The Contemplative Tarot: An Interview with Brittany Muller
Note: I recently came across Brittany Muller, a Catholic author with an interested in Tarot, the Church Fathers, and contemplative living, among other things. She recently completed a new book on using Tarot as a contemplative spiritual practice. I reached out for an interview, and our discussion is below.
1. There's been an explosion of interest in Tarot cards. When did you first discover Tarot? What drew you to it?
I first discovered tarot in 2015. It was an overwhelming time in my life – my husband was in law school (ie, very busy) and I was a stay at home mom to our two sons who were both under the age of two. I was adjusting to life with two young children and I didn’t have much time to myself or much order to my days, both of which were difficult for me. We were living in Austin, which is kind of a witchy place, and I had friends who played around with tarot cards. I thought it seemed interesting, so I looked at some different decks online and found the art of the Rider-Waite tarot to be aesthetically captivating. I bought a deck of cards and immediately fell in love with tarot. Tarot really did give me what I was looking for at the time, spiritually speaking. After I bought the deck I started pulling a card each morning and spending ten minutes or so writing about it. I never used it for divination; I just liked to think about the art and what it meant to me. For me, it was an easy way to create a little orderly ritual for myself and to give myself something pretty and pleasing to pay attention to during a time when my daily responsibilities were often demanding.
2. You are now a Catholic, but, correct me if I'm wrong, this wasn't always the case. What drew you to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular?
My story with religion is a bit meandering! I grew up in a religious home, but we weren’t settled about it. My family moved around a lot when I was a kid and we tended to hop around Protestant denominations too, trying out different churches every time we moved: Methodist, Presbyterian, Southern Baptist. When I was fourteen, my family converted to Catholicism (I won’t get into the details of that here, but it had a lot to do with my grandfather, whose influence on my life cannot be underestimated). Catholicism stuck, and I spent the rest of my teenage years as a devout Catholic: going to daily mass, reading a lot of theology, even considering a vocation to religious life. However, I left Catholicism, and organized religion altogether, in my early twenties. People ask me about this often, and I still haven’t found a good answer for why I left. My husband regularly wonders how I was ever not Catholic. But I think that, more than anything else, I started to have doubts about my faith that I didn’t know how to handle. I didn’t know how to be Catholic without being all in, and I did’t know how to be Christian without being Catholic, so I wasn’t anything at all for a very long time.
I did start going to church again, eventually. After my husband graduated from law school we spent a few years living in New York. My husband suggested we start going to church as a way to find community, so we became members of an Episcopal church in our neighborhood (Church of the Heavenly Rest on the Upper East Side, which is a church I can’t say enough good things about). Attending church services regularly reminded me of all the things I missed about organized religion, and attending an Episcopal church specifically, with its liturgical similarities to Catholicism, reminded me of all the things I missed about being Catholic. So when we moved back to Austin last summer, we became parishioners at a Catholic church here. My husband converted and we’re raising our kids as Catholics. I go to mass every Sunday and I go to confession regularly and I’m an all-in Catholic again.
I wouldn’t say that I always feel comfortable being Catholic, but I also feel like I don’t belong anywhere else. I think there’s something to be said for being part of a community, no matter how imperfect, and trying to make it work. For me, that community is Catholicism. I have deep disagreements with certain aspects of Catholicism, but it’s the faith of my family, and it has a strong enough hold on me that no other religion fits me quite the same way. Also, mysticism is an important part of my spirituality, and Catholicism has such a rich mystical tradition. I want to be part of whatever Joan of Arc, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas Merton were a part of, even if what they were a part of is a complete and utter mess sometimes. I don’t always love the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church doesn’t always love me, but this is my faith and I belong here too.
3. Among Christians, Tarot can be controversial, with many evangelicals and even Catholics considering it dangerous spiritually. How did you personally reconcile the two?
I definitely grew up in a religious environment which taught me that tarot was spiritually dangerous because of its associations with the occult. When I started using tarot, I was in a period in my life during which I was deliberately distanced from Christianity, so its seeming sinfulness wasn’t a problem for me. And as I came back to Christianity, I found my faith and tarot surprisingly easy to reconcile. Indeed, tarot was one of the specific things that led me back to Christianity.
When I started using tarot, what I found was a wealth of Christian imagery. This Christian influence was surprising to me until I learned more about tarot’s history, especially its origins as a card game in the Italian Renaissance. While tarot has occult associations, it doesn’t have occult beginnings. It comes from the same cultural tradition as Dante and Petrarch; there’s a deep neo-Platonic influence. For me, regularly interacting with Christian archetypes like Justice, Temperance, the Hermit, and even the Devil piqued my spiritual interest in a way nothing else did during those years away from organized religion. Here was the Christianity of my childhood in a most surprising place.
Christianity’s problem with tarot lies in tarot’s use as a divinatory tool. Divination goes against Catholic teaching, but since I’ve never used tarot in that way, it’s difficult for me to feel like tarot is spiritually dangerous. I feel like much of the evangelizing I do around tarot is simply trying to convince Christians that tarot can be used for something other than fortune-telling. If I can convince a Christian of that, then they’re usually more amenable to the idea of using tarot in a prayerful way, and we can have fruitful conversations. Of course there are some folks who think it’s dangerous regardless of how it’s used, that the physical deck itself contains some measure of evil, but I find that to be a superstitious view of things.
4. You use Tarot cards as part of your spiritual practice. Most people assume divination is the only way to do this. How do you use Tarot cards as part of your spiritual life?
This is the question I get asked most often by Christians interested in tarot! It’s such a common question that I wrote an entire chapter on it for The Contemplative Tarot, which details different methods for using tarot in prayerful, non-divinatory ways.
In the interest of space, I won’t detail all the different methods here. But I will say that most all of them fall under the umbrella of visio divina. Visio divina is a contemplative prayer practice which involves praying with images. Translated as “divine seeing,” it’s similar to its more popular cousin, lectio divina, but instead of using Scripture, one uses art to help set one’s mind on prayer. When I pray using visio divina, I choose a religious artwork, settle myself somewhere quiet, and spend ten or fifteen minutes praying while meditating on the art. For all my waxing poetic on the internet about contemplative prayer, I actually often have a hard time with it, and using art to focus myself is helpful for me.
Tarot is one of the religious art forms I use for visio divina. For me, this feels like a natural way to use tarot, similar to the ways in which icons or any other explicitly religious art can be used to set one’s mind on prayer. For folks who are only familiar with tarot’s associations with the occult, it can seem strange to use tarot as a tool for visio divina, but, as I wrote above, tarot truly is filled to the brim with religious imagery, and I think that tarot lends itself well to this kind of contemplative practice.
5. You wrote a new book on Tarot and contemplative living. What inspired the book? What can people expect to learn from it?
When I first started using tarot in 2015, I started an Instagram account to talk about it and find other tarot people. My following grew, and when, a few years later, I narrowed my focus to write specifically about tarot and Christianity, my following grew even more. I had started to toy with the idea of writing a book about tarot and Christianity, and the idea became more pressing as I had more people asking me for resources on how to use tarot in a way that aligns with Christian teaching. There are very few resources on this idea, as it turns out, and writing a book seemed like the best way to formally present my ideas.
The merging of tarot and Christianity is an unusual idea. It’s not talked about often, there aren’t many resources on the topic, and so I’m hoping that The Contemplative Tarot will be a good beginner’s guide to the subject. I wrote this book for Christians who are interested in tarot but know little or nothing about it. While the bulk of the book consists of meditations and reflection questions on each of the seventy-eight cards, there are also chapters on the history of tarot, why and how tarot can be useful in Christian spirituality, and practical ways to use tarot in one’s life of prayer. I want this book to be one that gives Christians permission to explore tarot and how it might have a place in their spiritual lives.
6. What's the reaction been to the book so far? Are you seeing a new openness to alternative spiritual practices among Catholics and other Christians?
The reaction to the book has been surprisingly positive so far! I’ll admit that I’m still hesitant to talk about the book with Christians I meet in real life, because I never know what the reaction will be, but most folks have at least been polite about it. Of course there’s been pushback among conservative Catholic news sites, but that’s to be expected, and I can hardly blame them – a story about a devout Catholic using tarot makes for great clickbait.
In general, I’ve been surprised about Christians’ openness to tarot, especially among younger Christians in their twenties and thirties. I do think this openness has been helped along by tarot’s renaissance in the last decade or so. Tarot is enjoying a new popularity right now, and I feel like it’s popular in a different way than it used to be. Most of the people I know who use tarot now are using it not for divination but for meditation and self-reflection. There are a number of popular tarot books right now that view tarot through this non-divinatory lens. I think that, for Christians, it makes it easier to see tarot as something they can use too. Removing tarot from a fortune-telling context makes it feel less potentially sinful.
7. Let's say someone wants to learn more about Tarot and Christianity. Other than your book, do you have any recommended resources?
As I’ve said, there aren’t many resources on this topic, which is a shame, but I can’t talk about the subject (or about my work in general) without mentioning Meditations on the Tarot. I first read it a few years ago, as I was coming back to Christianity. An old friend gave me a copy for my birthday; she had never read it but thought it might interest me. “Interest” turned out to be an understatement, because it changed my life. I feel like, since I first started reading it a few years ago, I’ve hardly stopped reading it. I’m always picking it up to read bits and pieces here and there. While I don’t agree with all of Tomberg’s ideas, I find his work to be masterful, and I still recommend this book to people all the time, despite how dense and difficult it can be to read.
Other than Meditations on the Tarot, I have found no formal resources on the subject of tarot and Christianity (I wish there were more, which was the driving force behind my writing of The Contemplative Tarot). I often direct folks to other Instagram accounts I’ve found that focus on tarot from a Christian perspective (I have a highlight on my own Instagram account that lists some of my favorites). I also like to recommend books that treat tarot as a tool for self-reflection rather than divination. While not explicitly Christian, they do utilize tarot in a way that aligns with Christian teaching for those Christians who want to stay clear of any of the fortune-telling aspects of tarot. Two of my favorites are Tarot for Change by Jessica Dore and The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin.
8. When does the book come out? Where can people follow you?
The book comes out on September 13th, and it’s available for preorder wherever books are sold. (I put together a nice little set of preorder links here!) On the internet, I’m most active on Instagram, though you can occasionally find me on Twitter as well. I also have a Substack which I use to send out longer essays at the beginning of each month. These monthly essays via Substack have been my favorite way of being online, and my dream is to eventually transition away from social media and focus more of my energy there.
