How to Use Tarot as an Herbalist
When I was still just a kid a rather perceptive aunt of mine gave me two books on herbalism (one on herbs in the garden, another on making herbal skin care remedies) and one book on tarot for my birthday. Since then, tarot and the workings of herbalism both medicinal and magickal have been inexorably linked, serving as the weft and weave of so much of my work.
Tarot is a storytelling tool - whether telling stories of the future, the distant past, the infinite present or stories that help us to understand whatever feelings we're slogging through. Sometimes tarot tells stories about relationships or points us in the direction of something to explore more of, like a helpful, living map. My earliest experiences of reading tarot for others were grounded in the sense of a language being unlocked and a fluency of connection being tapped into - it felt like a way to connect with my peers that I often struggled to do (a powerful spell at any time in our life, but especially those in those tender and trying middle school years).
Alongside my explorations of tarot, I was learning about the magickal world of plants, pouring through Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs as my guide to what I felt when amongst my green kin, but had only started finding words for. In the wooden box that I stored my tarot deck was a small chunk of amber resin given to me by a friendly hairdresser when she heard I had started reading cards, it’s rich plant-scent infusing the cards. My altar was full of dried plants much like the images of the cards themselves, rich with flower-abundant gardens and woodland spaces. If I was working with tarot I was working with plants and vice versa.
I’ve been using tarot since my herbal student days and continue to use it in my practice as a community herbalist. While tarot is never a diagnostic tool, it is a great tool for simple ritual, inclusive storytelling, and strengthening connection to our plant allies - skills that all kinds of herbalists and healing practitioners can benefit from.
Whether as a practitioner working with folks in their vulnerable moments of healing need or as students excited to be learning more about plants and magick, it's important that we have a number of places that we can return to, whether physically, emotionally, spiritually, that offer us space to process our experiences with students and clients, take care of our own needs so they don't muddy the waters of connection, and as a place to reflect on is going on around and within us. Some of these places are with other practitioners or with friends and family, but one of these places is at my altar with my tarot cards (or wherever my tarot deck and I happen to be).
So with that in mind, let's explore the ways that you might incoporate tarot into your practice as an herbalist. Whether you're brand new to using tarot (or oracle cards) or are a season tarot reader who doesn't know how to combine your tarot and herbal practices, the following guide offers a number of simple ways to find a connection between the book of healing that the tarot can be and our herbal path.
Deck Shown: The Gentle Tarot by mari in the sky
Casting Cards: Simple rituals & energetic check-ins
Rituals help to mark transitions through time and space, giving meaning to the rhythm of our days, months, seasons, and decades. I find rituals and all the ways they help us care for our complexity are an important aspect of creating an herbal practice that is not only helpful to those you work with, but cares for the longevity of you, the herbalist. Simple daily (or nightly) rituals help to untangle energetic knots, release stress, find humor and joy, and connect us to the very old ways of being human in this world while growing and dreaming ourselves into something new.
Thankfully, rituals do not rely on belief - they are a form of practice no different than a daily walk or making a cup of tea in the morning before starting work. Of course, rituals can be infused with belief or spiritual meaning, but that's a preference, not a requirement. It's important as practitioners to mark the time between working as an herbalist with a client or student and holding a certain level of professional conduct and expansive compassion versus when we are not working and can be messy, silly gooses (or ungovernable raccoons or semi-feral stone hags). To maintain these healthy boundaries we need to have regular ways of checking in with our energy which is one of the ways that tarot can be so useful for herbalists.
In Practice
My simple daily ritual before work looks something like this:
I light a candle, speak a few simple devotions, practice a few minutes of breathwork, and then pull a card or two to help me connect with my inner landscape. Sometimes the card points my attention towards a certain practice - on one particularly busy day a card's message reminded me to stay connected to my self-awareness practice more so than usual so I wouldn't get lost in worry about what needed doing that day. Other times a card might offer a different perspective on an issue that I've been feeling anxious about, helping to settle that energy so that I can focus on the workday ahead, while giving me something to return to and reflect on later in the evening to see how that anxious energy may have transformed. Sometimes the card acts like an inside joke, helping me to laugh and loosen up.
These daily practices are not about constant, incredible spiritual breakthroughs, but about signaling to ourselves that we are moving from one part of our day and responsibilities to another part while gently stirring awake our skills of observation and kinship.
While pulling a single card before you begin your work for the day is a great practice, if you're looking for a slightly more complex but still simple spread for your daily pull here is my favorite daily tarot practice.
For further inspiration, here are a variety of questions or prompts for you to consider for a daily draw:
A message from the plant spirits and/or specific plant ally.
A message from my ancestors.
How is {current season} showing up in my inner landscape?
What needs releasing? Where do I need to loosen up?
What needs strengthening?
What needs reconsidering?
Where do I need to pay more attention to?
What needs slowing down?
Deck Shown: Tarot by Caro by Caro Clarke
Telling Stories: Helping clients identify what they're feeling
Some clients who show up in consultation are adept at describing their inner landscape, from physical symptoms to emotional dysregulation. For others, being asked what they are feeling - and then being listened to for more than 15 minutes - is a totally new experience within a healing setting.
For most of us, learning how to talk about the experiences of our bodies (and I mean bodies in their most expansive form from the physical to the emotional to the mental and beyond) was not an education provided early in life and something that must be learned later on. Instead of relying solely on my client's sensory lexicon I make sure that I have resources like emotion and physical symptom word lists to help them tell me their story, including tools like the tarot. I might not use any of these tools, but even having them as an option signals to those we work with that they don’t have to have everything figured out and collaboration is a key part of their care. Fortunately, herbalism across culture possesses a sensory rich language to draw upon when helping folks find the words for their stories.
As a traditional western herbalist, I primarily work with the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water along with spirit not only as a way of organizing information about the physiological actions of herbs and the effects of illness and disease (alongside modern medical terminology) but also as a way of relaying information to and offering language for clients to use to understand their experiences in a way that honors their complexity. Tarot follows along the same elemental system and the visual language of tarot with its rich elemental landscape provides all sorts of useful ways of describing energy and experience. The language of tarot can help us speak with our clients, describe herbal actions, and make the process of working with herbs less mechanized and sterile and more earth-centered and inclusive.
In Practice
I have a tarot deck that I have sorted just for consultations. I'll separate and set aside the Major Arcana and then sort the Minor Arcana by suit. If a client is having a hard time describing what sort of stress they are feeling and they are interested in working with the tarot, I might hand them the stack of Swords cards. I'll have them look through them, setting out one or more of the cards that they resonate with. We'll talk about the card together, not its meaning in a divinatory sense, but what the images are bringing up for the client.
In general, I think of the suits of tarot corresponding to broad body systems as:
Pentacles: Sleep cycles and cognitive function
Swords: Stress and mental health
Cups: Emotional health and community connection (social bonds, relationships, etc)
Wands: Inherent energy and overall vitality
Here’s a sample scenario: Let's say that Verbena is a client looking for help with stress. She's been stressed for months and it's making it hard to sleep and focus during the day. When you ask Verbena what the stress feels like in her body, she struggles to describe anything. You ask them to look through the stack of Swords cards and they pull out the Three of Swords, explaining that the stress feels like it is sitting on her chest and she even remembers another symptom that she forgot to mention earlier - heart palpitations. Working with Verbena's description and the rest of the details from the appointment, you recommend Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) as part of the herbal blend you'll be making for her. The tarot helped to open up the storytelling part of the consultation, alleviating the pressure on Verbena of having to figure how to describe the stress she was having all on her own, and giving you as an herbalist extra insight into Verbena's sensory experience. You’re even able to tie the story of Motherwort’s gentle heart-strengthening energy to the images from the Three of Swords that Verbena resonated with, helping to facilitate a deeper connection between Verbena and the herb, Motherwort.
Sometimes I might pull out the stack of Major Arcana cards an ask a client to choose a card that represents what they want to feel, helping to create a visual language to describe the path they hope to walk along with the plant allies we’ll be working with.
Do I pull out tarot cards with everyone? No, but since folks are drawn to my practice because I do incorporate tarot into my work it's not unusual. I don't give readings of a divinatory nature during a consultation, but I love the playfulness that it can bring into a space, and see it as a tool for accessing language and connection. For my clients who have a tarot practice and want to use tarot as part of their healing work, tarot is your great tool and I have a number of simple practices I recommend to folks.
If you're interested in using tarot in this way, I encourage you to take out your deck, sort it like I’ve suggested, and start playing with it to help you identify your own feelings and experiences. Say you want to make yourself a tea to help you destress after a long day, but before you start pulling out herbs, pull out your cards and find the images that best reflect how you're feeling, naming aloud what images speak to your experiences. Can you connect the language you might use in consultations to the images you see in cards (such as talking of tension when looking at the Nine of Swords or overwhelm that leads to hypoactivity when looking at the Ten of Swords)? The more you practice, the more you'll be able to bring these story skills into your consultations.
An important note: Feelings do come up in consultations and classrooms (as they should) and it's important as herbalists to know how to listen, reflect, and provide resources while remembering that as an herbalist unless you're a therapist, you're not a therapist. It's good to know your own boundaries, what plant remedies can and cannot do, and have a list of recommended resources to be able to pass along to folks. Stress, burnout, and anxiety, for example, are common reasons that someone might seek out an herbalist, and while plants are excellent as addressing these sort of complaints, there are also times when we need to use our skills of observation to notice when what the client thinks is general anxiety might be something more complex (such as undiagnosed OCD or ADHD) and suggest resources beyond an herbal consultation.
Deck Shown: The Herbcrafter’s Tarot by Latisha Gurthrie
Finding Guidance: Using tarot to connect with plant allies
Like many herbalists, plants are not only sources of medicinal gifts, but are living beings who act as guides and teachers. Tarot, as a tool of storytelling, discernment, and communication, can help strengthen our connections with our plant allies. I love pulling cards as one of the ways of getting to know new plants in my practice or deepening my connection with familiar plant friends.
Tarot is also useful in helping us access muscles of intuition that we may not have used a lot in our training as herbalists. While some of us may have experienced plants-as-kin practices as students, others may have had strictly clinical approaches where opportunities for relationship-building with our plant allies was limited. Tarot can be an excellent communication bridge, helping us drink from the well of wisdom from plants themselves.
In Practice
While I wrote a tarot spread for connecting with plant allies over a decade ago, there are plenty of ways of working with tarot to connect with new or familiar plant allies:
As you think of a plant ally you are getting to know, look through your tarot deck pulling out cards that feel like or remind you of this plant ally. Try to work with your feeling body more than your thinking body, trying not to get caught up in what you think is the "right" or "logical" choice. Once you've chosen your cards, lay them out in a line in front of you and read them like a story that your plant ally is telling you.
Spend a full lunar cycle pulling a card every day while connecting with your plant ally. You might choose to use a remedy made up of your plant ally before pulling a card (i.e. taking a few drops of Rosa damascena tincture if you're working with Rose as a plant ally) or simply invite them into your space energetically.
Working with the astrological correspondences of your plant ally, pull out the tarot cards that have the same correspondences. Rose is associated with Venus, so you might pull out the Empress and/or the Lovers cards and read those as a way to understand some of Rose's energetic qualities. You can find more astrological correspondences for tarot in The Tarot Apothecary.
You can also cast any kind of tarot spread while calling on the energy of your plant ally to help guide you. And you don't have to believe that you are literally being guided by a plant but use it as an energetic metaphor to open up the parts of you that need help receiving insight and guidance, such as working with Linden (Tilia x europaea) to open up your heart to hope. Working with tarot in your herbalism practice is an invitation to play, to loosen up what you think is possible, and find new ways of getting inspired in your work. If you're looking for more tarot inspiration, check out my archive of tarot spreads.
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Do you already use tarot in your practice as an herbalist? I feel like it is more common than ever for tarot to show up in healing, herbal, and therapeutic spaces. It’s pretty incredible how a centuries old stack of cards continues to shift and change with the times - I can’t wait to see what tarot culture looks like in the decades ahead.
While you can use any tarot deck that you want, I’ve also written about my favorite decks for herbalists if you’re looking for some inspiration (or, like me, never tire of reading about tarot). If you’re wanting a deeper dive into the world of tarot and herbalism, I invite you to join me in The Tarot Apothecary where I guide folks through reading the tarot like a book of healing.
Wherever your path as an herbalist takes you, I hope that the stories between people and plants flows freely, and that you always have the language needed to know your own.
This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎
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Tarot Decks Shown
The Gentle Tarot by mari in the sky
Tarot by Caro by Caro Clarke
The Herbcrafter’s Tarot by Latisha Guthrie
