Once we have agreed upon to start our journey the first card we come to is that of the Magician, and just like the Fool, the character in the card is young and just beginning to open their eyes to the world around them. In truth, though, the word is misleading. The figure in robes is more like an Apprentice, for the he or she is just beginning to learn their craft. In the original Rider-Waite deck the Magician learned his art from the Greek sun god, Apollo, though the Egyptian Ra or Isis, the Chinese god Taiyang Shen, or even the Aztec’s Tonatiuh — solar deities all — could teach us as well. It was to the sun the ancients of the world first turned to for warmth and wisdom — the “magic” that so many look for and so little find — and so it will be for us.

The young Magician stands before a table that contains his tools of the trade; the chalice and pentagram as well as the ceremonial knives. At his feet is a garden of herbs and flowers, for the Root Witches of Europe had knowledge over the world and knew how to cure and curse in equal measures back before the patriarchal religions rose to power. Above the Magician’s head is the ancient symbol of eternity, while in his right hand is a wand raised towards the sky, the element known as “æther,” and his left hand points to the ground, allowing him to be the conduit that combines heaven and earth.

I have never liked the word Magician, to be honest. Partly because the word is so overused in Hollywood that it has lost all meaning to me and we could be talking about a stage illusionist hired to entertain children or some farcical, Middle Earth geriatric who sneezes lightning and talks like a Shakespearean reject on the Gong Show. To me, the problem with the Magician is that he isn’t part of any community. He don’t use his skills to help others, he is simply a self-serving individual with nothing more up his sleeve than a desperate need for money and attention. Isis would not approve.

This is why I use the term Shaman in this deck, because by the very definition of a Shaman she is part of something larger than just herself and her needs. This is what separates in my mind a Shaman from a Magician or an Illusionist, though I’ve heard a lot of people call themselves Shamans, though usually at Pagan Festivals and usually in an attempt by lonely older men to get laid. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get laid, it’s the driving force of most of Western culture, it’s why college freshmen claim to read Charles Bukowski (hurrah for virgins!) but I’d be wary of anyone who tells you that being a Shaman is difficult, or that it takes years of concentration, that there are secrets given only to a select few, yadda yadda yadda. Learning to play the oboe takes years of practice. Learning to perform brain surgery talks years of study. Learning to do what a Shaman does — i.e., leave your body and enter into the Spirit world — is frightfully easy. I would go so far as to say it is mind-bogglingly easy. Anyone can do it, right now in fact, if you’re in the mood.

That’s the key word, “in the mood.” For we are all sexual creatures with erotic cores, but if you are unwilling to tap into your ecstatic nature then you might as well go back to drinking tequila and eating peyote and sitting in the desert at midnight, trying to avoid getting stung by scorpions, for that’s about as far as you’re going to get on your shamanic journey. The reason projecting outside your own body is so simple is that we do it every time we have an orgasm. In fact, I’d go so far to say that the orgasm is the shaman’s only true tool they need.

I don’t say this lightly: the orgasm is our doorway to the divine. It opens us up, allows us to leave our ego-based Id behind for a moment and step outside of our own consciousness. It’s why people are relaxed after an orgasm, blissful, at peace. But this experience isn’t only a sexual one. The same thing happens in the creative process. The poet John Keats called it “negative ecstasy,” the process of allowing ideas bigger than himself in. It is also what we experience in meditation and prayer when we are no longer part of our body. St. John called it “the dark night of the soul” and St. Therese of Lisieux described it as “transverberation.” But whatever word you use, opening yourself up to the universe, leaving your carnal body behind and taking part in something bigger than yourself, is what a Shaman does on their spiritual journey.

So far I’ve designed three different cards, each one having elements of what I’m trying to say in them (I’ll get the combination right, sooner or later)

All three cards contain the same element: the first thing we do when we discover we have a sexual side to ourselves is to masturbate. We are amazed that there are powers in our body not always under our control. Puberty is also a shamanic journey. Some of us feel frightened because of this. Some of us are made to feel guilty or ashamed as well. Perhaps this is what those PaganFest shamans were talking about when they said “that it takes years of concentration,” that they had been so emotionally damaged by adults who hate sexuality that they’d forgotten all about the power of the orgasm? Perhaps. Healing comes in many different forms and who am I to judge the path of another?

The reason that I say what separates a Shaman from a Magician is community is that traditionally the Shaman undertook her journey on the behalf of her community. The Inuit Shamans would swim to the bottom of the ocean to beg Sedna, the personification of the raging Arctic storms, for fish for the year to come. Since Sedna had no hands they would comb out her hair and out of her tangles and bloody stumps flowed all the marine life the villagers would need. When I first started learning about Tarot I didn’t have anyone I could turn to. The Spirit world is a scary place. Bad things happen there. I got a lot of ideas from books and since I adore books I was fine with that. I was, as they say, a solitary practitioner. However, claiming I didn’t have a community wasn’t really true. I had family and friends, I had people I worked with, neighbors, schoolmates, lovers and drinking buddies. In short, everyone around me was, in one way or another, part of my community, even if to them the idea of orgasms and Shamans was silly or foolish or something nice people never talked about. In a very real way that you, reading this, are now part of my community as well. When I ask a question to the deck it helps me ground that question by asking how it will effect those around me as well as just myself. There is no crime in having a little humility, just as there is no crime in daily ecstasy. Once we feel comfortable leaving our egos behind, even for only a moment, so we can hear what this ecstatic universe is trying to tell us, then we can call ourselves Shamans as well.

Perhaps second only to the discovery of fire and indoor plumbing, smut is one of humanity’s truly great inventions. To begin with, it easily polarizes people; almost everyone has a strong feeling about it. Very few people will claim to be apathetic about dirty pictures. That’s because it speaks about different forms of desire, and for some people that’s exciting and for some that’s horrifying — a world of conflicting emotions all over a scrap of paper with some ink on it. Curious.

I say this knowing I live a highly privileged life and while championing for us to live deeply and be, like Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” I must acknowledge that there are people who will never get that opportunity, that for them rape and domestic violence are not only very real but — more so than any “love that dare not speak its name” — the real taboo subjects in our society. So while I believe dirty pictures are not the problem — sexual violence is the problem — it is not my place to convince anyone that the orgasm will set us free. If the space isn’t safe to explore these things then that is something only you, yourself, can say and the last thing I want to do is silence you in any form. There is far too much silence already in this world.

It’s one of the reasons I decided against including the Emperor in this deck. Partly because my own spiritual beliefs run counter to the idea that old graybeard patriarchs are the embodiment of wisdom and justice (I work with far too many of them as a hospice nurse to get sentimental) but mainly because that’s not the kind of sexual energy I want to deal with. I mean, just look at the card in the Rider-Waite deck: the throne, the battle-armor, the ram’s heads, the orb and scepter. Gray and dour, the symbol of authority run amok. Anyone who demands to be called the “All Father” while in bed has a whole lot of issues he needs to work out first before he can start channeling his own sexual energy.

We are a culture that sends tons of mixed messages about what it means to be male. We seem to confuse being alert and brave with aggressive and delight in simple dualities: black/white, men/women, gay/straight. Not only is it a terribly boring way to look at the world, but no where in Nature — outside of Hollywood storytelling — can you find any examples of dualities. Zip. Nada. I find it curious that there’s yet to be a Feminist critique about some of the assumptions that go into a lot of these Tarot decks — like the idea that the Emperor is, for some strange reason, always higher ranking than the Empress, or that he’s Mars to her Venus, father to her mother, civilization to her wild nature, imposing his rigid meaty order to her divine wet chaos– aggh!, I’m beginning to sound like bad Freudian porn. But people keep telling me Tarot works on archetypes, so you know who my Empress is going to be? Lilith — the world’s first divorced, bisexual bad girl — who got kicked out of the Garden of Eden because she hated the Missionary Position so much. And there isn’t enough Viagra in the world to get that old man in the Rider-Waite deck hard enough for the Queen of the Night.

We’re not even going to use the word Emperor in this deck, leave that for men still working through their daddy-issues. For me, the word Consort sums up everything that is good about male sexuality — wild enthusiasm and loving energy without the aggression; leadership and compassion without being a tyrant — but the word Consort also has an erotic side to it, much more so than the word Companion. Make no mistake, the sex is great with the Consort, but Lilith already knew that, that’s why she picked him.

While designing this card, I placed a muscled, fey young man standing before the Universe. Like good foreplay, we are told the sky is the limit, but that doesn’t mean we need to go after it all at once when a slow, teasing build-up can work much better. On either side of him are symbols of traditional male power — a sword and an ankh — but the Consort does not need to use them to prove anything to himself. One of the reasons men are so reluctant to talk about sexual and domestic violence is that it means admitting vulnerability. Gods and action heroes are never vulnerable — which is also why they are make-believe. Boys are taught at an early age that real men are like rocks. But instead of taking this as free advice about their abs, they decide it must mean they need to hide their emotions, and so like Aries the Ram, the first sign of the Zodiac, they are forever stuck in the “infant” stage of development. Luckily for them there seems to be a lot of co-dependent people out there who think babies are cute (but we’ll save that side of our psyche for another card).

The Consort, though. faces no such problems. Pain, like rough sex, brings wisdom. The Marquis de Sade once quipped that everyone adores a fascist in bed. That is certainly true for some but it isn’t a call for becoming a despot with one’s emotions. Even at his relatively young age, the wisdom the Consort has learned is that being equal is never a sign of weakness.