Let’s celebrate Pride and all the inspirational queer witches out there with some Pride-focused tarot spreads!
By Rebecca Bell and Eleanor Tremeer
It’s Pride month! And to celebrate, we have put together some great LGBT tarot spreads. The queer experience is all about self-discovery, making queerness and tarot the perfect partnership! These spreads have been designed with LGBT topics in mind, and should help you understand yourself better, regardless of how you identify. Most of all, they’re Pride spreads, so they’re focused on self-acceptance and identity celebration. So let’s dive into it!
The Gender Exploration Spread
Gender is complex! It’s a social construct, which collects a host of behaviours, attributes, appearances, etc and packages them into two boxes: male or female. Reality, of course, can’t be quite so easily condensed. Regardless of how we’re assigned at birth, we all have a masculine and a feminine side, and many other sides as well. So it’s good to check in with yourself sometimes, to find the parts that hide and the parts express themselves freely. How do they relate to each other, and how can you own them with pride to be the truest you?
Method:
You can either chose one deck, or three decks for this spread. For one deck, shuffle the cards and split them into three piles. If you feel you have three decks that speak to different parts of your gender, listen to it and use those decks to represent your Feminine, Non-binary, and Masculine aspects.
Once you have your three card piles — Feminine on the left, Non-Binary in the middle and Masculine to the right — it’s time to draw, laying out three columns.
- Feminine 1: what does femininity mean to you?
- Feminine 2: how can you embrace your femininity?
- Feminine 3: what blocks you from expressing your femininity?
- Non-binary 1: what about you cannot be ascribed to any gender?
- Non-binary 2: how can you play with, or experiment with gender?
- Non-binary 3: in what form of expression do you feel most yourself?
- Masculine 1: what is your relationship with masculinity?
- Masculine 2: where do you find joy in the masculine?
- Masculine 3: how can you overcome problems with masculinity?
You contain multitudes of gender aspects, so explore them! You might be surprised at what you find… And it may help to keep a record of your results, and try this spread again throughout the year to see how fluid your gender aspects can be. Sometimes your feminine energies will overpower your masculine, and other times you might find you can’t relate to either of the two traditional genders, but instead reside in the liminal space between.
All The Colours Of Pride Spread
Hoist the flag! This spread is a great all-rounder for tarot reading, and a great ice breaker if you want to show off your tarot reading skills with friends! It’s inspired by what each colour stands for on the Pride flag, according to original creator Gilbert Baker. We’ve also added Daniel Quasar’s Progress version, as a modern update to the classic flag.
Method:
For this reading, you will need one deck and a nice big space to lay your cards. If you have a pride flag you can use this to lay each card on each stripe, as a nice reminder of the colour correspondence between the card and the readings. To start, chose your trusty tarot deck and give it a good shuffle while thinking about the questions you want to ask it, based on the colour meanings. If inspiration doesn’t strike, here are some example questions for each colour:
- Pink / sex – what do you need most from your partners?⠀
- Red / life – how can you be more fulfilled in life?⠀
- Orange / healing – what do you need to heal from? ⠀
- Yellow / sunlight – in what area of life do you shine the brightest?⠀
- Green / nature – what is your most natural state of being?⠀
- Turquiose / magic – what is your purest, most magical method of creation?⠀
- Indigo / serenity – how can you be a force for peace in this world?⠀
- Purple / spirit – what unites you with others?⠀
- Progress – how can you help your community move forward?⠀
Be Loud and Proud – Pride is not just for pride month!
Use this spread to take the wisdom of pride month and the joy of queerness to celebrate yourself every fricking day!
Method:
We have chosen our favourite healing deck for this spread The Luna Sol Tarot, but you can chose whatever deck you feel comfort with. This is also a great spread to use when doing a reading for a friend, as you can work together on the last card!
To start surround yourself in a big comforting hug of healing energy as you shuffle the cards. Then working from the bottom left corner work across and upward as the energies lift you.
- Present – How does your identity make you strong?
- Growth – How have you grown because of this identity?
- Energy – What is the passion that drives your identity?
- Community – How will your identity strengthen bonds?
- Creative – How does your identity manifest in expression?
- Love – How will you bring self-care into your day?
- Awareness – How can you help others in the LGBQT community?
If you do these spreads, feel free to comment with your results! And if you want more spreads, check out: Tarot Spread: Bloom into Spring, Tarot Spread: Dream Path of the Spheres and The Tarot of Love.
