What do we turn to when the world feels chaotic and the vibes are wiiiiild?
In our newest Witches Found conversation, on our sweet little witchy podcast of love, Risa sits down with Tom to talk about his book The Modern Fortune Teller’s Field Guide, and about what it means to practice divination in a world that can feel increasingly difficult to read.
Tom describes divination as a way of finding clarity when everything feels uncertain. But it isn't about using tarot to make the world prettier than it is. It’s about learning to look more closely — at patterns, power, fear, inequality, and ourselves.
“Divination is a mirror,” Tom says. And if we aren’t changed by what we see, perhaps we aren’t really letting ourselves look.
We talk about the rules we inherit around tarot and fortune telling, and what happens when we start questioning them. For Tom, divination is also about reclaiming something that powerful institutions have often tried to control:
Just by existing, just by saying that we do not need the auspices of church leaders or governments to get the answers to life's biggest and smallest questions is iconoclastic.
There’s something radical, he argues, about taking that authority back.
And then there’s the question of how we communicate with whatever we understand as divinity.
“I think divinity really wants to talk and play and dance and connect,” Tom says, “but we don't speak the same language.”
So we find a translation device. Tarot. Dominoes. Runes. Lenormand. Bones. Whatever helps us develop a shared language — and become part of the translation ourselves.
We talk about intuition, too: how it lives in the body, how it can be tangled up with fear, and how practicing divination might help us learn to recognize the difference. Tom reflects on the particular relationship between danger, pattern recognition, and intuition, while also reminding us that intuition is something we can practice and develop.
And we talk about community. Because even the most committed introverts need someone who can look up from the cards and say:
Hey, you okay?
Maybe this is part of the work of divination, too. Not predicting the future. Not escaping the world. But becoming more capable of meeting ourselves, each other, and the world as it actually is.
And maybe, in a culture that has spent so much time teaching us to distrust our own knowing, trusting your intuition is itself a revolutionary act.
Come listen to our conversation with Tom Benjamin — about tarot, magic, intuition, community, and what it means to take our answers back.
