Body Positive Tarot Or: How Diet Culture Has Systematically Destroyed Our Intuition
⤏ VIRGIE TOVAR AND HELEN SHEWOLFE TSENG IN CONVERSATION
⤏ PHOTOS BY LAUREN HANUSSAK
⤏ FEATURING THE LIONESS ORACLE TAROT DECK AND THE ANIMA MUNDI TAROT DECK
HELEN SHEWOLFE TSENG: Hi Virgie! We’ve just released Body Positive Tarot — a course we’ve been writing together for the past year. Junior High asked us to interview each other, and this brings me back fondly to my community radio days, asking questions and being in conversation with all sorts of witches, artists, activists, and more including you!
Some backstory for readers: we met at The Ruby, (though I had been aware of your work prior to that!) At the time, I was co-facilitating tarot workshops there, and we met collaborating on one in late 2019, titled Tarot and the Body. I loved the way you drew upon the Greek myth of Persephone in relation to the High Priestess card, to discuss the journey of recovering from diet culture. Soon after that, you invited me to collaborate with you, and that eventually became this course.
My first question is about the genesis of that idea: can you talk about your relationship to tarot, and how it became part of your process for healing your relationship to your body?
VIRGIE TOVAR: Tarot has helped me recuperate some of the things I’ve lost through the traumas of fatphobia and diet culture — specifically my intuition and the sense of my own magic. I really started exploring tarot after Michelle Tea gave me a reading in, like, 2014. I was completely blown away by its history as an intuition-building tool.
Diet culture had systematically destroyed my intuition and pushed me to question all the information my body was sending me, from hunger to wait-this-fucking-sucks-I-hate-this-let’s-stop signals. In addition, I feel like in our culture, people think they can look at a fat person and know everything about them: how we eat, how we live, how we move, if we’re loved.
To practice tarot you sort of have to accept that you are a mirror for this beautiful, mysterious, sprawling thing (P.S. The deck is so fat! There’s something corporeally affirming about holding a fat ass stack of cards as a fat person!) Like, that’s the contract between you and the deck. That is really reparative: to see myself in the deck, to accept that the mysteries of Major Arcana are in me after years of believing there was nothing magic about me because of my fat body.
For the past 10 years, I’ve worked with people who are in recovery from fatphobia and disordered eating, and I’m always, always looking for new tools to adapt so I can better serve my folks. This felt like a no-brainer. To be honest, I was very clear from the outset that I wanted to work with someone who knew the deck way better than I do. I’m just so into the deep and narrow knowledge vibe. I kind of can’t believe I got to work with you on this!
Okay, so I must ask this: You are a tarot revisionist par excellence, and you reinterpreted the entire deck for this course — I still can’t believe the sheer amazingness of this fact, which literally I had not even considered when I approached you to collab! Can you talk about how you arrived at this approach and what the process was like?
“I FEEL LIKE IN OUR CULTURE, PEOPLE THINK THEY CAN LOOK AT A FAT PERSON AND KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT THEM: HOW WE EAT, HOW WE LIVE, HOW WE MOVE, IF WE’RE LOVED.”
HST: Early in our collaboration, I began playing with using tarot as a window into your work. I loved your book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat, and your podcast, Rebel Eaters Club. You have such clear, compelling ways of connecting fatphobia and diet culture with capitalism, race, gender, power, oppression, etc. And this gave me this idea of using the Minor Arcana suits to explore some of those societal and structural impacts on our relationships to our bodies. The four suit reinterpretations were the first pieces I wrote, and to be honest, I was so nervous about it. I really wanted to do your work justice without reducing its complexity and nuance, and without closing the space to further expansion.
When I teach or read tarot, I like to facilitate collaborative spaces that encourage self-trust and agency. To that end, we designed the Major Arcana sections of the course to guide students toward building their own interpretations, while also rebuilding their intuitive capacities. To be clear, I didn't reinterpret the entire deck! But anyone who takes the course will be able to do just that, drawing upon their own unique perspectives and experiences.
I am forever revisioning my relationships with the cards. I started off learning the traditional systems, but what really opened up my practice was choosing to work outside of them. For me, something like astrological correlations can tend toward reduction and disenchantment, which isn’t super useful to me in seeing a particular card or spread. And it makes total sense when you consider that the European occultists who tetris'd all these unrelated, often colonized traditions together don't share my world views, or my ideas about magic. As you mentioned, the tarot is an expansive place. Look at the sheer abundance of reimagined tarot decks available today, with more being created all the time. Visual perception can be extremely personal and cultural; a card that brings up anxious thoughts for one person might make someone else feel at peace. When I work with tarot, I am honoring and being responsive to what arises in that particular interaction, and there’s a bit of shapeshifting that happens each time.
You create and communicate in so many different forms and media, what was your process like working on this project in this particular form? Did it change your relationship to tarot, or to your work?
VT: Shapeshifting! Yes, I love that! And yes to relativity. That reminds me of a section of the course where we talk about the Death card and compare the US — a sort of death-denying culture — and Mexico — a relatively more death-embracing culture.
In 2019-2020, I put collaboration at the top of my work goals. Around the same time, I wanted to create something that would teach people how to incorporate tarot into their body justice and acceptance practice. I love tarot, and I found a lot of comfort in repairing my intuition with it, but I definitely felt out of my depth. I met you, and it felt so perfect that I had this idea that required collaboration.
Working with you, brainstorming with you, and reading the curriculum you wrote helped me learn the tarot so much more deeply than I ever had. Also, while telling friends about our collaboration, some of them didn’t know anything about tarot. So I found myself explaining the framing structures of the deck over and over, drawing pictures, gesticulating wildly. It was pretty great. I’d never had the confidence to do that before. It was amazing to look at each of the suits of the Minor Arcana and see them as paths we walk as we repair our relationship to our bodies and to food.
I took this work style test once — sort of like a personality quiz but for how you work — and I learned that I’m a person who 1. thrives at the start of a project (read: not awesome at long-term stuff), 2. is eager to put work out in the world and tinker with it after it’s already gone live, and then 3. quickly moves onto the next project. Your work style is more process- and craft-oriented, and I learned so much from your patience, your self-knowledge, and your desire to get things right and not just get it done, which is so often my instinct or compulsion. It was incredibly fulfilling to work on this for over a year, to watch myself resist and then soften and then resist and soften, and to practice trusting another person with something I cared about.
Was there one card, or suit, or “Aha!” moment that stuck with you when you were writing for the course? Mine was when I had read your interpretation of the Cups suit, and I was like, “Cups are the only suit you could eat snacks out of! Cups = Emotion = Food = Memory = Culture = Emotion = Cups.”
“A CARD THAT BRINGS UP ANXIOUS THOUGHTS FOR ONE PERSON MIGHT MAKE SOMEONE ELSE FEEL AT PEACE. WHEN I WORK WITH TAROT, I AM HONORING AND BEING RESPONSIVE TO WHAT ARISES IN THAT PARTICULAR INTERACTION, AND THERE’S A BIT OF SHAPESHIFTING THAT HAPPENS EACH TIME.”
HST: Oh wow, I think my favorite collaborations are like this, where our differences in style are complementary and generative. I have you to thank for the forward momentum in our collaboration — considering the future and how this might land in the world beyond us — and helping us navigate the practical, business-oriented side of things, where I often feel completely hopeless!
I remember when you first referred to us as Tarot Revisionists. There is so much power in that naming, and it set the tone for my experience working on the course. I think of the Swords suit, which concerns the mind, where our thoughts, ideas, language — and by extension, beliefs and ideologies — are formed. Systemic power reproduces itself in individuals via Swords’ tools: self-surveillance and internalized oppression, and indoctrination is often done through verbal communication. In the course, we talk about how a phrase like "mind over matter" is a kind of ideological mantra (or spell!) for disembodiment and disconnection from the body, from emotions and intuition, from what we might know to be true but can't yet confirm in empirical ways. Your work speaks to the dominant culture’s arbitrary moralizing or pathologizing of certain ways of being, and of things that bring us pleasure, joy, and nourishment.
But swords are double-edged! The Seven of Swords has been following me for years, and has become one of my favorites. In the Smith deck, the card depicts a trickster, and tricksters use secret access points to trespass between worlds, often exposing power imbalances in the process. Lately, I've been thinking about magic in the spaces where our minds play tricks on us, and how this aspect of the mind as unreliable can be an opening, an opportunity — a word that shares a root with portal! — to question, reimagine, and cast new spells.
We talk about creating and cultivating the set and setting for working with the course, or with tarot in general. Magic is about a shift in perception, and we can access that with what we already have within reach. How do you invite magic into your space? What kinds of environments might you suggest for potential students working with Body Positive Tarot?
VT: Literal chills thinking of “The spaces where our minds play tricks on us.” In therapy right now, I am addressing my “cognitive distortions” — habitual ways of thinking that are often inaccurate and negatively biased! I’ve been thinking of these distortions as basically the magic that my brain did in order to take a lopsided situation, like my childhood, and turn it right side up. Now I’m trying to right-side my life so my brain doesn’t have to work so hard, and I have to face this trickster energy that totally helped me survive.
My house has nary a flat surface that isn’t covered entirely with books, plants, or Miss Piggy mugs! While working on Body Positive Tarot, I was often at my desk, which faces the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco. I think tarot puts on different faces depending on what it’s like outside. On foggy days, it’s easier to see its invitation to be introspective. On sunny days, it urges me to see the cards as calls to action. If I have time, I like setting out all my helpers when I read: crystals that friends have given me, my first-ever cactus child — Lumpy — as well as my other plants, rosewater, my journal, and my best pens. My dream scenario for potential students is that they find the most comfortable place they have access to and they bring together all the things that help them feel held and seen, and see what the tarot invites them to consider.
⤏ VIRGIE TOVAR (SHE/HER) IS THE AUTHOR OF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN FAT, THE SELF-LOVE REVOLUTION: RADICAL BODY POSITIVITY FOR GIRLS OF COLOR AND THE FORTHCOMING BOOK, THE BODY POSITIVE JOURNAL (CHRONICLE BOOKS, 2022). SHE HOSTS THE PODCAST REBEL EATERS CLUB AND IS A CONTRIBUTOR FOR FORBES.COM. VIRGIE LIVES IN SAN FRANCISCO WITH TWO NETHERLAND DWARF RABBITS NAMED JOHN CANDY AND LULU AND ONE HUMAN MALE NAMED ANDREW. SUBSCRIBE TO HER NEWSLETTER, BODY POSITIVE UNIVERSITY, OR FOLLOW HER ON INSTAGRAM.
⤏ HELEN SHEWOLFE TSENG (THEY/SHE) IS AN ARTIST, DESIGNER, WITCH, TAROT REVISIONIST, AND COYOTE OBSERVER, BORN TO TAIWANESE IMMIGRANTS IN THE DEEP SOUTH. HELEN WAS A 2018–2019 YBCA FELLOW, 2019 DESIGNER IN RESIDENCE AT HEADLANDS CENTER FOR THE ARTS, ILLUSTRATOR AND CO-AUTHOR OF THE ASTROLOGICAL GRIMOIRE, AND FORMER CO-HOST OF ASTRAL PROJECTION RADIO HOUR (2014–2020).