The author of Fragile Animals talks all about the powerful connection between tarot and queerness
BY GENEVIEVE JAGGER, IMAGE BY DAVID RONAN
We breeze into The Craft Pottery, Glasgow, and the queer girls are drinking strawberry tea. There’s a clay smell in the air and crocheted Miffy sits at the till, waving us into the evening. Craft’s a place that lets you paint mugs, plates, fairy cottages, giant bunnies, whatever. They run events – themed things like Hello Kitty, Mean Girls and Emo. Most importantly they run a tarot night called Queen of Cups. That’s where we come in.
We are divination duo Two for Joy Tarot and we deal tarot readings to strangers. David lights the incense while I set up the altar, a selection of candles and trinkets: troll dolls, brass bunnies, fat crystals, a real cow jaw as long as my arm. The cards are set and we’re wearing our tarot finery, outfits peculiar and particular and camp. Tarot is inherently camp. High drama.
Craft Pottery feels like a home for queer girls and so the ratio stacks up accordingly. How do we know the girls are queer? They tell us, or they appear with their polyamorous partners, or their fashion is so obviously Sapphic that it’s undeniable they’re anything else. Queer girls come in all shapes and sizes. Tattooed baddies with The Empress on their neck, crystal-laden pensives, block colour queens in neon blazers. Whoever they are, they are our favourite clientele to work with. Queer girls have powerful intuition.
You can see it in the way they shuffle and slice the deck. The way they lean into the cards and trust them. Common cards that appear for queer girls?
- The Hierophant Reversed (distrust for authority, creation of your own rules)
- The Moon (huge emotions in the darkness, secrets, dreamscapes, poetry, tears).
- The Devil (wrath and sexual power – shout out to my Satanic girls who jump for joy when they see it).
- The Three of Cups (endless love and trust and respect for your very best friends).
- The High Priestess (intuition).
Intuition is a queer power. I believe it comes from a lifetime of having to sense who you can entrust your identity with – the gut becomes connected to the mind. Queer girls are forced to make predictions: where can I wear my boldest choices? What places feel safe to hold hands in? Which employer is least likely to be confused by me? These questions are unfair and subconscious, but maybe they have nurtured a certain frequency of mind. Magick involves intuition and intuition involves pattern recognition. A skill that is learned through oppression becomes the key to seeing universal signs.
The marginalised look at shadows more closely, they have to in our homogenised society that keeps their needs pushed into the dark. I believe they also hope more deeply because they know there is so much to strive for. Queer girls see a sense of humour in The Tower and an anarchistic passion in the Devil. So, if you’re a queer girl reading this, I want to leave you with one final card. A fortune as thanks for your aura.
The Star.
Endless hope, healing power, vulnerability.
Faith in the universe we share.
Tarot is a threat to heteronormativity.
May we disrupt its system forever.
Fragile Animals, the debut novel by Genevieve Jagger, which follows an ex-catholic woman as she develops a sexual relationship with a vampire, and is forced to confront the memories that haunt her religious past, is out now and available via 404ink.com and all good retailers and etailers
Get your copy now: fragile-animals
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