Cassandra Snow takes readers on a queer tour of tarot reading. Check out the first two parts: Queering the Tarot, and Queering the Tarot: Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

Magic, luck, creation—these are just a few keywords often ascribed to The Magician—1. The Magician represents being able to use the skills and resources at your disposal to create change in your life and the world at large. Delving a little deeper, this card also indicates creating through the law of attraction the life you desire. It’s a card of having mapped out and planned for the life you want to create, and being ready to step into the world and share all those skills and resources you’ve just mastered. It’s a card signifying that a transformation has happened within, and you are now ready to take all of these skills and magic contained inside of you out into the world, and the result will be a transformed life. The minor prophecies therefore include instances of luck—meetings, e-mails, phone calls all meant to take our life from the “I’m ready” to the “I’m actually doing this” stage.

When we look at reading for the LGBTQIA* crowd, the base interpretation of this card doesn’t change. This is one of those cards where knowing a lot about the queer experience comes in far more handy than knowing a lot about the tarot. As discussed in my article on queering The Fool, queer people often go through quite a journey to even get to the point of realizing they are a queer person, let alone coming out and living as one. This journey can come with a lot of shame and missteps along the way. While normally The Magician is seen as an early stages life card, for queer people, assuming this would be a mistake. It often takes years to feel comfortable presenting as a gender you weren’t assigned at birth. It can take many sexual partners to figure out how you fall in terms of sexual identity or kink preference. This card showing up for a queer person is not about that moment after The Fool, when you realize it’s okay to be you. It’s possibly years later when you’ve actually hammered out what “being you” looks and feels like, and what you want the rest of your life as your true self to look like. This for LGBTQIA* people is when the magic starts happening.

Specific applications of The Magician in a queered up reading would look something like this. The querant came out awhile ago, and has been dating around a lot, but nothing has really clicked. They ask about relationships, and The Magician shows up. For many querants this would indicate that chance meeting or attracting the partner we want through magic and will, but for a queer person, this can mean that only now are you even ready for a relationship, which certainly explains why nothing has clicked yet. This is extra true for someone who is kinky or polyamorous, as those identities take a lot of trial and error to figure out what works best for you as an individual. The Magician also shifts when we look at gender identity. Transitioning can be a long process, upon which significant transformations have obviously taken place, and it’s once the querant is comfortable with those changes that they can think about other areas of their life—like new romance, in this example. The Magician wouldn’t show up when one is ready to live as a man, but when one is ready to date as one.

Even if the question isn’t about a new relationship, a queer person still has to feel ready and secure in themselves and the journey they’ve undergone to think about succeeding or attracting good things. The Magician will show up when a client—queer or not, is ready to embrace those good things.