92. Jenna Matlin - The Tarot Book of the Dead, mediumship and tarot, journey through the underworld, reordering the major arcana

Connect with Jenna

https://www.jennamatlin.com

https://www.instagram.com/jennamatlin

Show Notes

This week, Bex is joined by Jenna Matlin, author of The Tarot Book of the Dead. A Chthonic Journey of Death, Mediumship, and the Art of Guiding Souls (Weiser Books), and previously Have Tarot, Will Travel, Have Tarot, Will Party, and Will You Give Me a Reading? (Llewellyn, 2022). Tarot Book of the Dead is a book about using tarot as a mediumship tool, a grief companion, and a guide through the underworld journey. It has been described as coming through her rather than of her. Synchronicities pursued her as she wrote it. Death stalked her until she began. She started the Sun chapter on Lughnasadh. She was editing the Hierophant chapter when Pope Francis died.  The list goes on and on!

In this episode, we cover:

• How perimenopause, ADHD, burnout, and a dark night of the soul led Jenna into the underworld of this project
• Why Jenna saw AI coming for tarot readers before most people were talking about it
• The crucial distinction: AI can infer, but it cannot intuit, and why that matters most at 3am when someone’s anxiety is crawling up their throat
• What it means for tarot to be a co-medium, not a tool to fetch information, but a co-participant in mediumship alongside the reader
• Psychopomp work, using tarot with people who are actively dying, in comas, or in liminal states (including Alzheimer’s and dementia)
• The simultaneous spread that reads both the spirit and the grieving person at the same time
• Jenna’s anthropology background and what global shamanic mediumship traditions taught her about right relationship, right intention, and right space
• Why she reordered the entire Major Arcana around the four stages of the underworld journey: katabasis (the plunge), bathos (the depths), anados (the rising), and apanados (return to the world)
• Tarot as a child of the Black Plague and its connection to the medieval Dance of Death tradition
• Hecate with the golden hair, the earliest writings and how very different she is from how we conceptualise her today
• Oya, the Yoruban crossroads goddess, and why Jenna needed an underworld-based mother she couldn’t find in European mythology
• The Cumaean Sibyl, the ancient prophetess who refused to sleep with Apollo, asked for immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth, and became patron saint of the tarot reader who also does mediumship
• Why there’s an old man (the Hermit) in tarot but no old woman, and which figure Jenna believes should fill that role
• The cutout exercise: Jenna’s brilliant technique for bypassing the left brain’s keyword shortcuts and forcing readers to really look at the imagery
• Stacking readings: tarot + Lenormand + runes + charm castings, and why Jenna is always asking “is this rule breakable?”
• Whether Jenna might ever create a tarot deck

Like the episode? Leave a review !

Never miss an episode: tap on the Follow or the '+' icon

Follow me on IG:
https://www.instagram.com/bex_tarot_london/