Tatianna Tarot
Earlier this year, my life was turned upside down and, subsequently, I wasn’t in the happiest place. I felt extremely stagnant in my love life and fed up with certain issues that kept repeating themselves. I needed a change, so I cleaned house and then asked God to guide me to what I needed to know for this upcoming year. The day after I said that prayer, a close friend tagged me in Tatianna Tarot’s YouTube’s Energy Forecast. To be honest, I was afraid to watch the video because of my Christian upbringing. But I said “eff it” and watched because I never just stick to the Bible to gain understanding, if I’m honest. Interestingly enough, Tatianna called out my entire life in her 30-minute energy forecast and I was sold, completely. I decided to have a reading with her and it was incredibly healing. I am more accountable for the choices I make and I don’t disguise them under the pretense of God’s will. After my reading, I began to trust life more and found that I like growing without the 20-something angst many millennial women find themselves burdened with.
In this interview, Tatianna Tarot, the 28-year-old Bed-Stuy bred beauty, will explain how intuitive tarot readings and healing rituals became her career and how women of color can be healed through spirituality and practices from their ancestors.
MadameNoire (MN): What made you launch My Urban Illumination?
Tatianna Tarot (TT): To be honest, I’ve been working in a variety of locations that cater to spiritualism and different denominations of worship — not necessarily religious ones but practices that were occult and spiritual: Santeria, Voodoo, Hoodoo, Paganism, etc. It was my experience, predominately at one store in upstate New York called The Magic Moon which is, for the most part, pagan oriented (European, North American ancestry), that there wasn’t a lot of information on people of color, their own rituals, history and how they can connect to the divine. Since I’m a woman of color, I thought it would be dope to provide a service to my people, of all walks of life, to understand how they can connect further to the divine and themselves and, hopefully, in the process I can help in demystifying any taboos that are associated with practices that are from Africa and the African diaspora. [Learning about these practices] helped me out in so many ways and I was inspired to help bring this to the masses. I didn’t have the means to start a store right away so I did it online and it’s gradually growing.
MN: What’s the difference between a tarot reader, astrologist and psychic?
TT: They are not too dissimilar actually. All practices have a commonality in the sense that they use the cosmos and a force to read energy to foretell where the angles of a person’s energy are going. I don’t want to say predict because predicting is susceptible to change. Tarot does that through a 78-card deck and with these cards, through a process of art history and imagery, you interpret the cards and the energy to see where a person’s life path is going.
Astrology uses the planets and stars. Every planet and cosmological energy has its own force and its own property, so depending on the angles of the planets and how they relate to each other, you can tell how the forces are going to guide you in a certain life path and how it relates to you based on your own chart, which is based on where the planets were aligned at the time of your birth and how they are currently.
A psychic is a person who is very receptive to the divine; we are all psychic, it just depends on whether or not you want to exercise those muscles and if we want to believe in our ability to be psychic and tap into something that is greater than us. So a psychic can be an astrologist or do tarot readings. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.
MN: Why did you decide to become a tarot reader?
TT: I didn’t decide to become a tarot reader, I was born like this. [Laughs] Literally! Long story short I grew up with my father, grandma, aunt, and uncle in Bed-Stuy. My father would take me out every weekend to get a change of scenery to really have me engaged in worldly culture. We would go to a lot of cafes and bookstores. I was always allowed to get a book as a child but during one particular outing, I saw this tarot deck in the occult section. I always gravitated to the occult section even as a child—it was inexplicable, I always wanted to read about witches and rituals. So this one time I wanted to get a deck and my dad was like “Nooooo. You’re six years old and you don’t know what that is and it’s not a game and you wouldn’t even understand it.” So when I went home my grandma had a regular deck of cards and, as kids would have it, I used my imagination and I began reading people with that. I would read in my lunch room, practice on my own. I don’t know where I got it from; I don’t have anyone in my family who talks about tarot readings or did tarot readings. It was just a really natural gift. It sounds very abnormal; it just flowed out of me. It must have been from some past life and it resonated with me strongly. I would be like “Oh hearts are love, clubs are good luck and spades are opposition.” It wasn’t until high school, a friend gifted me a deck during a business class and that’s when I began using an actual tarot deck. Up until then I was reading people from a regular playing card deck or doing palm readings.
