The Tarot and Kamala Harris' VP Pick
Thom, from DC, checks in with me regarding Harris' second most significant decision in her life.
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MY FRIEND, THOM, who works with the federal government in DC, checked in with me this morning after I’d posted last night on IG about Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro being Kamala Harris’ pick as her running mate.
Here’s the three-card Tarot draw—and my first cursory pass at interpretation—that I pulled on Shapiro. Disclaimer: I indeed have an irrational attraction to Jewish men, but that didn’t influence my reading (well, not that I’m aware of).
By the way, I generally only work with the Crowley/Harris Thoth deck, as no one else in Tarotlandia understood the occult Tarot—and its complex cross-referencing to the Kabbalah—like Crowley. In divination, it’s essential to grasp the intended designations of each of the cards; in doing so, your readings are more definitive and specific. Crowley always delivers the meat in a field that’s scattershot with mediocre gruel.
A.E. Waite’s book that he wrote to accompany the juggernaut of the Tarot, the Waite/Smith deck, is often confounding. Trying to discern divinatory meanings for the card is sometimes a crap shoot. However, Pamela Colman Smith did an extraordinary job turning his symbolic transmissions into images that have withstood the test of time. No question there.
But I prefer Crowley’s sometimes eerie depictions over Smith’s Disney-like, and charming takes. As Tarot scholar
says of the Thoth deck: “Crowley’s pictures…depend not on conventional symbolism but on an atmosphere of strangeness, which makes it seem as if each card were a peephole into another word.” And in a way, this is what we do when we engage the cards for divination; we shake free from our orthodox mind and step over a threshold into the multifaceted but impeccably ordered world of the Kabbalah, of which the occult Tarot is a lexicon for. If the Waite/Smith deck is an exoteric Tarot, the Crowley/Harris deck is the esoteric take.Crowley understood the cards were more than cardboard printed with colored inks and symbols. In his The Book of Thoth he writes: “Each card is, in a sense, a living being; and its relations with its neighbours are what one might call diplomatic. It is for the student to build these living stones into his living Temple.”
Anyway, Thom mentioned that he thinks there are stronger contenders in the VP race than Shapiro. I asked him for his suggestions, and he said he preferred either Buttigieg, Kelly, Walz, or Beshear. (Thom’s a Libra, so, of course, he offers too many options, but whatever).
When I balked at Pete Buttigieg, saying that would be too radical for the US in this particular cultural moment, Thom countered by saying: “I think he’s more popular than you think, and the gay thing is far less an issue than conventional wisdom dictates. Every young person I talk to without hesitation has Pete as their top choice. Plus, it would be bold. He's the most vetted nationally. And he'd cream J.D. Vance. He’d play well in the Midwest. He won Iowa! He's the gay son people can handle.”
So, what did the cards reveal?
Here are the four three-card pulls I drew for the other candidates. Note: I read the flow of the cards, left to right, with the middle card being the more emphatic—it’s like the verb in a sentence. Note: I never incorporate reversed cards in readings.