The Swifties and the Cards

There is something about a themed birthday party that brings a crowd together before anything else gets started. Everyone is already in on the joke, already dressed for it, already laughing. That kind of room is great to work in because the warmth is already there and all I have to do is match it.

I went through reading after reading and people were engaged the whole way through. One after the other, sitting down, leaning in, asking questions. The feedback at the end was genuinely lovely and I left the night looking forward to working with them again. We were even chatting afterwards about magic as well as tarot, which is always a good sign.

First-Timers

What struck me about this group was how many people were sitting down for their very first tarot reading. That is one of my favourite things about hen parties and birthday events. You get people who would never have sought out a reading on their own, who come over out of curiosity or because their friend dragged them along, and then they get completely absorbed in it.

With a room full of first-timers I always take a bit of time at the start to clear up the myths. That tarot is not about predicting the future. That I am not claiming to be psychic. That the cards are more like a mirror than a crystal ball. They give you something to react to, a starting point for a real conversation. Once people understand that, they relax into it and the readings go somewhere much more interesting.

The Card of the Night: The Hierophant

One card came up more than any other across the readings and it was the Hierophant. A fitting one for a room full of people navigating their thirties.

The Hierophant is about tradition and the way we approach things we have always done a certain way. On the card there are keys lying at its feet, visible to everyone around it except the Hierophant itself. Those keys represent the paths to what it is looking for. Everyone else can see them. The Hierophant cannot because it is too locked into its own perspective to look.

That is what this card asks you to examine. If you have been trying to get somewhere and keep hitting the same wall, the answer is probably not to try harder in the same direction. It is to step back, look at it differently and try a new approach. The keys are already there. You just have to be willing to see them.

For a room of people turning thirty, that landed. Thirties are often when people start questioning whether the path they set themselves on is still the right one. The Hierophant showing up again and again felt very deliberate.