Before the Cards
Forty-five years on the road before I ever opened the deck
This is not a tarot post. This is the post that explains why everything that follows is different from anything else you will find in this space. Read this first.
The Girl Who Knew
I was nine years old the first time I felt the pull.
I do not remember exactly what it was that drew me in. I know it had something to do with witchcraft — not the Halloween costume kind, but the real kind. The kind that felt like it had rules and power and a relationship with the natural world that nobody in my immediate life was talking about. Something in me recognized it before I had any language for what I was recognizing.
I was raised in a Christian household. My grandmother was my primary motherly figure — a devout, deeply sincere woman whom I respected and cherished then and cherish still. She loved me fiercely. She taught me what she knew to be true. And what she knew to be true did not have room for the thing I was drawn to.
So I did what a nine-year-old does when she loves someone and wants to honor them. I shelved the curiosity. I put it somewhere quiet inside myself and left it there.
But it never left.
The things we are drawn to before anyone teaches us to be drawn to them are worth paying attention to. They tend to be the most honest map of who we actually are.
The Door Opens Twice
I turned nineteen and my father gave me three books for my birthday.
They were by a woman named Florence Scovel Shinn. The first was called The Power of the Spoken Word. My father has always been a man on a quest — someone who reads and explores and shares what he finds with the people he loves. He simply wanted to pass along something that had moved him. He had no idea he was reopening a door I had closed ten years earlier.
Florence Scovel Shinn was writing in the 1920s about the creative power of words, belief, and intention. She was describing what we now call manifestation — the idea that what you speak and what you believe shape what becomes real in your life. If that is not magic then I do not know how else to explain it. She just dressed it in the language of her time, which happened to be Christian.
I read the books. I tried the practices. For the most part they worked. But the Christianity woven through them eventually felt like a costume over the real thing — beautiful in its own right but not quite the shape of what I was actually looking for underneath. So I set them down and went looking for the thing without the costume.
Florence Scovel Shinn was publishing her ideas about the power of the spoken word and conscious intention decades before The Secret, decades before Tony Robbins, decades before the Law of Attraction became a cultural phenomenon. She was one of the original voices in a conversation that has been running for a century and shows no sign of stopping.
Building the Framework
What followed was not a straight line. It was more like a river finding its way — moving around obstacles, splitting into channels, rejoining itself further downstream.
Astrology
Astrology arrived almost simultaneously with tarot as an interest, though the deck did not come until much later. I still have several astrology books on my shelf. What drew me to it was not the newspaper horoscope version but the deeper system — the idea that the positions of planets at the moment of birth create a kind of energetic signature, a blueprint that interacts with the unfolding of a life in ways that are too consistent to dismiss.
Modern physics has begun to offer a framework for understanding why this might be literally true rather than metaphorically true. The concept of quantum entanglement — the phenomenon where particles that have interacted remain connected regardless of the distance between them, such that what happens to one is instantly reflected in the other — suggests that the relationship between a living system and the cosmic environment at the moment of its formation might be more than symbolic. The planets that were in specific positions when you took your first breath may have left a quantum signature in the very structure of your biology that persists and resonates throughout your life.
This is not mainstream science yet. But it is not as far from the frontier as most people assume. And it is the most honest explanation I have found for why astrology keeps working in my own experience with a consistency that goes well beyond coincidence.
Carl Jung and the Architecture of the Unconscious
Carl Jung was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the least understood in popular culture. Most people know him as Freud’s student who broke away and started talking about introverts and extroverts. That is the smallest possible version of what he actually did.
Jung spent his life mapping the unconscious mind — not the personal unconscious of individual repressed memories, but what he called the collective unconscious. The layer of the psyche that is shared across all of humanity. The deep substrate of patterns, images, and energies that appear independently in the myths, dreams, and symbol systems of cultures that never had contact with each other.
He called these patterns archetypes. Universal templates of human experience that exist in every psyche regardless of culture, language, or era. The Hero. The Shadow. The Wise Old Man. The Great Mother. The Trickster.
The Fool.
Jung did not study tarot specifically but he studied alchemy, the I Ching, astrology, and mythological symbol systems extensively. His conclusion was that these ancient tools worked precisely because they gave language and image to the contents of the collective unconscious that the rational mind cannot access directly. They create a conversation between the conscious self and the deeper patterns that are shaping the life from underneath.
When I lay out a tarot card I am not reading the future. I am having a conversation with the part of myself that already knows what the rational mind is too busy or too frightened to look at directly. That is pure Jung. It just happens to come with beautiful pictures.
The Chakra System and the Body as Map
The chakra system is one of the oldest models of human energy anatomy in the world, originating in Hindu and yogic traditions thousands of years old. The seven primary chakras are understood as centers of energy within the body — not metaphorical centers but actual locations where consciousness and physical matter meet and interact.
What is striking about the chakra system when you set it alongside Jung’s archetypal psychology and alongside the tarot is how precisely they map onto each other. The root chakra and the earthy, material suits of the tarot. The heart chakra and the cups, the realm of emotion and relationship. The crown chakra and the Major Arcana cards that operate at the level of universal consciousness.
The Witchy Cauldron Learning Tarot that I am using for this series includes a chakra correspondence on every card. This is not decoration. It is the deck acknowledging what ancient traditions have always known — that the symbolic and the energetic are the same conversation happening at different frequencies.
Personal Development and the Spoken Word
Over the years I found my way to the broader personal development conversation. Tony Robbins. Mel Robbins. The Secret. The Law of Attraction in its many forms and presentations.
What I noticed is that the most effective personal development tools all point toward the same thing from different angles. The power of belief. The creative force of intention. The way the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what is possible become the architecture of the life we actually live. Florence Scovel Shinn was saying this in 1925. Jung was saying it from the direction of depth psychology. The quantum physicists are beginning to say it from the direction of wave function collapse and the observer effect.
Different instruments. Same frequency.
The Sweat Lodge
I am my mother’s daughter. She was Native American by appearance — high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, the kind of face that carries its lineage whether it wants to or not. I have many of those same features. My father believed there was Native blood on his side of the family too, though his people were blond-haired and blue-eyed and the lineage was never spoken about directly.
My family went quiet about where we came from. The kind of quiet that has its own history, its own cost, its own reasons that I have come to understand better as I have gotten older. Assimilation. Survival. The deliberate erasure of identity across generations that so many Native families lived through.
So I went looking.
That quest eventually brought me to ceremony. To a sweat lodge in a backyard in Utah. Sunday mornings with my then-husband, who was the unexpected doorway to a tradition I had always belonged to without having the name for it. The Lakota tradition. The inipi. The stones — the grandfathers and grandmothers — heated in the fire and carried into the lodge. The directions honored one by one. The prayers spoken into the steam.
I learned the directions and what they represent. The colors associated with each. The medicines and the teachings that live in each quadrant of the medicine wheel. This is not information I read in a book. This is knowledge that entered my body through practice, through heat, through the specific quality of attention that ceremony demands.
My ex-husband and I no longer share our lives. But the gift of that connection to my heritage is mine permanently. Whatever else changed, that did not.
The medicine wheel and the tarot suits speak the same language. The directions and the elements correspond with a precision that suggests not borrowed wisdom but independent recognition of the same underlying truth. I will be drawing those connections throughout this series.
The Deck That Kept Coming Back
Astrology and tarot found me almost simultaneously as interests, but I did not get my first deck until I was in my forties. The timing was not coincidental. It arrived in the same season as the ceremony, as if the two were part of the same opening.
I have shuffled it, admired it, set intentions with it, and put it back on the shelf more times than I can count. I have watched tarot on YouTube almost religiously whenever I am having trouble with decisions or motivation. There is something about hearing someone else read the cards that cuts through the noise in a way that other tools do not. It bypasses the rational mind — which is exactly what Jung would predict.
But I have never read publicly. Never committed to the practice in a way that made it real outside my own private world.
Until now.
Why Now
I am 54 years old. I am a Pisces Sun with Mercury also in Pisces — a mind and a soul that live in the realm of intuition, symbolism, and the spaces between what can be proven and what can be felt. My Moon is in Aquarius, three minutes from crossing into Pisces when I was born, sitting on the threshold between the visionary and the dreamer. My Taurus rising gives all of that internal fluid motion a grounded, steady outward form.
Right now Uranus is sitting directly on my Taurus Ascendant. The planet of radical reinvention is rewriting who I appear to be to the outside world. This transit happens once every 84 years. I did not choose this timing. It chose me.
I am starting something called Astra Antigua — ancient starlight. A tarot series, a metaphysics store, a coaching practice eventually, some books that have been living in my head for years. And a cat named Dexter who has opinions about everything and has been sitting on my research notes all week.
The thinking is done. The deck is open. Forty-five years after the nine-year-old first felt the pull, she is finally following it all the way.
What you will find in this series is not a beginner stumbling through card meanings. It is someone who has been living at the intersection of Jungian psychology, chakra energy systems, quantum consciousness theory, Lakota ceremonial wisdom, astrology, and personal development for decades — now picking up the tarot as the next language for something she has been speaking her whole life.
A Note on How This Series Works
I am using the Witchy Cauldron Learning Tarot — a deck designed with the meanings printed directly on each card, including upright and reversed interpretations, the astrological correspondence, the element, the chakra, and a yes or no indicator. I chose it specifically because it removes the performance of expertise and lets the learning be genuine.
For each card I will research the symbolism, the history, the astrological and energetic connections, and where it sits in the larger story the Major Arcana tells. I will weave in the Jungian archetypal layer, the medicine wheel parallels where they exist, the quantum and energetic frameworks that give these symbols their deeper coherence, and my own honest personal reflection.
There will be multiple posts per card. Each one builds on the last. Each one unfolds more of the story as we go.
If you have been carrying a curiosity you were told was dangerous, welcome. You are in the right place.
Astra Antigua · Ancient starlight · Rachael · Eugene, Oregon
The light was always traveling toward you. You just had to look up.