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Friends,

Understandably, people are looking for reliable maps for navigating the next year, and – as part of the broader scrambling for reliable spiritual approaches to living – they are turning to divination practices more and more. Astrology, muscle testing, tarot, runes, I Ching, automatic writing, psychic & intuitive readings, channeling…

No community has been untouched. Particularly since the political realm seems so unknowable, which means world karma will intersect with our own lives, people of every political inclination are reflecting on the future through scrying mirrors.

This is in large part because the political will, political predictive class, and even the political itself has largely fallen to pieces. We can’t rely on the experts we used to rely on, or the rhythms of history to guide us.

As usual, the professionally spiritual – often mere influencers and pundits themselves, with a film of mystical dross drawn over them – aren’t doing much better than anyone else, partially because they still have outdated pictures of the world and therefore outdated concepts of the spiritual world, too. But more to the point, they refuse to acknowledge that merely seeing something spiritual is not the same as being able to read it. They create false maps, lead people down false paths, and deepen – rather than free people from – longheld but false political, economic, and otherwise materialist convictions.

Astrologers offer the most egregious abuse of spiritual interpretation by sheer number alone. Podcast after podcast of astrological predictions, substacks and mediums (!), offering little more than speculative shots in the dark sky. Every year, the astrologers surface to give their predictions based on highly selective histories that form “patterns.” Most astrologers, of course, are unwilling to note that the majority of days are largely unremarkable, so the pronouncements are grand and commonly fear-inducing. Fundamental misunderstandings of what the sky is, what the planets are, and most crucially what the human being is lead to failure and spiritual litter. Furthermore, a lack of humility hampers the chance for spiritually-scientific perspectives to develop. Rarely do these astrologers/influencers/podcasters apologize if their predictions fail to come true.

The lure of divination – contact with the gods to understand more deeply our relationship with time – creates false cartographies. Instead of navigating a narrow passage, we become stranded by misdirection.

People offering any divination advice, especially if they charge for the service or make public proclamations, and especially because they offer such emotional value and weight, must ask themselves the crucial question:

Does it work? 

If the answer is yes, then they must go on to ask, “Am I capable of making it work?”  

I’ve been using the tarot for years — more seriously for about 10 years now — to seek answers through time for myself and others. I’ve had varying levels of success. But does it work? How would I even know if it worked?

The answer is yes. What I am still deepening my understanding of is how it works, when it works, and what is at work? I want to investigate that in very abbreviated form with you here now with a little personal history, because to begin to claim you can make maps, you must have a history of exploration.

Like many of you, I suspect, tarot issued a mysterious and largely aesthetic pull throughout much of my life. But it couldn’t find its foothold for me. The first decks I bought, I bought around the same time in my life, as a very young man at a Brentano’s bookstore: the Thoth deck, because I thought that was the “real” and “hardcore” deck (it’s not, although it does have unique qualities), and the highly popularized Rider-Waite (now referred to as the Rider-Waite-Smith) deck.

I would pull the cards, then immediately look them up in the little books, and tell people their meanings. This is, unfortunately, still how most people read the tarot, and book after book after book will tell you the “meaning” of the cards. These are essentially dream dictionaries for tarot cards. You can look up fixed meanings without even knowing anything about who wrote them or why.

The fixed-meaning approach mimicks Jungian psychology – which denies the living nature of the spiritual world in favor of monolithic conceptual frameworks. It’s a precursor to other confused theorizings like Object Oriented Ontology or Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects. That is to say – a fully wrong approach. The Jungian fixed-meaning approach a materialistic system that gains its authority by mere proximity to real spiritual concepts. That way of reading kept tarot largely unsatisfying. It connected me to created facts but not to Wisdom that arose from the connection of Truth and Love.

Like all prophecy and divination, reading the tarot with too much fixity fixes the reader and the person being read for. In other words, it limits freedom, and the forces behind it are anti-human.

In 2007, I received a real tarot reading. I know it was real, because it was undeniably proven to be correct. The reader, a friend of my sister’s, told me disasters were coming in my life, and I could move steadfastly into them, or deftly avoid them. Either way, she said, I could make my way through, and that when I made my way through, there were many ways I could reorient my life. But ahead was a harder path and an easier path. I took the harder path. By the end of the year, I was assaulted by my boyfriend and diagnosed with cancer – which I learned from being in the hospital after the assault. I had no job, no home, and some family relationships were also shattered. She’d told me all of this would happen.

In other words, the first true tarot reading I received was about navigation.

Instead of turning to the tarot more, I turned away from it. I didn’t know how to read it, I knew I didn’t, not like the woman who had given me the reading just months before the disasters. What was I missing?

Perhaps it was fear that kept me from connecting more deeply. The fear was, of course, of tarot being real. Real spiritual techniques can have the same set of trials as spiritual development itself (albeit it miniature): the first of which is the Trial of Fire, which means you will be consumed the moment you truly set foot on the path, and be compelled to burn as you walk it till the end.

Of course, the way to move beyond fear is with Love. A relationship to the world that is born out of Truth. The Tarot was a real Mystery, and like all real Mysteries, it must itself obey Truth, Love, Wisdom. 

In other words, the tarot is not a prophetic system which denies human freedom, but a friend that can never breach the bond of friendship by glorifying the reader.

I was missing that tarot wants to speak to you, to me, to everyone, not through fixed archetypes, but, like a friend in deep conversation, through the revelation of being. 

Tarot is an anatomy of a full being – made of beings – revealing itself to us bit by bit. The revelation happens in dynamic interplay between the being of the deck, the beings of the deck, the reader in their spiritual development (that is, in their maturity in incarnation), and the read-ee in theirs. A trinity of connection.

There are too many notable moments on the journey to tell you about; but I’ll just say the sources that opened this up for me were Alejandro Jodorowsky’s/Marianne Costa’s determined exploration of the freedom of the cards, The Way of Tarot; and crucially, the most important book ever written on tarot Meditations on the Tarot by anthroposophist-turned-Catholic, Valentin Tomberg, with its expression of how tarot lives with us in our spiritual development (one caution: Catholicism’s problems can permeate Tomberg’s influence in ways readers are unprepared for and don’t notice themselves).

Crucially, like all spiritual beings, if you work with God in mind, the being wants to work for God through engaging with you.

The tarot as a being in friendship in service to God means that the values are both fixed and changing. Like any friend, they may feel one one today then another tomorrow, using the same or similar words to express different truths. The key is in the listening. It’s also who you are when you listen.

I’ve heard it said that you don’t reach for the tarot in the foxhole – meaning it won’t give you potent enough information in crucial moments. But if the tarot works, it must give information in the foxhole. Anyone interested in your life and development will be there for you in the most extreme circumstances. I have to say that tarot has saved my life – I mean this literally not metaphorically or as exaggeration. It’s  guided me away from extremely destructive decisions that I wouldn’t have known until afterwards.

This approach opens up what the tarot can give us. And it can map-make. We only have to be open to creating – through seeing, listening, reading, accepting – its perspective. It also means we can get it wrong. When we do, we need to accept in humility that we could have been a better friend and therefore a better partner in the cartography.

Friends, there’s so much more to share with you on these topics, but let’s do it together in one-on-one conversation and a unique tarot mapping – a card for each month of your 2025 – in my upcoming workshop

NAVIGATO: GUIDANCE THROUGH YOUR 2025
SIGN UP HERE.

I’d love to see you there in the spirit of friendship, speaking, and listening. If you feel called to do it, please do sign up today. More details here.

Conner Habib