My dear friend hosted a New Year’s Eve party and asked me to bring my tarot deck to do readings! Tarot cards have become an occasional hobby of mine, and something I like to do when the mood strikes me (or in this case as a party trick) rather than a thing I plan to seriously study and pursue.
I brought my beginner’s deck and did brief, three-card-spread readings for folks who wanted them. It was a lot of fun. I like the storytelling exercise of being given a prompt in the form of a question about the future, then using the cards as a framework for weaving a prediction about what may happen. It keeps my brain sharp and forces me to craft a narrative on the fly, which is why I enjoy it so much.
When I did one for another very dear friend, the last card in the spread that was meant to predict the future revealed a card with an unfortunate outcome. As I often do in those situations, I say I need more information and pull a second card to follow up. It was also a card that, in the narrative and my interpretation, foretold something unfortunate. Not wanting to give my friend the only ill omen reading of the night, I pulled a third card which also forced me to interpret it as misfortune.
My friend accepted the reading as it was. I did not.
So I shuffled the cards and did another one. The results were much more optimistic and satisfactory for both a party atmosphere and my sensibilities as a storyteller.
But what was the most interesting thing to me about choosing to redo a reading was that nobody else seemed to believe I was “allowed” to do that. Like there were some mystical forces I was unwisely tampering with, or perhaps tempting Fate itself, by not accepting the first reading simply because it foretold misfortune. And to all of that I said the same thing: “baloney.”
Here’s what I think. I don’t actually believe tarot cards have mystical divination powers. I like them as a storytelling exercise and what I do believe in is the power of telling a good story. Those first cards told a story I didn’t like telling, so I did what any storyteller does with a chapter that isn’t working for them: I revised it. With tarot cards as with comics, I am the storyteller and I make the rules.
Besides, I spent ten years of my life writing a comic about a guy who could actually see the future and changed it for the better every chance he got. So giving my friend an ill omen and then working to change it into a good outcome was absolutely something Dominic would have done, and spent ten years doing in the Oracle for Hire years.
And heck, given the incoming political landscape of 2025 around here, maybe starting the new year with that attitude is exactly the kind of story I needed to be telling.