Tarot for Hope
Building Liberated Futures with The Tower and The Star
Sure things don’t need hope. Hope is for the unlikely, the improbable, the marginal, the radical.
This past weekend, I had the honor and pleasure of teaching at the Modern Witches Confluence in San Francisco on the theme of Spiritual Activism. The workshop I led was called “Tarot for Hope.” Hope has emerged as the defining theme of my year. I wrote about it last December in the context of the Strength card in “A Year of Strength, Hope, and Devotion,” and then was invited on a deep dive into hope through guest editing The Star edition of The Rebis.
Now, on the eve of the U.S. elections, when anxieties are running high and many are struggling with the tenderness of hope or the despair of hopelessness, I want to share with you my notes for Tarot for Hope. Because no matter what happens with the election tomorrow, the fight for liberation will not be over. No matter who is president, the work will not be done. And no matter what, there will still be cause for hope—because we are the cause for hope.
We make our own hope through organizing, mutual aid, helping each other, investing in our communities, protecting the environment, standing against abusive power, and creating the liberated world we need in innumerable small and large ways in our daily lives, and doing it on a continual and sustainable basis, not only in reaction to current events. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her slim but mighty 2004 treatise on hope and activism, Hope in the Dark, “Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”
This post is an expanded version of my speaking notes for the workshop, which I’ve tried to render into something more intelligible with full sentences and paragraphs, along with material and tarot spreads from the class handout. This was originally presented as “Tarot for Hope: Building Liberated Futures with The Tower and The Star” at the Modern Witches Confluence in San Francisco on November 2nd, 2024. I hope it might bolster your hope and inspire you to take action for liberation as we move into election week and beyond.
What Is Hope?
Consider:
Is hope the same as optimism?
Does hope require probability or likelihood?
How do you experience hope? Does it feel comforting? Activating? Exciting? Tender?
What is the function of hope?
What is “false” hope? Is there such a thing?
I think hope is misunderstood. There seems to be this idea that hope equals promise; or, to put it another way, that if something is unlikely, it’s hopeless. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of hope.
The German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that hope must be able to be disappointed, as a matter of necessity, otherwise it is not hope. When something is guaranteed, there’s no need for hope. That feeling when something is going well, when the polls are good, when victory is within grasp—that’s not hope. That’s anticipation. The assurance that everything will work out okay, that’s not hope either. That’s either security and privilege, or it’s naïveté and denial.
Sure things don’t need hope. Hope is for the unlikely, the improbable, the marginal, the radical. Hope is the thing that keeps you fighting when the battle is all but lost. It’s the rage and love that spurs you onward even when success is unlikely, even when the grief is so huge that the hoping hurts. Hope is a feeling but more than that it is a conviction, a state of desire or necessity that spurs transformative action and meaningful change. It’s not passive “hoping” for the best; it’s active doing something to make the best happen.
Hope is not a passive state of wishing or expectation; hope is an action verb. Hope does not wait on its desires to become reality; hope spurs action to make those desires real.
In Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which she wrote in 2004 in response to the hopelessness she perceived surrounding the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, she writes:
“[All transformations] begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”
Reflection: What do you think about that? How does hope as an active verb, as a call to action, make you feel?
The Star Takes Action
Of all the cards in the tarot deck, The Star is the card most often connected to hope. Common interpretations include hope, healing, inspiration, collectivism (through its Aquarius rulership), peace, openness, and self-acceptance.
Reflection: We’ve already talked about hope being active. Is healing active or passive? How about peace? Inspiration? Openness? Does The Star card look active to you? What action do you see happening in The Star?
As KJ Naum points out in their essay for The Rebis, “A Body That Ripples,” The Star person’s position is a difficult one to hold. In imagery from the Rider-Waite-Smith and Tarot de Marseille, The Star person kneels on one knee, arms outstretched to pour water from a jug in each hand. Their knee rests on land, while their other foot seemingly floats on the surface of a pool of water. If you are able, I invite you to try taking The Star person’s position, and see how it feels to hold it. When I tried it, I felt knee pain (two bad knees) and also the constant small muscle movements of keeping my balance. We often think of balance as static or still, but it’s active. I also felt remarkably vulnerable, holding out my arms like that, chest open, legs apart, on my knees. And I wasn’t even naked like the Star person.
Their nudity symbolizes a radical openness, honesty, and self-acceptance. The Star person has been through the worst in The Tower, but they haven’t closed themselves off. They, like their two vessels, remain open. Staying open can be scary or even painful because it’s vulnerable. By remaining open to hope, we also open ourselves to hurt and disappointment. But we must remain open to hope because without hope, there is no action. There is no hope in the status quo, only more of the same. The only hope lies in the uncertain landscape of radical change.
Staying open to hope is a courageous act after the trauma of the Tower. It’s worth noting that the Star, number 17, is an 8 card, connecting it to the Strength card and its meanings of fear-facing and courage. Strength, of course, is our numerological card for 2024 (see my post on this), and it’s the emblem for this year’s Witches Confluence on the theme of spiritual activism. Appropriate, since Strength can also be an emblem for activism: facing the beast head-on, not shirking or hiding but courageously taking action for solidarity and liberation.
Probably the most obvious action in The Star card is the action of pouring. The Star person pours water from the vessels, one onto water, the other onto earth. This is significant. The Star person is bridging worlds with their body (one foot on water, one knee on land), and with their action of pouring. This action creates a circuit involving every one of their limbs and every element—the water and earth, but also the air surrounding them, the air they pour the water through, the fire of the stars overhead, and the fire of action.
The Star person holds two vessels, and we can read these as the simultaneity of opposites. One vessel is grief; the other, joy. One is rage; the other, love. One is fear; the other, hope. The Star person holds these seeming dichotomies, bridges them with their body, pours them out to rejoin the source and water the earth. Through this action of pouring, their love and rage and grief and joy are transformed into nourishment to water the seeds of liberation. The Star person demonstrates that these emotions don’t have to control us or disempower us; on the contrary, they can be the liquid fuel for action and change.
The water itself is also active. In tarot, water is usually considered a “passive” element, but water is constantly moving, constantly evaporating or condensing, freezing or melting, falling or flowing or trickling. Water is a shape-shifter. Water transforms. Water will take the shape of its container, but it will also find the smallest crack to free itself. When free, water will always take the path of least resistance and flow back to the ocean, to the source. Water finds its way.
The Tower Clears the Way
The card immediately preceding The Star in the Major Arcana sequence is The Tower, one of the most fearsome cards in the deck. Common interpretations include crisis, cataclysm, upheaval, destruction, disaster, destabilization, and rupture.
Appropriately, The Tower usually shows a tower—not a natural structure but a man-made one. A construct. Why do people build towers? To lock people in or lock people out. For defense or surveillance. For ego or pride. Through this lens, destroying towers doesn’t seem such a bad thing.
What is striking down the Tower in most cards? A lightning bolt. An “act of God” or a force of nature. The Tower reveals the constructed nature of human structures, establishments, and institutions by revealing their flaws, weaknesses, and rotting foundations. We experienced this in 2020 when COVID revealed the inherent racism and classism of the healthcare system. We have experienced this over the past 13 months with Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which has blatantly revealed just how actively and purposefully complicit the US is in Israel’s violent colonialist project. The lightning bolt that blasts the Tower shakes the foundations of what we thought was true, revealing in its searing flash the horrible truth behind the constructed lies.
In the Rider-Waite-Smith and Marseille tarots, a crown is blasted off the tower’s top. The Crown can symbolize ego, identity, authority, and conditioned beliefs or mental constructs. The Tower can be a reality check that undermines our sense of self in some way. The Tower’s epiphany may reveal our own complicity in systems of oppression, in doing harm, in upholding abusive power structures. It might illuminate false and harmful belief systems that we have followed uncritically or never before questioned. In our personal lives, it might illuminate uncomfortable truths or bring revelations that demand a response. The Tower is the truth that once you’ve seen, you can un-see. It’s the revelation that demands change.
The Tower is an uncomfortable awakening. If we think of the Crown in the card as the crown of the head, where the connection to the Divine, or Spirit, or Higher Self, or however you conceive of it, enters us, then we can also see the Tower as a spiritual awakening. There’s a meme out there that says “What you think a spiritual awakening is like,” and it’s The Sun, and then “what a spiritual awakening is actually like,” and it’s The Tower. Accurate.
The destruction and upheaval of The Tower clears the way for a new reality in The Star. But The Tower isn’t benevolent. Sometimes, The Tower is just plain horrible. Unfair. Tragic. The tarot is a reflection of reality, and reality is often brutal. But if we shift our perspective of The Tower and of life’s challenges from one of hopelessness and despair to one of hopeful action and agency, then we can respond to upheaval, tragedy, and loss in ways that cultivate possibility. Instead of staying in a burning Tower, we can exit the building and add some gasoline on the way out. Then, in that space of un-knowing and uncertainty, we can imagine new worlds and take action to build something better, more caring, more equitable, more liberated for all in The Star. The space of uncertainty is the grounds for hope. The future is not yet decided. We co-create the future with our action today.
How to Partner with Tarot for Cultivating Hope
Embrace Uncertainty
Tarot for hope must be based in the anti-fatalistic embrace of uncertainty and the conviction that the future is not yet decided. This is the premise that tarot does not tell the future, but instead can help us look into a future or possible futures with the goal of making informed decisions in the present to co-create the future we need/desire.
Scary Cards are Information
By taking mindset of action-based hope, we can shift our perception of “negative” or “scary” cards from one of fear and denial to one of preparation, awareness, and agency. Challenging cards are information. They show up so we can be better prepared to navigate, mitigate, or even avoid undesirable outcomes by taking action in the present. Next time you find a “scary” card in a future position, consider what agency you have to change that outcome. Are your current actions or behaviors contributing to the outcome? Can you make changes or take actions to redirect this future trajectory? If not, what can you do now to help prepare for this challenge?
Tarot for Non-binary Thinking
Binary thinking, also called dualistic or dichotomous thinking, is the way of perceiving everything in extremes of good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, dark or light, etc. This isn’t to say that some things aren’t extremely bad—genocide is objectively evil, for example—but that most things don’t fall on one extreme or the other.
Binary thinking lends itself to supremacist ideologies, conformity, obedience, and defeatism because it creates the illusion of only two choices and insists on certainty and categorization. When we can’t handle the in-between, grey areas of experience where uncertainty lives, then we become hopeless. We give up. We fall in line. We accept what is because we are told it’s the only way things can be. Binary thinking is the enemy of diversity, adaptability, queerness, change, and hope.
Non-binary thinking, on the other hand, builds resiliency because it equips us to face challenges without succumbing to a doom spiral. It creates hope by cultivating a way of perceiving that is attentive to possibility and emergence rather than inevitability and stasis.
Here’s one way to cultivate non-binary thinking with tarot: When feeling hopeless or powerless, pull a card(s) for the question, “What else is true?” or “What else can be true?” This can help reorient from a space of despair to a space of possibility, and it combats binary thinking by reminding us that more than one thing can be true at once.
Call In a Helper Card
When you pull a difficult or “scary” card, you can choose a card (intentionally, not randomly) to “call in” to help you navigate it. For example, if I pulled The Tower and felt challenged by it, I might call in The Star for its hopeful, visionary, world-building possibilities, or I might choose a card for grounding and determination like the Knight of Pentacles, or for awareness and discernment like the Queen of Swords, depending on my needs. Put the card on your altar or do a small ritual to intentionally call it in for partnership. When you’re feeling hopeless or despondent, try to bring that helper card to mind, feel its energy, and let it bolster you.
Action Cards
Add a card position for taking action to your spreads. This helps bridge tarot readings from solely a cerebral/emotional/introspective space to an active/tangible/material space that can actually create change in the real world. This position can be as simple as “An action to take for [insert goal].” You can interpret the card itself, or if the action is unclear, you can read it based on elemental rulership.
Air cards (Swords) might mean speaking up, calling your representatives, writing letters, having conversations about social justice issues with your family or friends to help change minds, educating yourself on social justice issues, volunteering to teach English to non-English speaking refugees, or sharing your knowledge or skills in a skill share or teach-in.
Water cards (Cups) might mean volunteering in a care-based capacity in your community such as delivering meals or groceries to elders or volunteering at a retirement home, food bank, soup kitchen, or community center; helping neighbors or friends with child care; creating or seeking out a support group or affinity group; building relationships in your community; or creating public art.
Fire cards (Wands) might mean direct action, protesting, marching, boycotting, civil disobedience, creating protest art, or casting spells or doing energy work for social justice and liberation.
Earth cards (Pentacles/Coins) might mean volunteering in a land-based capacity such as land stewardship, land protection, or community gardening; supporting the Land Back movement; joining a mutual aid collective; donating money or materials to relief efforts, protest movements, bail funds, or directly to individuals experiencing hardship; or working with houseless people to provide food, shelter, supplies, and/or access to medical care.
Reason to Hope
In the workshop, a participant asked how people in Gaza, who are actually living in bombed-out buildings and burning Towers, who are besieged with most of their agency stolen from them, can access that hopeful and liberated Star space. It’s an excellent question, and I don’t have sufficient answer. But I know that when some of us are robbed of agency, the rest of us have to step in and do our damn best to get them their agency back. When some are starving, it’s the job of the rest of us to feed them. When some are persecuted, oppressed, imprisoned, attacked, killed, it’s the responsibility of the rest of us to demand justice and reparations. This is our human imperative.
Ruled by Aquarius, one of The Star’s interpretations is collectivism. We can see this in The Star person’s posture, straddling worlds, joining elements, connected and connecting to the All of Everything. When we build strong connections with each other and prioritize collectivism over individualism, then we can depend on each other for help when we need it. If we can’t get ourselves out of The Tower, we can have hope that the collective will do its best to get us out—not out of some sense of saviorism, but because of the deep understanding that our liberation is connected. As Solomon Burke sang, none of us are free if one of us is chained.
There is no Star without The Tower. There is no liberation without awakening to the reality of what is. There is no transformative, liberated future without the dismantling of the old, oppressive, abusive structures of empire. It will take time, more time than some of us have left, but the destruction of The Tower will clear the way for The Star’s liberation—as long as we don’t stop acting on hope.
Hope is too often conflated with optimism. But hope is not the same as optimism. To paraphrase Solnit again, optimists think everything will turn out okay without their involvement; pessimists think everything will be awful despite their involvement; both excuse themselves from taking action. The kind of hope we need is not spiritual bypassing, “good vibes only” optimism, which isn’t really optimism but denial and escapism, but the radical hope of facing the harsh brutal reality of the world—of oppression, genocide, white supremacy, transphobia, fascism—with our hearts as open as we can.
We need the radical hope of loving ourselves and each other enough that we don’t hide and shut down when challenges arise and grief pours down like rain, but come together and do something to create the liberated world that we all need and deserve.
We need the radical hope of not knowing what will come next but embracing meaningful change anyway, the radical hope that we’ll figure it out together or at least do the very best we can, because the other option—hopelessness, despair—will change nothing.
We don’t need a fluffy hope of naive optimism, but a fierce hope with claws and teeth, a resolute hope of solidarity and interconnection, and a courageous hope that acts despite uncertainty, despite risk, despite fear.
When hope leads to action—now that’s a reason to hope.
Ending Reflection: What’s one thing that gives you hope right now? What’s one action you can take to help bring the hoped-for world into being? Alternatively, you can pull a card for the second question.
Tower Spread: Crown on the Ground
For facing crisis and upheaval, for courting revolution, for transformative change.
The Tower: What structure is crumbling
The Lightning: The cause of this destruction or revolution
The Crown: An aspect of ego, identity, or conditioned belief that needs to fall away
The Open Window: An action to take that can support you or your cause during this crisis
The Field: The open space for possibility that will be cleared once the Tower has fallen
Star Spread: An Open Vessel Never Empties
For cultivating hope despite. For liberated future-dreaming
The Water: What your hopes are made of
The Vessels: How to hold hope despite horrors
The Crack: What you risk by acting on hope
The Pour: How to take action for creating liberated futures anyway
The Pool: How to fill your vessels once again
Recommended Reading:
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
78 Acts of Liberation by Lane Smith
Tarot for the Hard Work by Maria Minnis
The Rebis, Vol. 3: The Star, co-edited by Hannah Levy and myself
I wish I had experienced you facilitating this discussion in person but it was also such a gift to read this and reflect on the eve of the election. Love your way with words and how you thread everything together here. There is still so much to learn from this card, even after immersing in its energy for the last year. I'll be revisiting these lessons and practicing hope for the rest of my life, I think.
What an excellent article, Charlie. I very much look forward to using the Tarot Spreads included in it, very soon. Thank you so much.