Arcana
Jessica Traynor | Tolka Issue Four, September 2025
The Hanged Man
I associate the tarot with my early teenage years, a particularly disempowered time when there was nothing to do but when every moment was saturated with an indefinable yearning. At fourteen, I couldn’t even get a job as a lounge girl in the local pub, the means by which most of my friends gained some independence, working there after school and sneaking drinks with the barmen after closing. I wandered around town with my printed-out CVs, dropping them in front of managers who binned them as soon as I left the shop. In those days, time stretched and warped around us. We were waiting for something external to come and change our lives. The tarot promised us a message from the beyond.
The Hanged Man smiles as he hangs upside down. I often drew this card as a teenager, and his expression troubled me. That (ironic?) smile seemed to imply that waiting for this message was ridiculous: I was responsible for my own movement, and my own stasis.
The Tower
I wasn’t the only one waiting for life’s greater meaning to reveal itself. My parents had split up; we’d moved to different houses. During the phase of my parents’ separation, and later divorce, both underwent what felt like a second adolescence. Having found freedom in the ending of their marriage, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. My dad drank too much, spent too much money and neglected his health. My mum looked for something better than the relationship she had lost yet kept finding herself with men who were thin ciphers of my dad. They were both as lost and as lacking in focus as I was. Nobody knew what should come next. When the Tower falls you expect another blueprint to materialise. Sometimes it takes a while.
I lived for most of the week with my mum and she had always been open to ideas of the supernatural. Her sister read the tarot, but my mum preferred the I Ching. She had recently subscribed to Nichiren Buddhism, introduced to it by some neighbours on our new street. After attending a number of retreats, where she had to pay her way and work for nothing, my mum realised that she had managed to find the one sect of Buddhism with a weird evangelical bent. She was instructed by initially nice but latterly pushy neighbours to hold dinners for friends who might be interested in converting. She was pressured into buying an expensive altar at which to direct her chanting. In escaping the negative space of her marriage she found herself angled into another awkward corner. The Buddhism was scrapped, eventually, but the I Ching book remained, with its envelope of three coins – three twenty-pence pieces from the pre-Euro Irish punt featuring a horse in profile. When I turned sixteen, my aunt gave me a set of tarot cards and I performed ambitious readings for my friends. The depressing thing about these sessions was that we had no lives to interpret. We soon got bored of trying to apply the grand archetypes of the Major Arcana – the World, the Lovers, the Empress – to our small lives.
The Wheel of Fortune
Many years later, in a holiday rental in my thirties, I find a cheap deck of tarot cards on a shelf. I do some three-card readings for myself and my partner, just for fun. He can’t stand any kind of mysticism but I become intrigued all over again by the cards and their meanings. I take to Twitter, where a few of my writer friends (all people of good sense) respond, and we get chatting. The readings I’m doing are unusually negative – warnings of false friendship, betrayal, illness, catastrophe. We’re all familiar with the TV trope of a querent drawing the Death card and reeling in shock, but tarot practitioners will tell you that Death is not the worst card – that it signals the end of one dynamic and the birth of another. There’s the equally false assertion that there are no bad cards in the tarot. The Tower is never a fun experience, even if the calamity it portends is necessary for movement to better things. As I chat on Twitter, a friend comments that she has the same deck of cards as the one I’ve found in the holiday home, and that she always receives catastrophic readings from them. I love the coincidental synchronicity of this, but it gives me pause to ask myself: do I actually believe that these cards are magic? That they are capable of filtering great wisdom from the universe? That they have some kind of agency?
The Moon
Some months later I see that some writers I know are running a tarot course online. We’re in a second lockdown, I’m on maternity leave and, other than the constant task of feeding my month-old baby, my evenings are empty. The course description promises a focus on the history of the tarot, as well as explorations of the cards’ individual meanings. I sign up and sit on the Zoom, feeding and quieting my baby as the instructors talk. The history of the tarot is as fragmented and full of contradictory historical projections as one might expect. The original seventeenth-century Tarot de Marseilles were simply playing cards. In later centuries various groups introduced imagery from Egyptian mythology, which sits rather incongruously alongside the abundant late-mediaeval Judeo-Christian imagery. The Minor Arcana was created for the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is influenced by the ideology and symbolism of the Golden Dawn movement. During the course I find myself drawn to these Minor Arcana cards, even though they are not as ancient as the Major Arcana. Upon scrutiny they are more accessible, even if, at first, they seem strange and unnerving. Where the Major Arcana is full of unknowable archetypes – the Chariot, the Hierophant – the Minor Arcana – with its suits of cups, swords, pentacles and wands – shows people being obstinate, or kind, enjoying being part of a team, or taking things they shouldn’t. I can map these narratives easily onto my own life, applying them to my anxiety over writing, or money, or relationships. Where the Major Arcana feels abstract and foreboding, the Minor contains cards of community, simple morality, easy wins. They conjure the kinds of lives we can create for ourselves, if we’re lucky, if we can break away from institutions like schools or biological families or churches.
The Lovers (reversed)
After my parents’ separation my grandparents became frail, then sick, then entered the catastrophic end-of-life years where death is staved off through ill-thought-out medical interventions that serve only to strip away a person’s dignity. As the only child of their youngest daughter, I’d always been close to them. I didn’t like to leave my mum alone on her weekly trips to Wicklow to visit them in the nursing home. Between these visits I went to college, argued with my boyfriend, got too drunk at weekends, half-assed essays and went to my job. It was the unhappiest time of my life. I take after my mum, perhaps, in my tendency to try and stabilise my sense of self through relationships. A partnership is where I find the most freedom. But this only works if the other person is open to this closeness, this ordered belonging. It only works, too, if they are happy in themselves, and if they can be kind. My boyfriend at the time was neither of these things. He had never pretended to be. When we first met I had thought him arrogant and a little cruel. He had pursued me, but after that initial chase the thrill wore off. Every time he pulled me into his arms I could sense him looking over my shoulder for the next girl. He would talk, at length, about his ex-partners and how they’d all turned out to be crazy. I’m not crazy!, I’d think, and put up with evermore careless behaviour in order to prove it. It’s crazy to be annoyed that your boyfriend kissed another girl on a night out. It’s crazy to be annoyed that your boyfriend is texting his ex, especially since we had already established that his ex is crazy.
Judgement
There are people in the tarot course who believe wholeheartedly in the supernatural, in magic, in astrology. Their belief in these arcane higher powers fascinates me but it makes me a little uncomfortable, too. On the Slack group for the course, they laugh at ‘earth signs’ for their lack of faith. I am a Virgo, which makes me one of the most pedantic signs, apparently. I read an article that says most psychopaths are Virgos. My theory that Virgos just make up a larger proportion of the population due to everyone getting drunk and having lots of sex over the Christmas is dismissed as ‘such Virgo thinking’. I’m a bit pissed off by this Virgo-hating, and feel embattled because in another entirely unscientific people-categorisation method, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, I always come out as INTJ (the most fussy and unlikeable personality type, according to the test). But for the most part I enjoy all the chat about moon phases and crystals and protective circles. It reminds me of being a teenager again, and in my late thirties I find that I’m ready to get sentimental about a time in my life I hated while actually living it.
The Hermit
One day, when I’m in my second year of college, my mum calls me. I’m sitting in my boyfriend’s flat reading As I Lay Dying while he smokes spliff after spliff and plays Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
‘We’re going to see a psychic,’ she tells me.
‘What? Are we?’
‘Yes. He’s in Mullingar. I’ve us booked in tomorrow afternoon.’
We drive to Mullingar. I’m feeling a bit resentful and impatient with the whole trip, but any small distraction from my vast unhappiness is welcome. We park the car and make our way to a dingy pub in the town centre. It’s early and there’s no one there, not even the auld lads you might expect to see propping up the bar. We sit down, and finally a barman arrives. He seems much less surprised to see us than we are to be here. He makes us some tea in tiny chrome pots, which leak most of their contents on the sticky tables when poured. He tells us the psychic is on the way. Or rather, he says, ‘Oh, Billy? Yeah, he’ll be running a bit late with the calving. Hang tight.’
After a while we get the nod. I go first. I sit at the table in the back room and a slight man in early middle age comes in. He wears mud-stained work trousers and a fleece. He is slightly stooped.
‘How are ya?’ he says, taking a pack of cards out of his pocket.
I watch him shuffle them. They are yellowed playing cards, not a tarot deck, and he worries and flips them with great speed. He stops and looks at me sharply for a second, then back to the activity of flipping the cards. His movement is like that of a card sharp, constant, dizzying, as if trying to draw the eye away from some sleight of hand. But he talks all the while, responding, ostensibly to things he is seeing in the cards.
He doesn’t tell me my future, not as such. But he tells me everything I know about myself, and it is quite remarkable. He tells me I am burning the candle at both ends; he tells me I am with the wrong person; he tells me I am stuck, and that I know it, and that I know only I can help myself.
The only predictions he makes are also linked to the things I already know about myself: privacy matters to me, so I will live somewhere where I can withdraw from the outside world when I need to. Intimacy is important to me, but also autonomy, and though my current relationship is doomed I have already met the person who will offer me the stability I need. But he seems less interested in these things – he seems more concerned, gently but directly, about the mess I’m in now.
‘You can’t go on the way you’re going,’ he says, not looking at me. ‘But, sure. you know that.’
I do, I think, I do know that. It’s what the Hanged Man’s wry smile had told me.
I come away feeling like I’ve just had a counselling session. I’ve come away thinking that what we know about ourselves and each other at a glance is not because some of us possess psychic abilities, but because our small, tired problems are all the same.
The Hierophant (reversed)
The history we learn in the tarot course, delivered by two writer-academics, debunks any illusions the group might have had about some pristine secret knowledge system passed down through the ages. Instead what we have is a mishmash of ideologies and symbols gathered from all sorts of different belief systems. This should be deflating, I suppose, but for me it points to far more interesting ideas about human information systems. I remember studying the Encyclopédie in college and envying the certainty with which Diderot and Voltaire decided that they could categorise all knowledge, neatly and efficiently, using the alphabet as an organising principle. Their faith that none of their choices were arbitrary was astonishing to me, considering the project from the distance of three hundred years and with a great deal of postmodernist doubt under my belt. When I read how Diderot, in particular, had used certain entries as ways to satirise and challenge existing structures of power, I felt again how keenly the project was rooted in Enlightenment ideas and social history. However, like all good knowledge systems the Encyclopédie is both fixed in terms of its categorical approach and infinitely flexible in its capacity to both shield and suggest subversive ideas. Is there not something similar in the tarot?, I thought. It’s a system of symbols that can be combined and recombined in numerous ways. According to Tarotforum.net there are 456,456 ways to select three cards from a tarot deck.
The Devil
After the trip to Mullingar we end up driving straight to the nursing home because my grandad has taken ‘a turn’. When we get to my grandparents’ room some hours later, some of my aunts are also there. A priest has been summoned and soon we all find ourselves pretending to know how to say a decade of the rosary. My grandad lies there, his breath whistling in his throat, focused on the business of staying alive. He is refusing water and is in renal failure. His mind seems disturbed; there is something deeply uncomfortable, beyond the obvious, about seeing an older man in childlike distress. I think Shakespeare knew it when he wrote King Lear. My grandad had been a stubborn, ebullient, cheerful man. He had been passionate and temperamental and hilariously inarticulate in a house full of women so sharp they’d cut you. Certain things would send him into a hilariously inchoate rage. The mere mention of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid would make him apoplectic. We used to find ways to introduce him to conversations just to set him off.
That fella!’ he’d rage, ‘He’s nothing but a—’
‘Ossie,’ my granny would say, ominously.
‘Well, he! And then! Sure, then they – and what about the other shower!’
‘He’s angry about the rugby,’ my granny would interject.
‘The . . . That shower of fuckin’ eejits! Don’t get me started! But it’s not half as bad as—’
‘It’s the buses he’s on about now . . .’
‘Exactly!’ he’d bellow.
In his latter years, when his heart was giving way and the sadness of the world seemed to rise up and overwhelm him, we’d learn to regret our McQuaid mentions. My grandad had been sent to Blackrock College as a boy, the one child in the family to get a secondary education. A distant aunt had made a bequest to pay for it. Family lore had said that it was because he was to become a priest, but it was actually to get him away from the violent, shell-shocked father who would single him out from his siblings and beat him unmercifully. Unfortunately, in Blackrock, McQuaid, headmaster at the time, used to beat him too. And possibly worse. He’d run away from the beatings, run home, and his mother would send him back every time, to keep him out of his father’s way.
I remember him crying one day in my granny’s kitchen, just the three of us having lunch and him breaking, without warning, into slow, heavy sobs. ‘The little children . . .’ he kept saying. ‘But the little children.’ I thought then that his face was like a child’s grown old.
How must it have been, I thought later, to watch the man who brutalised you become the religious leader of your country, to watch his influence seep into every aspect of your life, dragging your disempowerment from youth into adulthood? I thought back to the times in my life where I had looked for answers outside myself, where I had given myself over to magical thinking, because I wasn’t in control. But I grew up in a world where institutions like the church had lost their stranglehold on the lives of Irish citizens. Even in my teenage years, when my querent card was the Hanged Man, I knew that one day I’d figure out how to slip the noose that held me in place. There was no escape for my grandad, in a world where men like McQuaid were untouchable.
Death
In the nursing home the priest has administered the last rites. It’s late. My grandad is slipping in and out of consciousness, his breath rattling. My granny is perched on her bed, the suffering of ages worn lightly on her face. She is exhausted and wants us all gone. It’s a circus, this whole thing, and none of us are sure for whose benefit. We each kiss my grandad and say something to him. He murmurs some sounds, but probably not in response to anything in the room. This nursing-home staff say there’s no way of knowing if he will last the night. As every medical professional has told us for the past years; it could be hours, days, weeks.
We go back to my aunt’s house, get fish and chips. The call comes just as we’re finishing them – he’s gone. My mother and aunt go back to the home. The rest of us settle in for a night of broken sleep on various sofas and spare beds. That night, in a cousin’s childhood bunk bed, I have a vivid dream that a film of my grandad as a young man is being projected onto the wall, where he flickers in the silver light of early dawn. He is saying something, but there is no sound, and whatever message he has for me is lost as I wake and he vanishes.
The Magician
What do I think, or want, or believe, when I shuffle a tarot deck and choose three cards?
One thing I’m consistently surprised by is how often the same cards come up. I don’t have the mathematical brain to reason this away, but my shuffling skills are atrocious, which must shorten the odds. I find the cards I choose mostly fit, thematically, with the concerns I have when asking the question. But surely this is simply confirmation bias in action? Given a hodgepodge of images and ideas, of course you can find something to map onto your own banal existence. While I would love to be able to game out all of these possibilities statistically, using a very fixed definition of each card’s meaning, I’m not sure if I’m willing to dedicate years of my life to that experiment. Instead, I find my focus shifting to a different question: does the confirmation bias matter here, as long as I don’t believe these cards are channeling a higher power? If I’m not prepared to believe – and I’m not – that the cards are magic, then why do I find them so compelling?
One day, long after the course ends, my notifications start pinging. A woman on the course, based somewhere in the UK, is asking for help with protective spells. Her downstairs neighbour, a drug addict, has decided that she is someone else, perhaps the previous resident of her flat. He stands outside her window shouting threats and abuse. He has a Staffordshire bull terrier and she is afraid that this dog will attack and kill her own dog. She has called the police, who have told her that they can’t do anything until there is an incident. In the meantime, the other women in the Slack group advise her to wear obsidian, which has protective properties.
I think of my eldest daughter, and how she turns her plastic bead necklaces into ‘amulets’ infused with magic powers. I think of my grandad, and all the children of generations past growing up in the shadow of those who did them harm, with no recourse, no escape. I think of the Hanged Man and his ominous smile. When previously I’d cringed a little at the magical thinking the Slack group encourages, I’m now struck by how many people are surviving on wishes because there is nothing real to protect them.
‘Arcana’ was first published in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). Issue Four is now sold out but may still be available from certain stockists. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
Jessica Traynor is the author of Liffey Swim (2014), The Quick (2019), Pit Lullabies (2022) and, most recently, New Arcana (2025). Awards include the 2024 Tundish Award from Field Day for contribution to the arts in Ireland and the 2023 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. She was the 2023 Arts Council Writer in Residence at Galway University, and is a Creative Fellow of UCD. She is poetry editor at Banshee Press
