Brittany Muller: Contemplation in the Cards
By: Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo
Tags: Christianity, Instagram, Contemplation, Tarot, Conversations

The Six of Coins card from the Tarot of the Saints. Photo courtesy of Brittany Muller.

Brittany and I met through Instagram (no, I didn’t send her one of those Deuteronomy dms she refers to.) Following her account, blessed.vigil, has been a comfort, a revelation, and a challenge, especially to to my ideas about tarot. (Those things sure sound like spiritual practice!) I wish that I lived in New York City so I could tag along with her to the Met. In the meantime, this edited email conversation will have to suffice.

Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo: How did you get involved in tarot?

Brittany Muller: I bought my first tarot deck about five years ago. I was in a difficult place in my life at the time. I had a husband who was very busy with law school, a new city to adjust to, and two kids under the age of two at home. I spent a lot of time feeling very overwhelmed! I started to look for ways to create a little space for myself in my day-to-day life, and I had a few online friends who enjoyed playing with tarot cards. I bought a deck for myself and immediately fell in love with the imagery. In those early days with tarot, I would pull a single card for myself every day and spend just five minutes focusing on a single image, thinking about how that image might reflect some aspect of my own life and what that might mean for me.

EHF: At this point, did you have any twinges about tarot stigma?

BM: It was definitely something I kept quiet about for some time. While I didn’t feel like I was doing anything dangerous or sinful by using tarot in a meditative way, there’s still such a stigma attached to tarot that I was sort of impulsively secretive about it for awhile.

This is maybe prosaic, but mostly I wish I could dispel the idea that tarot is somehow Satanic or only used for fortune-telling. In popular culture, tarot has been mostly the domain of witches attempting to tell the future, so there’s a lot of superstition surrounding tarot cards. But tarot is having something of a cultural moment lately, and it’s being used in very different ways now. Most tarot readers I know use the cards as journaling prompts or as a tool for self-reflection. These days, when you get a tarot reading, you’re more likely to have an experience that’s akin to a deep conversation with a friend than you are to experience any woo-woo fortune-telling. And this is how I use tarot as well! I get a lot of Instagram dms that quote the Deuteronomy passage about fortune-telling, and I do indeed think it’s wildly hubristic to think that any person can know the future. But tarot has more than one use, more than one purpose. It wasn’t something I was using to tell the future as much as it was a way to create a little pocket of reflection during days that were very outwardly-focused on the immediacy of caring for young children.

EHF: I would love to hear more about this tension between reflection and having to be outward focused. That seems very much like a motherhood angle that most people don’t describe. I would think that it has to do also with the space and time reflection requires…

BM: Reflection does require some interiority, and that’s difficult to find when you’re at home with young children all day. Even when they had moments when they would play by themselves, I always had one ear cocked in case one of them needed something. I felt like I was always focused on them, always anticipating their needs, and tarot was a tool that helped me to stop and relax into a more inward-focused state for even a few minutes at a time.

EHF: What about it connects spirituality and faith with tarot for you?

The Ace of Swords card from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot Deck. Photo courtesy of Brittany Muller.

BM: We live in a world that’s constantly fighting for our attention. It’s very easy for us to move through our days without a single moment of quiet. We always have our phones at hand, you know? Things like social media are designed to be addictive, and so it’s difficult sometimes to fight the impulse to fill every minute with some kind of distraction. I’m always looking for ways to push back against that impulse and to live in a more spacious and reflective space, one that’s more attuned to God’s sense of time than my own. Religion certainly does this for me. Things like going to church every Sunday and praying the daily office help me to live in a more intentional and less distracted way. And tarot does the same thing! It’s self-reflective by nature. It invites a slowing down. It invites a different kind of attention. It puts me in a more intentional and prayerful state of mind.

I’m inspired by the people I know, in real life and through social media, who are trying to live contemplative lives in a world that seems to actively work against any sort of contemplation. In my blending of tarot with religion, I sort of have one foot in both worlds. I wouldn’t say there’s a large overlap between these two groups, but I have found that they’re similar in some ways, and one of those ways is their commitment to a more contemplative and self-reflective kind of life. I’m inspired by fellow Christians who have a deep love for the liturgy and the way it invites us into a different notion of time. And I’m equally inspired by the tarot readers I know who are so deeply committed to self-reflection. They use tarot to help know themselves more fully and live more deliberate lives because of it.

EHF: How do you use it in a faith practice?

BM: Every morning I wake up a little earlier than my kids do, I make coffee, and I pray the daily office from the Book of Common Prayer. I also pull a tarot card during this morning prayer time. Usually I pull just one card, sometimes several, rarely more than three. And then I reflect on the readings for the day and my card for the day and how they might connect. If I wake up early enough or my kids sleep late enough, I’ll spend some time writing out my thoughts. It’s a way to add an extra layer of depth to my prayer life. For me, it feels similar to the practice of visio divina, using divine images in prayer. And while tarot cards aren’t explicitly religious images in the way, say, icons are, they do depict what I feel to be universal human experiences. And there is often a religious bent to many of the cards, depending on what tarot deck you use. I most often use the Rider-Waite tarot deck, and the illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith, was a Catholic convert, so there is familiar imagery.

EHF: Is there a particular story or image that inspires you?

BM: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot on the story of Mary and Martha. I’m a stay-at-home mom, and my days mostly consist of tending to my kids’ immediate needs. It’s so easy to get pulled into the never-ending to-do list and let everything else, including prayer, collect dust. Because someone has to do the dishes and feed the kids breakfast and make sure everyone has clean underwear and so on and so on. I really identify with Martha and where she’s coming from, and I come back to the story of Mary and Martha to remind myself that prayer is also important. I mean, it’s necessary. It’s not a nice thing I can do when I have time for it. Mary reminds me that Christ should be the sun around which my whole life revolves. That prayer should be my center of gravity. And if I’m not showing my kids that Christ should be the thing that there is always time for, what am I even doing?

EHF: This is a very helpful exegesis! I know so many women who are irritated by this story. Thank you. Will you say a bit more about your familiarity with these particular texts and rituals? How did you choose the Book of Common Prayer?

BM: I returned full-force to Christianity about a year and half ago, and my husband and I joined an Episcopal church, and I’ve been introduced to the BCP that way. It’s such a rich resource, and I’ve loved having set morning and evening prayers. On the subject of visio divina, part of what led me back to Christianity was spending long mornings at the [Metropolitan Museum of Art] after we moved to New York.

The Young Saint John the Baptist by Piero di Cosimo, ca. 1480–82. At The Met in Gallery 640.

I was regularly surrounded by truly extraordinary art. It was overwhelming in the best way, and eventually I realized that I could not explain such heart-stopping beauty in a non-theistic context. Once I realized this, I started spending a lot of time researching subjects related to art and religion and prayer, mostly as a way to explain how I was somehow coming to believe in God again after spending hours staring at Monet paintings. I came across the prayer practice of visio divina, using images in prayer as a way of focusing oneself and entering a contemplative state and truly seeing in a new way. It felt like exactly what I had been doing without having a name for it, and also explained so well the way in which I use tarot.

EHF: Where does the overlap of religion and tarot challenge you?

BM: I spent my formative teenage years as a Catholic, and a deeply devout one at that. I loved the Catholic Church, and I toed the doctrinal line pretty hard. I whole-heartedly believed that the capital-T Truth could be found in the Catholic Church and absolutely nowhere else. In college, I had a crisis of faith and left the Catholic Church and Christianity as a whole for almost a decade. It was during this time that I came to tarot, and tarot played a big part in leading me back to God. At the time, tarot was the only thing in my life that created enough quiet space for me to reflect on my own feelings of lack in the wake of my loss of faith. My tarot practice was still enough and reflective enough to allow me to hear the voice of God. To meet God in that way was a deeply humbling experience for me. It’s challenged me to open myself to the idea that God can be found and seen and heard in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places. Who am I to say where God can and cannot work?