I bought the first of many tarot card decks when I was 11. I was a mostly reasonable girl, but the box they came in had tantalized me with promises that the cards could offer glimpses into the future. More than anything I wanted those promises to be true, more than I cared to admit. I’d long harbored a deep fascination with the supernatural, the paranormal and the occult. In a place beyond reason deep in my bones, I knew that life—and life on earth—were things of profound mystery.

What I especially loved about my deck were the illustrations that looked like scenes from a fairy tale. Each of the 72 cards were based on a system created by nineteenth century British academic and spiritualist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith. Both were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study of metaphysics and magic. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I bought the cards; I was just a curious child who hoped her colorful new cards could answer her most burning questions: Will I pass my math test? Does my crush like me back? Will my mother ever stop driving me insane?

At around the time I started learning the meanings of each tarot card image, I found an inordinately beautiful hardback called Astrology sitting on a shelf in my parents’ library. I knew in general that astrology was a divination tool like tarot, but one that “explained” through a system of twelve symbols. As it showed me the influence astrology had on societies through time, the book revealed that the tool I had thought was so simple sought its deeper answers in the mathematical relationship of planets to each other to the constellations through which they moved.

 I never found out which of my parents had bought the book though I had my theories. Before I was born, my mother had been a hardcore Catholic with establishment beliefs about divinity. She had venerated Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a few pious saints and all church teachings until everything tied her up in knots she eventually severed like the Gorgon’s heads they’d become. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine her contemplating alternative, non-dogmatic ways of understanding the unknown and unknowable.

Of course, a reasonable girl like me knew that tarot and astrology weren’t to be taken seriously. They were on par with my mother’s Catholicism which seemed like a rarified form of the mythologies she’d read to me in childhood. That didn’t stop me from nurturing my occult interests, talking about astrology and especially the meaning of birth signs (but never tarot, that seemed a witchy bridge too far) with friends. As far as we giggling girls knew, it was just a crazy system developed by even crazier ancients that was mostly wrong but on occasion more correct than we believed was possible.  

It doesn’t surprise me now that I would be drawn to studying the meaning of things and understanding the world through symbols. In college that took the form of a dedicated passion for literature. That led to a surprising discovery that linked back to my occult interests. One day and apropos of nothing, I leaned that the author of my beloved astrology guide, Louis MacNeice, had also been a poet who had versified and published alongside fellow Oxonians W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, who came to read his work during my first year; and whose words, like those of all the great writers I studied, struck me with the force of falling stars.

What I wouldn’t know for many years was that my interests were more interconnected than I realized. Tarot cards first emerged in fifteenth century Italy, stronghold of the Catholic faith my mother had abandoned. But it was the French who adapted them for fortune-telling purposes in the late eighteenth century, just as the Romantic movement—which celebrated imagination over reason—began taking shape. Astrology originated almost two millennia before tarot in Mesopotamia before spreading to India and Greece, where its western version was born. For ancients, it was inseparable from the science of astronomy.

It was the early Christians (and Jews) who condemned astrology as antithetical to biblical teachings that warned against divination. Later, tarot cards came to be considered in a similar way, especially by fundamentalist groups. As suspect—and even demonic—as some believed these tools to be, they nevertheless inspired many, and especially those who, like MacNeice, centered their lives around imagination and creativity.

Psychologist Carl Jung was ultimately the one who gave me courage to more openly indulge my eccentricities. I don’t know when I learned that Jung had studied astrology and tarot; and that both had led to his ideas about human archetypes and the collective unconscious. Perhaps it was in the uncertain years after graduate school when I turned to my decks for answers. It was then I told a roommate who studied psychology about how liberating Jung’s esotericism felt to me. We spoke only one about this and never again: with PhD student authority, she told me that mainstream psychologists considered Jung an outlier and a crank.

I could have told her that Sigmund Freud, the founder of her discipline, had based part of his work in  ideas taken from ancient Greek fictions and philosophies; and that his work, which he believed was scientific, was far more anecdotal and theoretical than empirical. But I didn’t and just flashed my never-mind-me-I-just-study-literature smile. Jung’s work was also theoretical. But what made it more suspect than Freud’s was its open, artist-like reliance on intuition and its proximity to the mystical.

Despite my roommate’s cold shower of a response, I’d found my vindication. While I appreciated reason just as much as I appreciated science, neither could satisfy my need for wonder. Or the need to imagine possibilities beyond what I could see. There’s a richness in allowing space for unconventional ways of knowing that stand apart from the kind of dogma that drove my mother away from her faith; a richness I would not trade for all the four-square certainties in the world.