ep. 1: tarot & trauma 101

topic: context and history

On the very first episode of tender tarot, we explore the roots of the tarot and set the foundation for this podcast.

what are tarot's origins? where did it emerge as a practice and how did it extend it's roots to now be such a widely used tool for divination and healing?

We will time travel to 1400s Italy, learn about the Roma people who engaged in fortune telling as a survival trade, what Carl Jung and tarot have in common and discover the long and winding path the tarot has taken to get us to where we are today.

I'll also give a basic overview of trauma, trauma healing and it's neurobiology and offer gratitude to my teachers, without whom I wouldn't be able to create this podcast.

Notes:

Romanistan Podcast

Transcript

Akshi: 0:03

Hey all, welcome to Tender Tarot, a podcast that explores trauma healing through the lens of the tarot. I'm your host, Akshi. I'm a trauma therapist, social worker, and of course, a tarot reader. In this podcast, we will explore various topics related to trauma, trauma healing, and how we can find medicine, inspiration, support, and expansive pathways toward healing using the tarot. Although I'm a practicing therapist and we may discuss many topics related to mental health and therapy in this podcast, it is not a replacement for psychotherapy with a licensed practitioner. This podcast is for you if you're someone who is interested in understanding trauma and how it impacts you, your community, and the world around us through the lens of the tarot. Hope you enjoy! Okie dokie, so here we are in episode one of Tender Tarot. This is my first time creating a podcast all on my own, so definitely feels like the energy of the fool in the tarot, which we'll get into probably not this episode, but in the next one. To give a brief intro to myself, I'm Akshi. I'm a drama therapist, I'm a licensed clinical social worker and a tarot reader. Those are some things about me. Since 2019, tarot has been a strong special interest of mine that has intersected pretty beautifully with my interest in spirituality, astrology, and all things otherworldly. This podcast is a project that I have been wanting to start for a long time as I've found tarot to be such a support for me in my own journey of healing. And I've also found it really helpful to use with my clients. I guess in today's day and age of May 2025, Tarot is much more commonly used. I think people got into it way more during the pandemic. And I think it can be used for a bunch of different things, you know, reflection, decision making, connecting with yourself, exploring your parts, a friend to have a conversation with. Of course, there are people that use it in a more predictive way, and I'm gonna get into that a little bit, but that's not really the way in which I use tarot anymore. I think when I started, I maybe explored it in that way, but it's my belief system that the future is not set in stone and that we all have free will and the ability to, you know, guide our lives and guide our paths. And so there's only so much that energy can be predictive. I think it's much more helpful to use tarot as a way to like center in the present moment and connect with yourself than it is as a way to sort of like future trip, basically, and give yourself anxiety about the future. Um, I think most of us already have that without incorporating like esoteric ways to increase our anxiety. Anyways, so I want this podcast to be accessible to folks who are like completely new to Tarot and completely have no understanding of trauma either. So I wanted to give like a little brief intro on tarot decks and the history of tarot and also a little bit about trauma in this episode. So, first of all, I'm just gonna start off by explaining like how a tarot deck is set up. A typical tarot card deck has 78 cards in it with two types of cards: the major arcana cards and the minor arcana cards. So there are 22 major arcana cards, and these are cards kind of like the fool, the high priestess, the moon. These are archetypes. Some of them have like humans associated with them, but not all of them. And they're cards that I would say just have like a stronger energy associated with them, and like maybe more long-term energy sometimes as well. And minor counter cards are the suits, so typically it's split into cups, wands, swords, and pentacles or coins, and those go from ace to 10, and then there's like the court cards, yeah. So, like in most decks, that's page, knight, queen, king, but people make it their own, you know, as we'll learn with the tarot, like as it's proliferated in its popularity, people have really made it their own, which I find really beautiful and also totally a you know representation of how the collective consciousness flows together. So the tarot, the first ever tarot deck that I had was called the Astera Tarot. Um, I don't have it anymore, but I really built my relationship with the tarot first with that deck. So I owe the creators of that deck a lot. It is a beautiful, beautiful deck that has a lot of imagery related to spring in it. Um, and it's created by four illustrators from British Columbia, Canada, I'm pretty sure. The second deck that I got, um, which I have with me right now next to me, is The Gentle Tarot by Maritza Rice Apariccio Tovar. I really hope I'm saying that right. But she's an indigenous person and she's based a lot of this deck based on her life living in Alaska. So it has a lot of really beautiful like imagery of nature, of animals, of plants, and I wanted a tarot deck that was more gentle in its approach, which is why this deck was perfect for me when I got it in 2021. Um, and I've been using it since then. So very grateful for this deck as well. The two other decks I have, which I don't have with me right now, but I will probably pull in future episodes, are the Tarot of the Unknown, which is based on my favorite TV show, Over the Garden Wall, and The Crow Tarot, which I love crows, so also based on something that I love. As you'll find out through this podcast, there are certain things that I am obsessed with and hyperfixate on and are my special interests, and I will talk about them over and over again. Over the garden wall, crows, definitely part of that. Tarot, also definitely one of those things. Anyways, I wanted to spend time in this first episode talking about the history of tarot, and why do I want to do that for context, for origins, and like why do we need to talk about lineage or history? And it's for that, for context and for origins. And when I think about what it means to be a trauma-centered or trauma-informed individual, I think about context and history. What is the context? And Rejma Menekum says that trauma decontextualized in a person might look like personality, trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits, and trauma decontextualized in a people looks like culture. So context and history are super important. I also think it's really important to honor those that came before us and um the people who've created the tools that we use today for healing. That being said, I do want to take a moment to also name some of the teachers that I've learned from in my tarot journey. So I've been exploring spirituality through education, learning, and experience with deep intention since 2016. I, like I said before, I began reading and studying tarot in 2019. And in 2020 was when I started reading for others and community members and friends. Astero Tarot was illustrated by Molly Applejohn, Eden Cook, Krista Gibbard, and Juliar Iridale. Also, hope I'm saying that correctly. I mentioned how The Gentle Tarot was created by Maritza Rice Aparcio Tovar. Those are the ones that I learned with the most. The books that I found most helpful in my learning were The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Meanings by Bridget Esselmont, who's also the creator of Biddy Tarot. Great website, which I used so, so much in my first several months of tarot reading. And also this book called Tarot by Tina Gong, who is the creator of the Labyrinthos Academy, another great website and resource for those of you interested in getting into tarot. I also have, of course, listened to many podcasts that have supported me in my education and learning around Tarot, main one being Tarot for the Wild Soul with Lindsay Mack. And I've actually also taken a course with Lindsay called Rewilding the Tarot and the Spiralic Tarot in 2024. So that's really changed and helped my understanding of Tarot grow and become a lot more present focused. I also love Tarot for the End Times with Sarah Cargill, and they just restarted again, so definitely take a uh take a look at that. And the tarot diagnosis with Shannon Knight, who's another therapist that explores Tarot and psychology and therapy. I also want to name the Spiritual Shit podcast with Aliyah Lovely, Astrology of the Week Ahead with Channy Nicholas, and Ghost of a Podcast with Jessica Lignato. These are all podcasts that have really informed my understanding of spirituality and astrology, and other spiritual teachers that have had an impact on my understanding and relationship to tarot and spirituality are Juliet Diaz and Magali Morales. So I just wanted to name my sort of like lineage in terms of learning tarot and my spiritual journey. I haven't included everyone and everything who has contributed to that because I would spend hours just doing that. But I will weave this in to each episode as it comes up and as it becomes relevant. So kind of expanding wider, where does tarot come from? And when I was looking into this, it's honestly it has esoteric origins, which makes sense given the vibe of the tarot being what it is. But here's some stuff that I did find about it that I feel like it's relevant to share. So Tarot has some of its origins in mid-1400s Italy, and it was called Tarocci at that point of time. It has always been adaptable in its nature. Helen Farley, who wrote A Cultural History of Tarot, states: Tarot has evolved and been accommodated within the cultural currents of different times, which I think is super, super true, and it's definitely having like a resurgence now. Card games in general have their origins in China, which then spread to the Arab and Islamic world in the 1300s, and then later arrived in Italy, like in the late 1300s. There's also some hypothesis and speculation that tarot actually originated in Egypt. There's a surviving deck from Egypt, 15th century. It's a 56-card deck from the Egyptian Mom Luck Empire that was found in Istanbul, and it included coins, sticks, cups, and swords. So just the minor arcana, not the major arcana. But, you know, that's sort of one of the potential origins. The early use of the tarot in Europe was definitely something that was the Catholic Church was not a fan of, and people used it as a way to sort of rebel against the power of the Catholic Church. Card games, in and of themselves, were seen as like frivolous, and actually, I guess the Catholic Church tried to ban card games. It's like, can we not have fun? You know, like I feel like a huge part of like my relationship to spirituality is like not taking myself as seriously and just like enjoying living in this world that is the hellscape so much of the time. And so what the fuck, you know? Clearly, so much of oppression is about just like not letting us enjoy things. Tangent aside, Tarot was kind of forced underground in medieval Europe because of its connections to the occult and esoteric receiving esoteric guidance, um, which obviously the church was not into. And it was also forced underground because it was a card game, and but disguising it as a card game was like a way of allowing people to continue using it without persecution is also another speculation. Apparently, some people in the church called it the devil's picture book, and so people who were seen to be using it were seen as heretics and sometimes put to death. And this is why sometimes, like, the history of tarot, and like history in general, right, is just like it's what we have records of. And like if there were records that were ruined or there were people that were killed, like and they didn't leave a written or even an oral history, like we are losing so much of that context, right? But I'm so glad to live in a time where tarot has resurfaced, you know. It was something that was actually quite popular among aristocracy, like card games were, which also kind of makes sense, and they had their decks hand painted. And one of the games that I guess they played um included cards that trumped or triumphed over other cards. And the word in Italian, I guess, for a trump card was tarotci. And the trump cards they're referring to are now known as the major Arcana. This specific deck, which was hand painted, was thought to be developed by someone named Francesco Fibia. The French word for taroci is how it's spelled today, which is tarot. There are decks that show how there's corruption within the church, like one called the Visconti Sforza deck. And in the late 18th century France, as a reaction to quote-unquote rationalism, esotericism became way more popular and was honestly inspired a lot by Egyptian cultural practices. So, rewinding a little, I want to talk a little bit about the Roma people. The Roma are a diasporic ethnic group that originally came from India. They left India around the 1300s and traveled west. Fortune telling, metalworking, basket weaving were all survival trades for the Roma people, as they were met with a lot of discrimination, violence, and persecution. Interestingly, the history we have of the tarot sort of like arriving in Italy is around the same time that the Roma people arrived in Europe. So the Roma are thought to be some of the very first people to use tarot as a divination practice. There is a podcast recommendation I have right now, which I will put in the show notes. Podcast is called Romanistan by Jasmina von Tiel and Paulina Stevens. This podcast, um, they talk about how fortune telling and using tarot cards was deeply rooted in the survival of racism and being pushed out of homes and experiencing discrimination wherever they went, because fortune telling is something that you can do from anywhere. Jasmina von Thiel and Paulina Stevens' work brings to light an accurate history of tarot, not to propose that non-Romani folks stop reading cards or even saying that fortune telling should be limited to professional Roma fortune tellers. They just want, out of respect for the families who pass down these gifts over centuries, for Romani people to be acknowledged and credited for their contributions to what has become such a popular trend, but also a significant tool for healing and reflection in the mainstream. I just wanted to name that because I think often when I hear about tarot, I think about Romani people, but I never hear much about how their history is connected to the practice of fortune telling and how we need to acknowledge and credit them for Tarot being as popular as it is today. When people think about the Tarot, I think a lot of the time they think about the Rider Waite Smith Tarot deck, which was published in 1910 and at the time was called the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. I heard this rumor that Pamela Coleman Smith, who was a person that illustrated the Tarot, was black. But then I looked into it and I found out that she actually wasn't black and actually appropriated black and Jamaican culture, potentially was a lesbian, but she was an artist that came from upper and middle class white family. And like people, because of how history loses some of its context over time, people thought that she was black when actually she was not. For anyone who thought that Pamela Coleman Smith was black, she was not. She was a cultural appropriator. Anyway, last thing that I kind of wanted to talk about as like a segue into connecting tarot with trauma healing is Jungian psychology and the tarot. So Carl Jung, for those who don't know, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he explored the concept of what's known as quote-unquote archetypes, which he defined as universal symbols and themes that reside in our collective unconscious. Ooh, love that. He talked about how these manifest in our dreams, in our myths, in our art, and how they influence our way of being as individuals and as a collective. And so you can see how tarot similarly depicts archetypes, can be seen as different parts of the human. Psyche can be seen as different stages in a journey and also can be seen as symbols of the unconscious mind, which I just think is so, so powerful when it comes to trauma healing. So let me do a little bit of uh neurobiology talk right now around that. So the middle part of our brain is where our limbic system lives. And that is where our survival responses, our emotions, and all of that originates. And so when we think about healing from trauma, we want to be getting access to that part of our brain. And we can't do that through talking and language because that is in the newest part of our brain. That's the neocortex. And the neocortex actually has little to do with the regulation of our nervous system, which is literally all about what trauma healing is about. So let me come back to that. I'm gonna define trauma in a very holistic way. And I got this definition from Linda Tai, who is a wonderful teacher of mine, and it's a also like a combination of Rajma Manicum's definition. So I'm gonna state it out loud and it's gonna be long, but then we'll sort of unpack it slowly. So I think what a lot of people think about when they think of trauma, especially if you're not familiar with like, especially if you're not like living in the world of like trauma therapy and mental health. So when you think about trauma, you probably think car accident, war, natural disaster. And while all of those things can be traumatic, trauma is not an event. Trauma is too much, too little, too sudden of something for too long, not long enough, and this is the important part, without adequate time, space, permission, protection, resources, or resourcing for our nervous systems to return to homeostasis. A mouthful, for sure. But let's unpack it a little bit, you know. And I want to start by saying that as mammals, we have systems built into our body to release and heal from trauma. So thinking about like prey animals, like a deer, you know, a deer doesn't get PTSD every time it is chased by a lion or another predator. And that's because it is able to move through the trauma response stress cycle and come out of it. So you might see like animals that are in a free state when they're coming out of it, they shake their body first and then they sort of go back to normal, right? We have that same system built into us, but we're not socialized in a way that we're given adequate time, space, and permission, protection, resources, or resourcing for our nervous system to return to homeostasis. Because sometimes that looks like sobbing, crying a lot, screaming, shaking our body. A lot of things that are not seen as socially acceptable. And we live in a world in which emotions are we're taught to suppress our emotions from when we're very, very young. And so trauma starts getting stuck in our body from when we're very, very young. So let's look at the first part of this definition a little bit more. Trauma is too much. Let's think of examples. Too much of something. How can trauma be too much of something? Perhaps for someone who has strong sensory sensitivities, you know, someone who might be autistic or a highly sensitive person, being in an environment with a lot of people that has a lot of stimulation, that has a lot of light, that has a lot of sound, that might be too much for their nervous system. Too little. We as human beings, biologically built to relate to one another for attachment, we're social creatures. And so we need that connection. We need attuned presence, we need love and care and support and compassion. And many of us were missing this in our early child development, too little, too sudden of something. This I think can relate to a lot of traumatic events that we sort of think of instinctively when we think of trauma too fast. Trauma happens quickly. Speed is something that is like very, very related to trauma because we have to respond very fast if we're to survive something that is potentially lethal for too long. Experiencing stress for too long is not good for our nervous system. Not long enough. Kind of going back to the too little, this is where not experiencing comfort, love, care, support, attuned presence, a sense of belonging, learning our self-worth, learning our dignity. Not long enough, you know. And then yeah, there's a second part adequate time, space, permission, protection, resources or resourcing for the nervous system to really turn to homeostasis. Healing takes time, it takes patience, it takes space, it takes allowing ourselves to cry, it takes allowing ourselves to feel our feelings in a safe place. A place where we feel safe to express fully, a place where we have resources which might look like a pillow, or it might look like another person, or it might look like an internal resource, so like a part of our body that feels like grounded and calm. All of our nervous systems have the capacity and innate knowledge on how to heal from emotional and psychological wounding in the same way that our body knows how to heal from physical wounding. We just have to give it the time and space to actually do it. And I feel like that knowledge is like feels like such a weight off for me as a therapist because it reminds me that like what a lot of people are looking for is just another person to sit with them and they're healing, and that that's really, really powerful. And when you're thinking about how you can support yourself, your friends in your community who have experienced traumatic events, who are trauma survivors, think about just like how you can just show up. It doesn't have to be in a big way, it can be in very little ways, too. As we sort of get to the end of this first episode, I want to make it a practice at the end of each of these episodes to like pull some cards without, you know, pulling them beforehand. Like, I'm gonna pull them right now with you. Trying to think of like what would be something to pull cards on as it relates to her first episode, which is about like an introduction to tarot and trauma, the history and context of tarot. Maybe I want to pull a card and ask, why is it important to explore the history, context, and like lineage of something? I want to ask that. So let's see what comes out. I'm pulling from the gentle tarot. And what I'm doing right now, for those of you who are curious, is that I'm just thinking of this question, right? I'm thinking, why is it important to know something's history, to know something's lineage, and to name it. And I'm just shuffling the deck as I do that. People do it in a bunch of different ways. I usually shuffle, split the deck into three, and pick one, or I shuffle and if a card flies out, I pick that one. So that's what I'm gonna do. Alright, let's see what we got. Justice. Okay, amazing. Totally sort of makes sense to get this card. In the Gentle Tarot, there's two hands, and they are holding two little bags. One of them is black and one of them is white, and it almost seems like they're being weighed against each other. The justice card, I feel like, sort of speaks for itself. That like it's important to name lineages, context, and history in order to give credit, you know, to those who came before us, and to give gratitude and thanks to those who came before us. And how like offering that acknowledgement and credit is a way to practice humility, it's a way to like honor that we are part of like a huge, huge lineage that started so many, many years before us, and we're contributing to it now. But that like none of this started today, you know. History and trauma healing have a something in common, and I think that thing that they have in common is that they are spiralic in nature, that they repeat not in exactly the same way, but they do repeat, you know, we go through cycles. I feel like justice is a lot about truth as well, and when we talk about context and history, we are we are talking about things that are true, right? Like what are the roots of this thing that we're talking about? Where does this come from? You know, this didn't just appear from nowhere, it started with something, and I feel like a lot of justice is about speaking truth to power. And I think there is a power in talking about something's context and history, connecting back to Rajma Menekam's definitions around trauma being decontextualized. We get to understand something in a much deeper and vivid way when we have its context. We can have so much more compassion for a person and a people when we understand where the root of a behavior comes from, right? And this is why I love being trauma informed and think it's so important for like every person, but especially for mental health practitioners and educators to be trauma-informed. Because in this way you start to see people not through the lens of pathology, but through the lens of adaptation. A lot of the behaviors that have been labeled as disordered are actually very wise adaptations that a person's body has developed in response to trauma. And so when we get that context, we can potentially liberate that part of that person from engaging in that behavior anymore if that context is no longer true. But how are we supposed to do that if we don't know what that root is, right? If we don't know what the context is. Simplistic in some ways, because of course we're not always gonna have access to that history or that context. Like, you know, I myself like feel like I don't have access to a lot of my ancestral history past like my grandparents and great-grandparents' generation. There's colonization as a part of that. Like, I hear about some people who have, you know, knowledge of lineages that go back so much in time, and I just don't I don't have that. And a lot of people who come from colonized nations or colonized people have that experience. So we don't always have the privilege to know what our histories are, but we all we can do is do our best. In creating this podcast, I'm also really putting myself out there and I'm always open to feedback. If I do or say something that sits with you wrong, if we for you do or say something that you know is actually wrong and you want to correct me, please let me know. You know, reach out, and I will I'm so open to engaging in a conversation in that way. It's really important to me. I value humility a lot, and I also value gratitude a lot, which is why I really wanted to name all my teachers right in the beginning, and I'm gonna continue to do so as this podcast continues. I'm not really sure what the structure of the podcast is gonna be like. I think I'm just going to like explore different cards and different concepts and sort of like mix and match together as we go. I'm also gonna have guests on in the future. Um, some might be other therapists or healers, some might be other spiritual practitioners, some might be totally unrelated to those two, but somehow related to tarot and trauma. We shall see. For now, I'm going to end this episode here. Thank you so much for being here with me for the first episode of Tender Tarot. Thank you for listening to Tender Tarot. This is a labor of love, and it brings my heart warmth that you have listened all the way to the end of this episode. Stay tuned for ways to support and ways to stay connected. For now, give us a subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you enjoyed what you heard, please share it with your friends with love and in solidarity. The music that you heard on this podcast came from childhood memories by Clavier Clavier from XFA. It was written, recorded, edited, and produced by me. Okay, you can find us on Instagram at ThunderTerraPodcast, or you can email me at ThunderTerraPod appropriate on mail talk. Catch you in the next one.