Turning Tarot Into a Tool for Body Positivity

By Virgie Tovar

September 30, 2021

I’ve spent the last year working with Helen Shewolfe Tseng, a brilliant tarot revisionist, to create a course called Body Positive Tarot. We both felt excited to help others bridge their tarot practice with their recovery from body shame, disordered eating, and fatphobia.

As Helen was reinterpreting the deck for the course, I worked on documenting the ways that tarot has helped me repair my relationship to my body. To talk about how tarot had changed the way I see and relate to my body, I have to start with a conversation about loss: the place where most transformation begins. Re-up my time.

My family has been fat for many generations. When I look at pictures of my older and deceased relatives, I recognize the familiar jowls and cheeks-on-cheeks-on-cheeks I see every day in the mirror. My body is a living scrapbook, an ambulatory hope chest, a breathing archive of them: fat, brown, prone to melancholy, and exactly as it was designed to be.

The United States, where I grew up, is a culture that does not particularly like archives. It does not want to be a witness to its own past of slavery, gendered violence, and genocide. It is caught up in the project of forgetting. The past is dangerous because it holds the truth, because it begs for reckoning and aches for redemption. The United States is built on the dream of a future that is lily white, untouched, where — unlike the present or the past — forgetting seems possible.

Diet culture is part of the vast, sprawling mechanics of that amnesia. Through diet culture, I learned to live in that “lily white” future. “Today I might be fat, but in a few tomorrows I will be thin.” With my mind focused on the future, I did not identify with the body I had in the present.

I hated food. I hated eating. I hated my body.

I’d been introduced to tarot as a young feminist in college, but didn’t really connect to it until Michelle (yes, Michelle Tea, of this very podcast newsletter!) offered to give me a reading one day. “If Michelle likes it, then it must be pretty flippin’ great,” I thought.

I had stopped restricting food by then, but I hadn’t really worked through the wreckage of the twenty years I’d spent starving myself. I didn’t know that tarot would become a part of the process of sorting through the wreckage.

I bought a miniature deck, and when I opened the tiny accompanying booklet I was immediately engrossed by the description of tarot’s history and its connection to the process of strengthening and rebuilding intuition. That word — intuition — was what I sensed I needed as I undertook this new and relatively uncharted path of body liberation.

I began to familiarize myself with the cards — looking at them, seeing what they said to me. Honestly, they baffled me, but it was in this confusion that they held the most power.

Slowly I began to stop looking to my deck’s booklet to guide me — not because I had memorized it (far from it!), but because I sensed the deck had unexpected lessons for me. Unlike diet culture, which is full of rules, I felt like the deck was an opportunity to let go of the rigidity that had stifled me. In the face of not knowing, my intuition had an opportunity to speak. Where diet culture had been a demand to silence my body, tarot felt like an invitation to listen.

I laid out the deck, and it took up space — just like my body. The cards sprawled, sort of like my thighs.

The cards came together to tell potentially infinite stories, which encouraged me to imagine freely and wildly, not just for myself, but for the collective and a world where body shame didn’t exist.

The mystery of the cards reminded me that I had mysteries of my own. Fatphobia had taught me that I was inferior, basic, and, above all, entirely knowable. Our culture says that you can just look at a fat person and know everything about us: how smart, interesting or capable we are (the culture says, “Not very.”), how much love is in our life (the culture says, “Not much.”), what we desire (the culture says, “To disappear. To be thin.”), and who we are (The culture says, “No one important.”).

There’s a lesson in the Body Positive Tarot course where I talk about reinterpreting the concept of the Major Arcana to reflect how I began to see them. Here’s an excerpt:

The word “arcana” translates to “mysteries” or “secrets.” And synonyms for the word “major” include: big, great, weighty, considerable.

Could we call the Major Arcana the Big Fat Mysteries? Yes!

Let’s reimagine some other words, shall we? We know that fatphobia is a form of bigotry that makes us afraid of fat and fat people. We know that fat is both an organic compound (think: butter, oil) and a word we use to describe people with big bodies.

But what if we pushed past these very technical meanings? What if we pushed our definition of “fat” beyond the material world, and we defined fat as “expansiveness of any kind?” The way space is expansive, the way our hearts and souls are.

What if we understood fatphobia as the fear of that expansiveness? If we accepted these new definitions, then to be fat would include the ability to love big, dream big, imagine big, feel big, think big.

Are the Major Arcana themselves a vast, sprawling invitation into fat positivity? Uh – YES!!!

The boring, awful slog of fatphobia and diet culture dampen our ability to play, our ability to shape shift, to time travel, to imagine, to suspend disbelief, to swim into the depths of our enormousness and our subconscious with curiosity and delight. The cards of the Major Arcana come to life through you. You are both one of the mysteries of the universe and the universe itself. Each card is a key that unlocks a psychic door.

Fatphobia makes us feel like we are not complex, not mysterious. It makes us feel like we are small, insignificant, unworthy, lacking in depth or complexity. The Major Arcana inspires us to see ourselves in a different way. The cards encourage us to dive deep into our subconscious, and face our ego (Emperor), our heart’s wish (Lovers), our inner wisdom (Hierophant), our trauma (High Priestess), our inner hedonist (Empress).

I’m still very, very far from a seasoned tarot practitioner, and I may never become one in the traditional sense. But tarot has become a cherished tool: one that connects me to others, to my intuition, to my possibility, and to a future that is neither pristine nor lily white, but stretch-marked, magical and fat (in every sense of the word).

Virgie Tovar is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat and the host of the podcast Rebel Eaters Club. She is the co-creator of the new online course, Body Positive Tarot, with Helen Shewolfe Tseng.