This Summer, just when I thought I had made it through the last of cancer treatment, I got a bad scan and was dropped back into the terror place. Rachel Pollack's writing and thinking walked me through those times. They were heady, delirious and intensely magic-coloured days and this episode walks through some of the impacts of her life and work - on the world, and on my own freaked out mindbody.
Welcome home to the Missing Witches podcast. This episode invokes the life, spirit, words, and deep enchantment of Rachel Pollack. A lynchpin theorist and practitioner in the world of tarot, author of the definitive culture-shifting book on Tarot reading, 78 Degrees of Wisdom. A creator of worlds and possibilities, Rachel isn’t missing in the sense that witches don’t sing her name, but missing in the other sense, as in one who is recently crossed over, and she’s missing from us and we are bereft.
And yet.
As I was writing this episode, I was sent Kristine Gorman’s Visionary Woman Tarot Deck. A shining tribe, you might say, of channelled paintings, each one crafted by a visionary woman listening to the wood block that was her canvas. Kristine writes:
“I saw, in my visionary way, Rachel Pollack as my World card. I immediately called her up. So I asked her, “Rachel, would you be my World card?”
Rachel Pollack, whose gargantuan ability to inspire like the sun, as millions of you know and have personally experienced, said yes. She was just jazzed and cheered with delight when my portrait of her graced the cover of The Cartomancer Magazine. “A cover girl at 75!” she said triumphantly. I am humbled by her love, support and her consistent lion-tamer cheerleading to expand myself to see what I am capable of. I honor the ones who came before and did the work. Rachel changed my life and has many sacred names in my heart: mentor, tarot midwife, and now with her passing my angelic powerhouse fairy godmother goddess divine. She is busy still, popping up in my days and nights, often not so subtly, like making her portrait fall off the wall, reminding me to get to work, and making my phone call folks all by itself”
We honour Rachel Pollack, gargantuan sun energy ancestor, Tarot scholar, Tarot midwife, Trans activist and philosopher and fairy godmother goddess divine. Novelist, futurist, possible world-ist. Comic-book sorceress. Teacher. Poet. Lion-tamer cheerleader on the other side, energy unleashed and unveiled, reminding us all to get to work. In that spirit, if you can, maybe pick up a deck to read with her while you listen.
Rachel made her own deck called The Shining Tribe, drawing on ancient depictions of spirit knowledge. She made her own myths. She gave us a trans superhero whose very name was an alchemical spell: Coagula—dissolve, but then always recombine. Always gather into new true shapes, always become.
Rachel Pollack taught us that divination is not a trick for fortune-telling. It is a deep play with mystery. It is question-asking as resistance. It’s permission to imagine otherwise.
Ask your cards, what can I imagine otherwise?
This summer, exactly one year to the day of my cancer diagnosis, I thought i was done treatment and then found out it might have metastasized into stage 4. I sat in my car screaming No. I was back in the otherwise place, the community of death terror, the cancer people, the between world, the people of the shadowlands between solve and coagula. I had a lung biopsy and waited. And it was a hallucinatory terror, and a shattering gift. Dreams came pushing out of my body with the living impulse of “be it all feel it all body it all hug it all say it all while I still can” and I saw symbols everywhere.
In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, writing about the Death card, Rachel describes initiatory rituals where the shaman would be cut down to the point of seeing their own bones, to know the skeleton that shambles along within us is to know a thing both about our impermanence and what lasts beneath our changing shapes.
“The initiation rites always led up to a simulated death and rebirth. The initiate is led to believe that he or she is about to die. Everything is done to make this death as real as possible so that the ego will be tricked and in fact experience that dreaded dissolution. Then, when the initiate is reborn he or she experiences a new maturity and a new freedom of energy.”
Rachel was a wise companion to me in those days. I had strange experiences, waking up from the way I slept then, light and dream-drenched with the kind of dreams that muddle with your awake anxieties. I pulled a card in the night. I was reading Rachel Pollock's A Walk Through The Forest of Souls and followed her way of asking big, wide-open universe-sized questions: What can I learn from this moment of waiting?
I got the Ten of Swords. The woman lying all penetrated. They did a lung biopsy through my throat, I kept waking up choking and terrified, and they increased the fentanyl, they took samples by puncturing through to my lungs.
But in the distance, you can see the sun breaking through the clouds.
This is a card of darkest hour, right before the dawn, and then I asked what I'd been afraid to ask. What will it be like after I get the results, what will that time be? And I got the King of Wands. It's funny, I remembered it as cups. It's been all about cups lately, weeping and swimming and dreaming, and memory plays tricks with tarot symbols making its own mythology, but it was wands. It was magic and majesty and making your life. Living your truth after seeing the bones.
And I held onto that while I waited. Sometimes mythology is a liferaft.
I kept having visions, or journeys, half asleep in the bath or on the mountain halfway through a hike, dreams that I was floating in a river, just underneath the water.
Seeing it sparkle. As above so below.
My hosier shaman friend Amy Miranda, author of What We’ve Forgotten, one of those forced to see the bones too young, a kind and laughing sharp-toothed fury who walks between worlds, led me on strange spirit journeys and my mind let itself go places it never had before because my fear was a wide open door, and those journeys brought me back wild hope, dancing optimism, and weirdly appropriate medicine. (I am the kind of witch who checks vision-perscriptions against peer-reviewed medical journals and consults a coven of oncology pharmacists.)
Miranda pulled a card from her own deck for me, and it was the Way of Woo. A boat. A Taoist principle of being in the stream, not worrying about each choice, but letting your intention guide the shape of your life. Being in the stream.
Decades ago, towards the end of a long-term relationship, my partner described his feeling as always not quite catching the wave. I knew what he meant. I know what those times feel like, just off the edge of the flow. Anyway, that night after Miranda pulled the Way of Woo I couldn't sleep again and I pulled up Rachel Pollock’s A Walk Through The Forest of Souls, and turned the page to this:
“”Tao” refers to a flow of energy through all of existence. If you move or rest in harmony with the Tao all things become possible. If you resist the Tao, you accomplish nothing. When we shuffle cards for a reading, we give up conscious control of their order and so allow the Tao to sweep them up and direct their fall. They do not predict so much as show us how the energy flows.”
I let myself rest in the stream then.
I pictured myself flowing towards that underwater moonlight.
I felt safe and held.
I believed that my cough would go away. I would heal and feel strong again, and I waited.
Ask your cards,
What will guide me to the boat, the float, the way of woo?
Where is the river calling me?
What do I need to let go of to ride?
A wise man appeared in the radiation waiting room on my second to last day and told me: Fate is the divine or the universe pattern telling you to go pick up a certain thing from the grocery store. Free will is the route you take to get there.
In Phallus Palace, a journal of Female to Male trans experience and theory published in 2002, Pollack writes of Osiris brought back to life, made man by woman’s hands, and she writes of the real work of the alchemists, to become unified, to bring forth the true glowing seed of ourselves, to walk with Osiris through the underworlds of our experience in order to become a force for life:
“Osiris’s death and rebirth charts in great detail a transformation of consciousness. The pictures, stories, and hymns from five millennia that we call collectively The Egyptian Book of the Dead actually bear the title Pert em Hru or “Coming Forth into Light.” The phrase brings to mind the modern expression “coming out of the closet.” In the ancient stories, a soul often journeys through the darkness of death into a new existence. In modern experience, someone hidden, repressed, fearful, emerges into the light of true identity. This identity has been inside the person like a seed hidden in the Earth through winter until the urge to come out lets it shine forth, like the secret child who shone as a blaze of light on Set’s forehead.”
This is part of why Witches, at least these Witches, know to encircle and protect trans people. Because we too have seen our true bones, journeyed through the darkness of the underworld, lived in chronically ill and pained bodies, lived violence, violation, terror, been to the edge of dissolution, shoved to the edge of families and communities, felt always other to the overculture, and like the hermit kept walking past solutions that didn’t feel honest, past controlling and shame-filled solutions, past glamours that crumpled into pyramid schemes or love-with-conditions that kept us small and subservient and masked.
Trans people are people first and foremost, like each and every one of us born deserving of the simple right to live and love and be.
And when a person has been brave enough, or forced by their insides screaming, to look at the bones of themselves and burn the husks that were not alive and to reach for something true, they can become a seed of truth in a world that too often copy pastes conformity, consumption, destruction.
Truth is a domino in the world, running down the lines of energy that weave between us, flipping the tables in the synagogue, and releasing a power like splitting the atom: we can be radically truthful and brave too, we too must be allowed to simply live the days we have in these bodies and to listen to the ways they want to make love with the world and make it kinder, safer, more glorious, more alive.
What is the truth that’s splitting out of you?
Where can you root your bravery?
Rachel Grace Pollack was born in Brooklyn in 1945. She grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue until age fifteen, her writing runs with deep knowledge and respect for Jewish philosophy. She came out as a trans woman and a lesbian in 1971, the same year she first encountered tarot and sold her first short story. She called it her miracle year. In 1973, she moved to Amsterdam with her then-wife Edith Katz, and lived in Europe for nearly two decades.
She published speculative fiction in New Worlds, then novels and non-fiction. Unquenchable Fire published in 1988 won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Body of The Goddess published in 1991 traced the history of religion and spirituality to the body, especially the woman's body and the land. Godmother Night (1996) won the World Fantasy Award. She wrote essays, poetry, tarot books, and comics.
In 1993, she took over Doom Patrol, following chaos magician Grant Morrison, and introduced Kate Godwin—Coagula—DC’s first openly trans superhero.
I read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics in grad school and since then I can’t help but see comic books as places where time is weird, quantum particles scattering between creator and readers opening spaces for the new. McCloud demonstrates that in comics, time is spatial — it literally lives on the page. Each panel represents a slice of time, and the reader controls its unfolding by moving their eye from one panel to the next. The “gutter” — the blank space between panels — is where the reader’s imagination bridges moments, filling in motion and stretching or compressing time. This means that time in comics can expand across a single wordless image, collapse in a rapid succession of small panels, or even coexist simultaneously on a single page.
Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol makes this insight tangible. Nearly every issue of her run references the Tarot, using the cards’ archetypes as narrative engines and metaphors for transformation. Like McCloud’s vision of comics, Tarot spreads are spatial maps of time: they invite the reader to see past, present, and potential futures coexisting on the table. Pollack brings that temporal layering into superhero comics, allowing multiple timelines — mythic, personal, political — to overlap and refract. Her Doom Patrol followed Grant Morrison’s, who famously treated comics as a form of chaos magic, collapsing the boundaries between story and life; Pollack extends that experiment, using Tarot to open portals between the reader’s reality and the strange, transformative world on the page.
Like Grant Morrison she wrote the world anew into the books and so into the world. She made the unseen visible.
Witches, may we make the unseen, unwitnessed world visible.
What if you let your real self take up space and be seen? How does that change the future? How does it change the past?
Rachel taught tarot with Mary K. Greer for decades at the Omega Institute, and taught writing at Goddard College in the MFA program for eleven years. As editor and collaborator Justin Hall said: “She was the most interesting woman in the world because she was the most interested woman in the world. She had a mind that never stopped moving, never reached the limits of its curiosity.”
Rachel died in April 2023 of lymphoma, after a long journey with cancer. Her wife, Zoe Matoff, shared:
“I am sad to tell you that our beloved Rachel Pollack passed so peacefully and beautifully today at about 12:45 p.m. after a touching ceremony called Hand to Heart. Several of us stood in a circle. I had my hand on her heart… I know that Rachel will continue to be a Light in this world and in the next.”
End quote.
In this our Hermit year, Rachel Pollack comes to us as the lantern, a light to living worlds, living truth.
I had cancer in my lymph nodes too, Rachel, mine was traveling from a core site of my personal feminine. I had always liked my boobs and breastfeeding my kid, though a torment in a way, had been a healing place outside of time for me. They emptied my breasts and filled them plastic bags and removed 12 lymphnodes down my arm and I have had 7 infections since then because we need our lymph nodes, they move white blood cell healers through our underground waterways. I’m sorry you had to live that haunting and I’m sorry your loved ones had to watch it take you. But it’s so clear the light and light of you moved and moves from your wise heart spiraling out into the circle still.
Ask the cards,
What message does Rachel have for you, Witch?
What knowledge is circling in your lymph nodes?
In non-hodgkins lymphoma cancer doesn’t move in a predictable pattern through the circulation of the lymphatic system, it appears like scattered particles lighting up in the system as though refracted by some unknown wave. Perhaps it is a mark of the time traveller, who knows.
Rachel wrote:
“Physicists long ago noticed an odd quality about equations that involve a process over time. Nothing in the equations implies a direction. They always work as efficiently from the future to the past as they do from the past to the future. Quantum theory (the branch of physics that deals with the behavior of infinitesimal particles) produces an even more interesting view of time. Events occur through a process called “transactional interpretation.” A wave ripples out from the present moment, the now. This wave must meet a resonating wave from the future. The interaction between these two waves produces a probability field in which events occur. At any moment the future is as real as the present.
The future can “cause” the past as much as the past causes the future. In fact, neither one causes the other, they exist in a relationship that goes in many directions at once. Imagine a web with a vast number of points, all connected to each other, with no single point as the origin or primary cause of the others. Our consciousness places us in one point, convincing us that a single line from the past has caused our current situation to come into being. But this may be an illusion. The physicist Louis de Broglie wrote that elementary particles sometimes seem to come out of nowhere because they can move freely through space time, and our awareness reaches a point where they happen to exist.
If you find it difficult to follow these ideas, try to experience them as a kind of meditation. Stand outside on a pleasant day (so no rain or cold wind will distract you.) Close your eyes and try to sense this moment, right now. Then see if you can feel the past rippling backward from where you are. Think of your parents, and their parents, and the people who have influenced you, the events that shaped and even created you, such as the first time your parents met, and more subtly, the moment a friend showed you the tarot, or the first time you saw that book or movie that changed your life. Now see if you can sense a wave equal in size that ripples out to the future, as real as the one to the past. Think of the friends you will influence, the lovers who will move through your life, the children you have or will have, and their children and their children’s children. The now shifts constantly and is different for each person, but it always contains the past, and the future, and both perhaps as real as the present.” (13)
Rachel’s writing returns again and again to the knowledge of the in-between.
“Nothing exists absolutely in nature.” she writes in (78 Degrees of Wisdom, p. 43)
She quotes Ursula K. Le Guin:
“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.”
This is the witching place—not comfort of false clarity, but the haunted crossroads where binaries dissolve.
Perhaps this is the place to say awkward things.
It’s hard to write about Rachel Pollack without quoting Neil Gaiman, because they were friends and he interviewed a lot about her when she died, and he and his ex-wife Amanda Palmer have been accused of sexual assault. I think I’ll make it to the end of this episode without quoting him, but I have loved his work and I know many have and its a sadness that lurks nearby here when I am with Rachel Pollack’s legacy and that’s infuriating, the way we are entangled with the monstrous, all of us.
The other messy piece, here at the bend between dark and light where we must say true things even if they are an awkward sidebar, is that it can be heavy to engage lovingly with Jewish thought, as Rachel did, while living in a world where Israel is committing genocide draped in a rhetoric of Jewish protection.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve had to untangle wisdom from dictators draping themselves in stolen tatters to justify their violence. Throughout history, traditions with peace at their ethical heart have been co-opted to justify brutal injustice: Sri Lankan and Burmese monks incited attacks on minorities in the name of defending Buddhism. In Islam, the very word Islam shares a root with salaam, meaning peace. The Qur’an says in Surah 8, verse 61: “And if they incline to peace, then incline to it also, and trust in God.” And in Surah 10, verse 25, we read: “God calls to the Home of Peace and guides whom He wills to a straight path.” Yet, in Iran, for example, the ruling clerical regime has used Islam to justify authoritarian control, the violent suppression of dissent, and fascistic limits on the freedom and safety of women and minorities — actions that many Muslim scholars and activists worldwide condemn as a betrayal of the Qur’an’s call to justice and mercy. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” yet Christianity has been invoked in the Crusades, the Inquisition, European colonial conquest, the white supremacist violence of the Ku Klux Klan; and by the modern Republican party drowning out the pedophile blackmailers Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s victims with war planes; kidnapping people off the street into unmarked cars; murdering and disappearing and lying to our faces.
No religion is immune from distortion, and though I’m inclined towards a scientific atheism as antidote for all this cruel distortion, I still believe that the misuse of spiritual traditions by states or nationalist movements doesn’t erase the radical insights those traditions contain.
In this spirit, I still am moved by Jewish philosophy and esoteric wisdom, especially as it comes to us in Rachel’s hands.
In Forest of Souls Rachel writes:
“When Akiva considered a one-sentence definition of Torah, he chose the commandment from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus, a rabbi after all, had made a similar choice when he stated that “love your neighbour” was “the whole of the law.””
In 78 Degrees, of the Emperor card, Rachel writes:
“If the entire system is corrupt, producing only bad rulers, then stability becomes the enemy of morality. The value of the symbol of the Emperor depends a very great deal on time and place.”
Resistance is always situated. Symbols shift with context. As Witches calling in just futures, we ask: stability for whom? morality by whose hands?
Stay true to the beating ethical heart of your craft - an thou harm none do as they wilt, the whole of the law, love each other as ourselves - and follow your own lanterns.
But how? In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel taught:
“Most people experience feelings of being powerful so infrequently they try to hold onto them. By doing nothing, they hope to preserve their magic moments. But we can really hold onto power in our lives only by constantly discharging it, by releasing creative power we open ourselves up to receive a further flow…. The spectator at the football game, even the possessed churchgoer, will find their excitement gone after the event that triggered it has ended. But the craftsman or scientist or teacher or for that matter the tarot reader will find the power increase over the years, the more they discharge it into physical reality.” (78 Degrees of Wisdom, p. 32)
Witches, we build our power and the light of our guiding lantern becomes a north star by discharging our energy into physical reality. Put what feels electric and true to you into the material world, into your practice, into your activism, into your interrogation of the depth of your soul and mind, into the workings of your hands, your story crafting your art making, your cooking, your care. See these acts in the embodied world as steps in a dance with the present that shapes both the future and the past. This letting go of power, gifting it into the web of the living world, builds a resonance machine.
In “Forest of Souls” Rachel writes:
“The various formulas - the famous “tall dark stranger” or ”journey by water” connect our reading to a kind of world all its own, a sort of artificial universe that we lay over the real one. The fact that people have used these formulas for centuries gives them power.
How does that artificial world of fortunes connect to the real one? … Is it possible the cards and their traditional meanings act as a kind of electrical transformer to connect real events, including future events, to a way we can understand what they mean? Transformers step down the raw energy of electricity to a useful form. In the Chariot we will ourselves to reach into a river of pure energy.” (57)
This is the best way for me to begin to describe what happened to me in those weeks when I danced and hiked and moved always half in a trance, calling forward my life, feeling the way the body was a black box of flipping coins, more cancer or no cancer. The woods were lit up, birds looked me in the eye as they hopped just in front of me down the path, I saw Xs everywhere suddenly, everywhere I put down my foot or touched my hand, great cracks in the rocks and fallen branches, a hike I did every day was changed as though someone had gone through it with a highlighter going: look. Look here. My family is Nordic on one side, we’ve built up grooves over hundreds of generations with those stories and symbols and gods so I checked the runes and X is for your gifts. The 10th (X) card in the Major Arcana in the Wheel of Fortune, positive change. My hosier shaman Miranda told me I was drinking from a firehose of spirit. She told me the reason I hadn’t been told definitively that this was more cancer was because there was a chance it wasn’t and there was power in “acting as if” while we waited on the samples and the message from the ticking half-life of nuclear medicine.
We all have cancer cells in us all the time. And all cells are called daughter cells, did you know that? And when things are working weel, they all should receive the history, the pattern, for how to be the kind of cell their mothers were, but some lose the plot and become sociopaths and colonizers but I sang to mine every day a song about healthy multiplying, and letting go into the river of pure energy:
“We are healthy and wealthy and wise, we sing songs of our mothers as we multiply, oh la lachez prise oh la lachez prise.”
La lachez prise is a french expression which means “the letting go” it’s not just an action, it’s kind of a noun. The letting go. Like slipping into a river.
Sing with me into the river of hopeful flourishing.
Tarot in Pollack’s hands becomes a question-making instrument, which is a world-making instrument. In Forest of Souls she asked: What if we asked tarot about God’s soul? What if the tarot was the blueprint God used to create the universe?
The point was the generative power in the question. “Where is my death now?” “Where will my soul go when it’s time?” “How will we know the rapist’s regime is crumbling?” “Where should we hold each other in the moon-time?” Ask the most haunted questions.
Solve et coagula—break down what is false. Recombine what is true.
Rachel wrote throughout her life—in fiction, comics, poetry, magic. She practiced representation as spellwork, imagining characters who look like us, fight like us, dream like us.
Her novels transported us: Unquenchable Fire imagines magic as civic infrastructure. Godmother Night makes queer love and death mythic powers.
There is science fiction that sees the future or makes the past alive like Octavia Butler could channel, then there’s Pollack who writes what feels like something just below the surface of the overculture. Another dimension of the multiverse.
I used the phrase the Living World a lot before reading Unquenchable Fire and was system-glitched and jaw-dropped to see it so crucial to the fabric of her fictional world, and the complex ambivalent power of it, not pastoral romantic magical nature but spirit beings like animals with sharp teeth or cool breezes that can become sucking floods and rip through toxic emergent bureaucracies wearing the garb of ancient magic.
Days after I started Unquenchable Fire I saw this wink from her on an Instagram post from @Earthyeducation that read:
The Living World.… the humming energy, the physics spirit animus mundi, animism, ancestry and ances-trees… The world of this humming I hear just as I type, you can’t make this up, —a hummingbird just out of sight and when I look for them all I see is the jewel-red heart flashing past the eye of a birch tree. The world that interpolates each body and mind in waves through time.
After all my journeys and spirit walks and singing, I emptied my office of all the death things. Shells, coral, birch bark, wings, bones, I took them all down to the moose skull that guards a lilac-bowered spirit beach where the snakes sleep, 20 feet away from our small, sandy friendly swimming beach on the land that keeps us. I brought my dried flowers, I brought all the moss and lichen out of my writing room—which had been my ‘learning to nurse a new baby’ room, then my ‘recovering from mastectomy’ room, and then my chemo room.
I took the death altars out of there and brought them to the bones by the beach and talked to my death there and told her I’d be ready when the time came, but that it wasn’t now.
Now was the time of the stream, of the wands, of flourishing after many hard years. We’d finally made it to the safe shore, and I would love it all and love my people and live in honour of love and death and the living world, the world alive, for a little while longer. Please.
Rachel Pollack died April 7, 2023. Communities across tarot, comics, speculative fiction, and trans worlds mourned her. But she remains— she is a wave spread across time and bodies resonating and refracting - in her work, in her students and readers, in the symbols and stories.
She modelled how to live such that craft, myth, politics, and joy become one enchanted body and that body is stretched across the web and the land. A shining tribe.
Draw a card. Ask:
How do I keep the flame unquenched where I stand?
Walk through your underworlds, see if you return with seeds.
Reach into your past and weave the future. Hold onto the life raft of your mythologies.
Pour your energy into the world, and maybe together we can weave our culture back into the living world.
Blessed fucking be.
