Tarot and the Saints: Gender, Queerness, and Reclaiming the Sacred in an All-Woman Deck

If someone asks me if I am religious, I inevitably struggle to respond. It is not quite a crisis of faith: I am a cradle Catholic, and do, in fact, still identify as Catholic today. The hesitation, I think, comes from knowing what Catholicism evokes for many in my community: conservative politics, anti-homosexuality, and centuries of hate, fear and harm. 

If I am still Catholic, it is because of my lifelong fascination with the mystic strains of the faith: the transubstantiation, the stigmata, the dark, gothic, and intuitive side of religion—and always, always the lives of the martyrs and saints. 

As an adult I have become increasingly drawn to what can be broadly termed new age practices, as many of us do when searching for something beyond our first faith. It’s a bit of an irony after a childhood spent with a strong but vague fear of anything occult, like crystals or Ouija boards (I suspect I am not alone in this childhood terror, especially among evangelical strains of the faith). Today, I think of these practices as an addition to, rather than a substitution for, my Catholicism.

The Saints Tarot Deck

It is this personal quest to meld Catholic mysticism with new age magic that inspired me to create The Saints Tarot deck. The Saints Tarot mirrors a standard tarot deck. Both consist of 78 cards. 22 lie in the Major Arcana, where you find “classic” imagery such as the High Priestess and Death. The remaining 56 are spread across four suites: wands for creativity, cups for emotion, swords for action, and pentacles for worldly needs. 

There are, of course, far more than 78 saints; while there is no official number of Christian or Catholic saints, estimates begin around 10,000. It’s theorized that a quarter of those saints are women.

In my deck, each tarot card is paired with one saint. All the saints are women, and all date from the post-Biblical age (where you find Mary, it is in her later apparitions back to earth). I have pulled from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican traditions, from folk saints, beguines, mystics, the venerable, and the blessed. Many are well-documented historical figures; some have a long history of regional devotion despite being quietly “retired” by Vatican II. 

Pairing saints to tarot symbolism was a process of intuition, pulling from my six-year study and practice of the tarot alongside a lifetime spent immersed in the lives of the saints.

Reclaiming women’s histories

Theresa of Avila became the Moon, her mystical rapture mirroring the card of our deepest fears and desires. The Magician, a sign of resourcefulness and action, paired with the social justice champion Dorothy Day. Clare of Assisi, who followed her spiritual brother down a “Fool’s Path,” begins the Major Arcana. Brigid is the Empress, a sign of fertility and nature—fitting since many believe Brigid to be the goddess of the pagan holiday Imbolc.

At the heart of my work is a desire to reclaim these women who have fascinated and guided me throughout my life: to honor their radical legacy as historical figures, reclaim them from the patriarchy of the Catholic Church, and offer queered interpretations of how they can serve as guides.

My first desire is to reintroduce my saints as historical women. It’s been said that women occupy less than one percent of recorded history. How extraordinary it is then, that we do have hundreds of stories of these women who occupied a sphere of public life—or at least of public imagination. I’m interested less in strict historical veracity (hagiographies, or written lives of the saints, are notoriously fantastical) than in the immutable fact that these women were known, revered and memorialized. 

Their surviving stories have the power to upend our understanding of personal agency and choice in historical women’s lives. Some were writers, and we see the birth of autobiography in the mystic writings of Julian of Norwich (The Hierophant), Hildegard of Bingen (The Hermit) and as far back as the 3th century Perpetua (The Star). Some were preachers who spoke publicly on the streets like Rose of Viterbo (Two of Wands) or traveled extensively like Margery Kempe (Five of Wands). And some, like Saint Catherine of Siena (The Lovers), wielded real political influence across regions. 

So I wish to illuminate these extraordinary women as the writers, autobiographers, radicals, preachers, and mystic messengers that they were. I think of them as my ancestors and my spiritual guides. And I dearly want to claim them as guides/intercessors outside of the confines of the Church—a church that has neither been inclusive to women historically, nor so very equitable for women today.

Queering the Tarot

I also hope to offer new understandings of some saints; queered understandings, if you will, that come from the deepest part of my own faith and identity. I see trans identities, not just in Joan of Arc (The Chariot) and Marinos (Nine of Cups), but in Therese of Lisieux (The Emperor), who felt so unshakably that her vocation was to be a priest.

I seek out queerness in the myths of Felicity and Perpetua, Brigid and Darlughdach, and Our Lady of Montevergine (Queen of Cups). The very concept of queerness finds resonance in these stories: breaking away from society’s conventions, living a life outside the norm, or acting outside of society’s understanding, is in some way inherently queered.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge that by nature of subject matter, this deck is overwhelmingly European and white. The canon of saints pulls predominantly from Western Europe, and with the European church comes a long and devastating history of colonization and forced conversions.

The stories of saints from colonized regions is a complicated one and I take utmost care in acknowledging the dualities of colonizer-religion and personal choice when working with women like Kateria Tekawitha (Justice) and Josephine Bakhita (The Wheel of Fortune).

My hope is that these cards will be used by people from all walks of spiritual life: whether practicing Christian or lapsed Catholic, long-time tarot readers or  those picking up their first deck. Since announcing the deck on social media, I have heard from so many fellow seekers: recovering Catholics who still hold a fondness for the saints; newly converted Catholics wondering how they can bring a decades-long tarot practice into their faith; women whose grandmothers practiced Benedicaria and see connections between their use of saint prayer cards and this deck. 

Tarot is, after all, a product of Renaissance Italy, the very place and time that produced many of the Church’s most renowned saints. The cards have always relied heavily on Christian imagery and Biblical metaphors, immutably the product of a Christianized worldview. Mine is perhaps just the latest iteration in a long history of blending the esoteric with the dogmatic. 

Originally published in The Commons. All work at The Commons is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/