Tarot Wisdom for the Coronavirus Crisis

This is a Tower moment if ever there were one.

In The Man From Beyond, guests have the opportunity for a tarot reading from Madame Daphne. These readings are often my favorite part of a performance—the personal connection in a tarot reading is off-the-charts, it’s really a bunch of one-on-ones—and guests leave not just with a grand adventure from the Séance Parlor but with new personal insight from the Tarot Room as well.

I learned the tarot for the show, and now I am an advocate. In my eyes, it’s not magic, but it is a ridiculously useful tool, and anything that carries meaning carries a kind of holiness for me. It’s helped me personally, and it’s honed my philosophy. There are 78 different cards in the deck, each designed to tease out of us a notion of something specific that is happening in our lives. When we see things, we begin to understand them. That may not be magic, but it is the path to empowerment.

In this extraordinary moment, I’d like to share with you a specific tarot insight.

Welcome to The Tower.

The Tower is the moment when we are subject to higher forces. Something that we did not want, that we did not will has just occurred. Make no mistake: it’s bad. Lightning—an act of God or an act of Nature, as you choose to classify it—strikes our Tower, and we fall. We are powerless against it. The crown of our great plans plummets to the ground.

But there is an opportunity in every tarot card, even the darkest ones (and this is the darkest one, in my opinion). The lesson of the Tower is: how do you respond? How you respond is always within your control. Do you take a moment on the ground and mourn the loss? Do you rebuild the Tower? Do you look into the feasibility of making it lightning-proof? Maybe the rebuilt Tower shouldn’t be so tall, or maybe you should get out of the Tower-building business altogether. Point is: know your sphere of action. What’s outside your control? What’s inside it? There’s a sharp line dividing the two. Focus on what’s inside.

So here’s some Tower-specific wisdom for all of us in the cornavirus crisis…

• This totally fucking sucks. It’s bad. It’s important to make space for that fundamental fact. Do not deny that you have fallen.
• It is not your fault. You are not responsible. Yes, the government could have done more to plan, but not you, dear reader. It was not within your power to have prevented this pandemic.
• Do not blame yourself if you feel you could have planned more personally for this very strange apocalypse. Lightning is random. No one could have reasonably predicted this level of society shutdown. I’m sure some of us are secretly kicking ourselves for being in the arts, or hospitality, or restaurant, or service industries, and not choosing an “essential” business or a viable work-from-home career, but that kind of blame is unfair to yourself. So don’t do it!

Focus as much as you can on what you can control. That means…

• Stay home.
• Reconsider going out in public or meeting up—skip it, if you can. There’s a lot that’s unknown and a lot of asymptomatic carriers, so it makes sense to take the most conservative course of action as often as you can.
• Limit your news reading. Get the information you need to inform your personal actions, and no more. Ask, “Do my actions need to change based on today’s update?” Once that question has been answered, cut yourself off. Staring at things that are out of your control will make you go blind.
• Think about what you can do for yourself, for your family and friends. Work. Play. Videochat. Find something that puts you in a flow. Do whatever you need in this very strange time. Take care of these people.
• Forgive your quarantine buddies. They’ve been thrown from the Tower, too.

In the tarot, the Tower doesn’t stand alone: it is part of a bigger story. Twenty-two Major Arcana cards represent the most important moments of life’s journey that we cycle through. The Tower, number sixteen, comes late in the cycle, we’ve gained a lot of wisdom, making this a particularly hard lesson. The Tower dethrones us, thwarts our narrative of progress. But the very next Major Arcana card, number seventeen, is this…

The Star represents hope and healing.

I’ve never felt a personal connection to the Star. All my books say it’s hope and healing, and I’ve never understood how those two different things are connected. Now I do.

Hope is healing. You don’t need to be cured of your illness to experience the healing power of the Star. The Star reminds us that dreams come true. Now, not all dreams come true, but some do, and it is the very act of dreaming that is just what we need.

This crisis has taken our dreams from us. We don’t know how long this near-lockdown will last. Two months? Eighteen? When will we meet at a restaurant again? When will school restart? When will it be safe to visit my parents? We just can’t know right now. (But answering these questions is not within your sphere of control, remember? So let go.)

What we need right now is hope. I am a very future-oriented person. I am driven by my plans for the future, whether that’s seeing the birth of Strange Bird’s next show Lucidity, working on our conference talk for the Reality Escape Convention, or just looking forward to the pleasure of reading a stranger’s tarot cards again. Given the current situation, it’s possible all three of these dreams will never come true. But I’m not about to stop dreaming them. Dreams are not part of what you let go of after the Tower.

The Star says, after the Tower, you must have hope. Hope is the way you will heal from this fall.

The future will come, so please, hold onto your dreams. Dream actively, if you can—perhaps there’s an opportunity for you to lay the groundwork to make them happen. But perhaps just looking outside your quarantine window and daydreaming about a day when hugs are back on is enough.

If you found this post meaningful, consider supporting Strange Bird by purchasing Madame Daphne’s Tarot Deck. Her guidebook features surprisingly similar insights as mine—it’s quite the coincidence! It’s also not a bad time to pick up a new hobby, and it’s one that will make your spirit stronger.

You can also support us with a donation. We are legally required by the City of Houston to have zero income, yet rent and taxes are unabated. What strange times.

All my best, from my quarantined home to yours, for the health of your whole being.