself and spilling out into every corner of our lives. There are only a handful of people I can think of who actively enjoy cleaning. With the notable exception of Stacey Solomon who seems like a good egg, I have neither the desire nor the patience to turn into Kim and Aggie or Anthea Turner and her creepy dusting gloves.

I don’t know anyone who uses tarot who only works with the minor arcana, but there are some people who only work with the major cards. My friends

Anna Brones

and

Rebecca Armstrong

brought my attention to this deck, created by Leonora Carrington recently. Carrington only made herself a major arcana, using it to fuel and inform her artistic practice. She also used a lot of other spiritual and magical processes, which maybe helped to enrich her understanding and meant that the minor cards were of no use to her. Or maybe she used other, fully realised decks for figuring out if she needed to call the plumber for that funny smell again. Perhaps she just knew that she was the kind of person always destined to live a major arcana kind of life and didn’t want to give any brain space to plumbing at all.

Normally I’d have the Carrington deck in my hot little hands within hours of finding out about it. This time, although I yearn to see the art of the cards, I knew that I didn’t want to use them. What I know is that in order for me to live a life that is rich and full and in balance, I need both major and minor arcana in my life and in my decks.

What I also learned through spending time and sharing wisdom with the women on retreat was that I had actually decided to settle for a minor arcana kind of life, and that it won’t do.

Way back when, there was a time when I lived a very major arcana life by choice. I teetered perilously close to the edge in those times and it took a lot of effort to pull back from it. Then there were the times when other people’s major arcana lives bled into mine and I was the one trailing behind with the mop and bucket, clearing up. Through a lot of complicated thinking, a hefty amount of trauma and a great deal of time spent living the dark side of the fairy tale, I realised I was more afraid of success than I was of failure. Every time I got near the possibility of succeeding I self-sabotaged. I never understood why until I pieced together what I had learned on retreat. I always thought my inability to carry things through was a sign of stupidity and that proved I was right to quit while I was ahead.

Understanding that what I coded as failure and weakness on my part was actually me trying to save myself meant that I could stop punishing myself. That gave me permission to start finding different ways to care for myself and rewrite my stories. Finally, it has given me the space to start exploring the possibility that with balance at its heart, I can work towards my dreams and a life where success is back on the cards for me.