Tarot and My Early 20s: Navigating Graduating from a STEM Subject and Wanting Nothing to do with Science

By Magda Nawrocka-Weekes

Tarot is a thread that has woven my early twenties together. While it is not fortune telling, it is a useful tool for accessing our own subconscious and viewing situations in a new light.

Tarot dates back to the fourteenth century. Then in 1909, Pamela Coleman-Smith produced the most famous Tarot deck: the ‘Rider Waite’ deck. Coleman-Smith, being both a woman and Black, did not get credit for the famed and enduring tarot deck for many years. While she was commissioned by Waite and the deck was published by Rider, Coleman-Smith’s innovative illustrations need to be acknowledged.

When I bought a one-way ticket to the US, my beat-up tarot deck came with me. When I took jobs and quit them, restarted my career, the tarot chimed in. As I recount my approach to work, I find different tarot cards that speak to each of my career stages.

The Tower

When I picked up my ex’s tarot deck at the age of twenty-one, I had no idea what I was doing. I shuffled the cards, the thick paper making a satisfying sound as endless possibilities slid over each other. I asked my question: what could be expected for our relationship? Slowly, I pulled cards and read their little descriptions in the accompanying book.

The message was clear: you’re going to break up, it will be amicable, you both have too much shit to sort out. Of course, it was true. In the breakup, he took the cards. I didn’t do Tarot again for some time.

When I say I had no idea what I was doing, I don’t just mean in our relationship. I was in my third year of a degree in biochemistry and finally surfacing from over a year of mental and physical illness. As I slogged my way through my fourth and final year of experiments, papers, lectures, labs and a resuscitated social life, I realised I didn’t want to do this any longer. I had seen how academia treated people (not well) and found the myopic lens of research stifling.

The Tower card depicts a large tower struck by lightning as its foundations are shaken by an earthquake. Two people are falling from the tower as it is destroyed. In general, it means the utter annihilation of your sense of self. Devastation. That’s how it felt coming out of science after dedicating years to its study.

Five of Wands

After graduating, I moved home to London and worked in a vegetarian restaurant for over a year. I learnt about wine, about seasonal food, about just how much butter to add to everything to make it delicious. I worked within a passionate supportive team and this period of time nursed me back to health, emotionally.

I had time to also work an unpaid internship for a zero waste grocery company, but that eventually fizzled out (I like getting paid). Still seeking fulfillment, I quit and bounced between jobs as a prep-chef and in a lab where I processed skin samples. Around this time, I bought my own Tarot deck and began learning to read the cards, finally noticing the intricate drawings on each of them.

In the tarot the deck is split into the major and minor arcana. The major arcana follows the journey of someone on a great adventure; it’s more related to big life events and themes. The minor arcana is similar to a deck of normal playing cards with four suits representing the elements and different aspects of life. It too follows a cycle, a journey, but on a smaller day-to-day scale.

Wands represent actions and the element fire, while the five denotes the early stage of a journey. The unsure nature of it. In this card we see people fight but only as practice. This card represents my time acquiring useful skills: social media, sales and admin. This time in my career was necessary to set me up for the next stage, and most of what I learned was transferable.

The Hierophant

I went to a free talk on water at the National Library in London on a Friday, met the CEO of a start-up trying to grow coral reefs using electricity generated by wave power. Over the weekend I wrote them a seven-page document on how to improve their online marketing, had an interview on Monday. Started work that Tuesday. I worked there for nearly two years – but not without hiccups.

The biggest, of course, was the pandemic. I found myself coming home from Mexico (where we had been setting up reefs) to live with my parents and work remotely. Then I got covid. Then the atmosphere of the job got too much. Throughout this time, I practiced Tarot, though it felt very at odds with my working life.

The Hierophant is a card in the major arcana. In it sits a holy man, preaching and flanked by strong stone pillars. This card is one of tradition, institutions and hierarchy. While I thought that this job would be different because I could use my science and selling skills for something I actually cared about, it ended up being exactly what I was trying to escape in academia. If I (a white cis middle class queer woman) am the most ‘diverse’ person in the office, then something is wrong.

Eight of Pentacles

I was part of the great resignation. 2020 came and went and so did my giving a fuck about my job. The only thing that kept me sane was growing vegetables in my parents’ garden. The only thing I could really pin down caring about was climate change and food apartheid. So I applied for an organic farming apprenticeship in Colorado and never looked back. Two years into farming and I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Moving my body every day, working outside, providing food for food banks, literally healing soil, working on complex little Excel sheets for crop timings and harvest details – I love it all. I thrive in it, and the abundance of food that comes with it is astounding. This lifestyle also seems so much better suited to working with the Tarot. I even recently set up a weekly Tarot newsletter and offer online readings.

Pentacles are a suit associated with the element earth, and with our physical bodies. Also with money. The Eight of Pentacles is often seen as the final push. In it a figure hammers out the same patter over and over, their skill stacks up; they slowly get better. Right now, I’m in this stage.

After two years apprenticing, my boyfriend and I are about to help run a farm for someone else before we hopefully start our own in 2024. Farming is hard work but once you get into the groove it is so visibly and physically rewarding. The plan is to stack coins (literally) and hone our skills, the final push before we start something new and even more challenging. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.