Tag Archives: Rachel True

MARCH 11 EVENT: THE MYSTERIES OF THE TAROT: IMMERSIVE WORKSHOP + READINGS with CONNER HABIB, RACHEL TRUE, and SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN – Early bird discount on tickets before March 1!

24 Feb

Three readers. Three decks. Infinite journeys.

TICKETS

Friends:

The landscape we find ourselves in in 2023 feels uncharted and dangerous, filled with new possibilities and new challenges. It’s no surprise that so many are turning to a time-worn and powerful tool for guidance: The tarot.

But what’s the best way to read the cards? What are the cards and what’s behind them? And when and why should we consult them, anyway?

This year, let’s investigate

THE MYSTERIES OF THE TAROT

Join Conner Habib, Rachel True, and Sarah Maria Griffin for a unique and potent one-time workshop on the secret truths held in the cards, and how to best relate to them for guidance and revelation.

This workshop and Q&A – with an option to receive a reading from the teachers – will alter your perception of the tarot by coming at cartomancy through three different decks, three cards, and three perspectives.

Each of the three readers has different experiences with the tarot and uses different decks; so instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to the tarot, we’ll show you the many, many paths the decks open for you… as well as what is more fixed as what, if anything, is fixed and foundational to reading the cards.

Whether you’re an absolute beginner or a seasoned reader, the three-pathway approach in this workshop will point you in new and exciting directions.

Together, we’ll:

  • Investigate what is it that you’re accessing when you read the tarot, anyway.
  • Examine which deck you should choose and why.
  • Consider when should you consult the tarot?
  • Create a spread using cards from three different decks to show how a spread and each card can be interpreted in many ways.
  • Look at why the cards matter on a personal level.
  • Talk about the process of learning the 78 cards, as well as how to best remember what the cards mean.
  • Uncover whether or not each card has a fixed meaning or if it’s up to the reader
  • Look at the differences – and challenges – in reading for yourself vs reading for others.
  • Listen and respond to participant questions about tarot.

And much more!

Plus, participants who want readings from the course teachers can sign up for the READINGS ticket and stay on after the workshop for an EXTREMELY LIMITED engagement. Readers will be assigned AT RANDOM.

All participants will receive 30 days access to a recording of the talk.

In 2023, let’s move forward… with 78 helpers from the deck by our side, and infinite pathways at our feet.

Tags: , , , , ,

Tarot as poetry, anatomy, anxiety. Rachel True and I talk about the cards on AEWCH 142!

23 Feb

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor • Patreon

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? To buy Rachel’s book and deck, or other books mentioned on & related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 142 at bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
The state of anxiety is always running, isn’t it? Here in Ireland, just as this is going up, there’s another Covid regulations briefing, and for a week now – as with every week before a briefing – the entire country has been filled with anxious speculation. And beyond the announcement itself, what about AFTER this set of regulations? What about this summer? Holidays? Haircuts? When will I be able to go to a concert? Will this ever end? Are we going to be trapped in neoliberal locked-in hell forever?Anxiety is a relationship to the future. And it’s one that’s felt in our bodies.In other words, anxiety is a form of fortune telling.
That means in a time of high anxiety, most people are ALREADY trying to tell the future. Why not use a system to help?I asked my friend, author, tarot reader, and actress Rachel True onto the show to talk about all this and more.
Many people of course know Rachel from her appearance in the 1996 cult film The Craft, about a coven of teen witches. But now that her book and tarot deck are out — True Heart Intuitive Tarot and Guidebook — she’s become increasingly know for her intense tarot readings and her potent intuition.This episode really goes through tarot on multiple levels – so it’s a great for whatever your level of interest and knowledge is.
We start by talking about tarot in culture. Tarot in politics. Tarot in black communities.Then we discuss what tarot is – so there’s a philosophical level there. How does it work? Rachel has an idea of tarot as a story, and I talk about the deck as a being and the cards as aspects of its anatomy.
Then we move deeper into the specific about her deck and her book. The deck is colorful, beautiful, and filled with people who aren’t just white alabaster figures. I’ve included some pictures of the cards we talk about down below here. She also reads a story from the book that comes with the deck – a book which has a personal story from Rachel’s life relating to each of the major arcana in the deck. And finally, we give some thoughts and tips on reading

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Why is tarot so visible now, again?
  • Tarot readers, psychics, astrologers as a class of workers
  • Anxiety as soothsaying
  • Rachel’s heritage and how that affected her spirituality
  • The folk and magic traditions in my house when I was a kid
  • Nietzsche’s role in Rachel’s tarot deck
  • Why neither Rachel not I use reversals when we read tarot
  • The story that unfolds in each tarot spread
  • Tarot as anatomy, tarot as poetry
  • That time Rachel became the Strength tarot card, complete with lion
  • What times to use which decks and other tips on reading
  • How does one choose images for their own decks at all? And how many symbols are too many?
  • The importance of (non-simplistic!) representation in tarot

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Rachel, support her patreon and get her live streamed readings! Here’s a short video of Rachel doing readings for Jezebel. And here’s a long interview with Rachel (in two parts!) with author Mat Auryn.

• Rachel fully designed her deck, and the illustrator she worked with was the incredible Stephanie Singleton.

• There’s a lot of overlap with the previous episode, AEWCH 141 with religion scholar Jason Josephson Storm on how we don’t need to “re-enchant” the world.

• I remember Miss Cleo. Do you?

• Here’s more on Byron Katie and her life changing path, The Work.

• Do you know our friend Alec Mapa (maybe best known from his role on Ugly Betty)? Here’s his one-man show, Baby Daddy, about adopting a son with his partner. It’s very sweet and funny.

• Apparently the phrase, “I hate to write, but I love having written” is not a Dorothy Parker quote, but probably (so far as this author can find) a Frank Norris quote.

• Also, if your curiosity is piqued about the Juvenalia podcast featuring AEWCH 93 guest (and tarot reader!) Sarah Maria Griffin, please do listen and subscribe and also support their patreon!

Until next time, pals,
CH

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Good Chaos

14 Jul

CG1

Caitlin Doughty, Yours Truly, Gordon White

My event in LA with Gordon White, Chaotic Good: Why We Need the Occult Now (More Than Ever), was a big success on many levels.
It sold out, so that was a pretty great marker of its success, financially. But also, it was a marker of the necessity of and longing for occult-related events.

CG2

La société du spectacle

Beyond those basic levels, it was intense. The audience members were all just…vibing. There were powerful occultists there (Poke Runyon sat in the front row, jeez), and beginners, and skeptics (including our amazing moderator, Caitlin Doughty), and political folks and artists. Everyone was just listening, taking it all in, and during the Q&A expressing their own version or whatever resonated. It was a spell against loneliness if nothing else. Whatever happened content-wise, I knew that we’d done a good thing together in just being with each other, in gathering all these weirdos who have imaginations that are big enough to take on reality itself.

Byron Katie says “We talk to figure out what we want to say.” I agree. And sometimes, we even say what we want to say and want what we want. When I give public talks, sometimes ideas come from me that I didn’t know were there. What I want to say just appears.

And the work of refining a thought so that others can hear it and understand it is an act of agility, so I find myself (especially in Q&A) turning to my heart as I speak. What will I say that is understandable here? What will connect these people – who are giving me the honor of their silence and the negative space of their hearing – to this idea and to me?

It makes me a better person to speak publicly and answer questions, because I have to imagine what other people are like, what they feel, and what they think. Even though I’m speaking, we’re inhabiting each other.

CG4

“I drink of my sisters and I ask for the ability to not hate those who hate me. Especially racist pieces of bleach-blonde shit like Laura Lizzie.”

Rachel True (from The Craft!) gave tarot readings, and tarot, beyond its more obvious powers, commands a listening-to. When you get a reading, you listen in a different way. The tarot has a conversation with your thoughts, and your embedded-ness in time.

Of course, the conversations after I got off the stage had their own lives too. One-on-one conversation is one of our most powerful tools. I always say conversation and sex are the same order of being: They are free; they can go in any direction; they may be happy or unhappy or exciting or boring; whatever the outcome, it doesn’t mean you won’t engage again with the same person; they’re different from person to person, and more. Chaotic good.

It reminds me of Rudolf Steiner’s stirring comment that “Conversation is the new Eucharist.” Body and blood and sacrament.

Sit with that, if you want. Let it ring out in you. Remember when you speak to another person, you’re encountering a completely unique nexus of universal forces.

Gordon talks about a bit of this on the new episode of Rune Soup, which you can/shouldlisten to here.

If you couldn’t attend the event not to worry, the entire thing is being transcribed into an ebook with new intros by Gordon and I.

Hopefully the book will be not only interesting, but make you feel like you’re at the event, in conversation.

A big part of my conversation now is happening through my Patreon page, which is linked to my new web series. Please do sign up on Patreon to support my work and livelihood, and to interact with me. Thank you, new pioneers.

Love,

CH

CG3

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,