My name is Lilly Slaydon.

The beginnings of these things are sometimes a little murky, but I can confidently say that my conversation with the tarot cards began on January 21, 2004. That’s when MM (my Mother’s Mother, never “grandma,” thankyouverymuch) gave me a Rider-Waite-Smith deck as a present for my thirteenth birthday. She gave me no instruction except for this: go through the deck and write down your own impressions of each card before you look them up. Don’t shrug those perceptions off if they don’t match the little white book. Give them time. Let them work on you.

So that’s how I started. At thirteen, my first tarot notes were in rainbow gel pen, on a tiny little blue-plush-covered notebook. That little book became the first Tarot Encyclopedia.

From sixteen to twenty I entered a stage of rigid-minded rationalism and set the deck down without looking at it once. I wouldn’t know it until many years later, but this was actually the most important stage in my development as a reader. Anyone doing spiritual work who has never doubted is lying.

But I didn’t have the luxury of remaining in that comfortingly logical space for very long. Some compulsion drove me to pick up the cards again, seemingly at random, and they told me something I did not want to know. Impossible, I told myself. Lucky that none of this is real. But then of course, that night, the thing I didn’t want to know made itself painfully clear in my ‘real’ life. And I was forced to confront the fact that I’d seen it first in the cards.

So I started again at the beginning. I wrote down my impressions, and compared them to both my old rainbow gel pen pages and the definitions in the little white book. I sat with the similarities and the differences. I gave them time. I let them work on me. This was the second iteration of the Tarot Encyclopedia.

Over time, I incorporated correspondences with astrology, kabbalah, mythical archetypes, modern psychology, pop culture, ceremonial magick with a k, and much more. I learned the Thoth system and began working with other decks besides my reliable Rider-Waite-Smith from MM. I honed my understanding of each card to provide keywords encapsulating the meaning of each, one for the upright meaning and one for the reversed. I read, constantly, and wrote things down. My book became more and more complete.

The current Tarot Encyclopedia is its fifth iteration.

Then something happened. A global pandemic made in-person readings impossible. I found myself blocked for the first time since my reintroduction to the cards over ten years ago. And I was forced to shed the last remaining thread of that rigid-minded rationalism that had been holding me back. When you are reading cards for someone in person, there’s a physical exchange of energies. And we may not understand it, but it’s clear that’s what’s happening— the client shuffles, the client chooses the cards, the reader deals them. The energy moves between us.

In a remote reading, the reader has no choice but to open the way for their own guiding energies to connect to those of the client. The absence of physicality means there is no escaping the fact of what one is doing, which is: Becoming the channel. Making the way clear. Receiving and communicating the message. This is what it’s always been.

The tarot is a tool. Why does it work? I don’t know. But it does. What I do know is how to use it.

The cards, as they say, don’t lie.

See you soon.