In this episode, Risa talks with Jack Chanek, a high priest of Gardnerian Wicca, doctor of Philosophy and the author of books on Goddess worship, Kabbalah, and Tarot. Jack shares his journey from an atheistic upbringing to becoming a Wiccan and a magical practitioner. They discuss Jack's books 'Kabbalah for Wiccans' and 'Tarot for the Magically Inclined,' focusing on how Kabbalah and Tarot can organize and enhance magical practices. He explains how to perform rituals like 'stacking the deck' for tarot magic and shares personal success stories, like the time he tied up the wind. Jack also offers advice on finding inclusive and safe Wiccan covens. He emphasizes experimenting with Tarot and scaling magic for local political activism.
https://jackofwandstarot.wordpress.com/
[00:00:00] Introduction and Welcoming
[00:00:00] Risa: Welcome friends. Welcome listeners. Welcome summer at least if you're up here in the north with us. Welcome, slowly returning to our bodies. If like me, you've been in a strange underworld journey, fugue state, maybe you're pushing back up through the earth and welcome to our guest. I'm super excited to get to talk about your work.
Because it's so interesting to me. I mean, one, there's a lot of really practical magic in both books that's really juicy and fun to get your hands on and play with and learn your perspective on. And two, I wasn't so familiar with your background and I would love to hear more.
[00:00:54] Guest's Background and Philosophy
[00:00:54] Risa: I wanna hear first about you have a PhD in philosophy.
I wanna start there.
[00:00:58] Jack Chanek: Yes, I do have a PhD in philosophy. My PhD in philosophy is not remotely magical. I worked on the history of philosophy. I did my research on a guy named Emmanuel kt, who was a German meta physician and ethicist writing in the 17 hundreds, and my doctoral research was on without going too much into the weeds because no one, like there are three people on the planet who care about this.
But broadly speaking, Kant was working at this really interesting juncture in the history of philosophy where some really significant advancements had been made in the natural sciences. He's writing about a generation after Isaac Newton comes forward with the theory of gravity and things like that. He is writing at this period where these really interesting developments have happened in natural science, and he is sort of taking a step back and looking at.
What the implications of that are for philosophy, for metaphysics, theoretical philosophy, as well as for Christian theology and ethics. So that's what I did my PhD on, and I loved it.
[00:02:06] Magic and Practical Applications
[00:02:06] Jack Chanek: People sometimes ask me, to what extent does that influence your magic? How does that relate? The honest truth is that it really doesn't.
Kant was not fond of magic. He was not fond of mysticism. He had a book that he wrote in 1776 where he really denounced mysticism, magic and spiritualism. It was wonderful working on Kant. I really loved that project, but there was nothing in Kant that I found. Operational or usable for my magic because his philosophy is just so opposed to the idea of magic.
I.
[00:02:43] Risa: It's funny, my collaborator, Amy, does a lot of these interviews. She talks sometimes about how you can learn about what not to do, like from bad parents. Hmm. You learn a lot about parenting from shitty parents. I kind of interpreting what you're saying a little bit about con because you're clearly a really magical person.
[00:03:04] Jack Chanek: I like to think so. I think the big thing for me is that a lot of K's philosophy boils down to this idea that there are things that can be proved. There are things that can't be proved and the things that can't be proved may exist in some cases probably exist, right? So like con believes in the Christian God, but we kind of just have to shut up about it because we can't.
Prove ourselves one way or the other. In that sense, it has helped me to be very. Quiet in some cases about my magic because I don't feel like I have something I need to prove to anybody. If someone else isn't into magic, I don't need to convince them. But I think there is also an element of, so much of what we do in magic is about.
Did it feel right? Did it feel like the power was there? Did the result we were looking for happen? Magic itself is very much in that category of things that can't be proved. It doesn't belong to the domain of science, but within magical communities, we still have this ability to talk about it, even though it's not in the domain of the provable.
That's where I really diverge from Kant.
[00:04:16] Risa: Yeah. My kiddo was telling me that this kid in her class always tells her about monsters, but then she told him that she was a witch and her mom was a witch, and he told her that witches didn't exist, and she was like, what do I say? We like furious, you know? I was like, oh, I kind of like to just sort of be like, oh, you might be right and then give 'em a wink.
Mm-hmm. Then she spent a while practicing her winks. Oh
[00:04:40] Jack Chanek: yeah. It's an important skill,
[00:04:42] Risa: right? Yeah, I like that. The idea of maintaining a little bit of a mystery and an open space.
[00:04:48] Tarot and Book Discussions
[00:04:48] Risa: But I'm interested also in this idea, and you talk about it in your books, which are now United as one in my head, as I tried to process them both before this interview, TaRL for the Magically Inclined, and remind me the full title of the book on the Kabbalah.
[00:05:05] Jack Chanek: So my first book was called Kabbalah for Wiccans. Thank you. Uh, my most recent book, which is book number four, is Tarot for the Magically Inclined. These are the two that I sent you copies of and that we're not gonna talk about today.
[00:05:19] Risa: Yeah. And what are the other two? I feel like, uh, so unlocking bonus levels.
[00:05:24] Jack Chanek: So I have another book on tarot. This is not a magic book. This is just like a straightforward how to read tarot. It's called Tarot for Real Life. I love this book. I'm so proud of this book. I think a lot of tarot books really focus on the major arcana to the detriment of the minor arcana. Right? They'll, they'll have like.
200 pages on the major arcana and then one chapter on all four of the minor suits. That's silly to me because they make up three quarters of the deck. They are, in many cases, the cards that are the most relevant to the kinds of day-to-day concerns that people want to read tarot about. Right? Like every now and then you have someone who is on an initiatory journey of transformation and you get a lot of those big major ArcHa cards popping up.
But a lot of the time it's just. Am I going to get the job? Does he like me back? You know, things like that. And those are minor arcana questions. So I really wanted to write a book that foregrounded the minor arcana. And the way this book works is it's structured the same way a tarot deck is, so it's divided into the four element.
And it talks about earthy techniques for reading tarot, airy techniques for reading tarot and so on, and it talks through the minor arcana with those. Then toward the end of the book, we start to get into some of the more personal and aspirational stuff and the big picture with the major arcana. It's a really fun introductory book.
I think there aren't really a lot of books out there that place the same focus on the minor arcana, and I had a lot of fun writing this one.
[00:06:56] Risa: I love that too, 'cause I love Pixie Coleman Smith, and I know you have researched a lot about this, but when I was writing about her, one piece that I loved was that, you know, they had a lot of ideas for her about the major arcana, but that she was relatively left to her own for the imagery in the minor.
And so I love the idea that I'm really seeing more of her interpretation of what she had learned and studied there.
[00:07:24] Jack Chanek: Absolutely. She is so important and I feel like we collectively, we don't spend enough time talking about the influence she had on tarot. She really understood those cards and each painting, each image that she made is just this beautiful, powerful expression of the meaning of the cards, but it's an expression, like you say, that comes really from her and I mean.
What, eight out of 10 decks that you pick up to today are gonna be inspired by that writer. Wait, Smith imagery. So huge, huge. Just a juggernaut of the tarot world. Absolutely.
[00:08:01] Risa: Yeah. And what an interesting character. Tell us about your fourth book.
[00:08:06] Jack Chanek: Or maybe your first book. This was my third book. It is currently out of print with Lou Allen.
I may put out another edition at some point in the future, but for the time being, it is out of print, but I think you can still get it used or in an audiobook ebook format. This is called Queen of All Witches, A Biography of the Goddess. This is my book about the goddess. The goddess, kind of in scare quotes there, right?
Because people have different theologies. There are some people who are very soft polytheists who have this whole, like all goddesses are one goddess type of thing. There are other people who are much more like, Nope, these are all very distinct entities. I really try not to take a side on that in this book, but I think if you spend enough time in.
Pagan witchcraft, new age communities, regardless of what your own practice looks like, you're gonna butt up against people who are doing sort of the goddess type stuff, right? There's a goddess and she's a moon goddess, and she's a goddess of witchcraft, and she's related to mother nature and this and that.
The thing that always really fascinated me about this goddess, well, a i, I worship her. I am a gardener in Wiccan. I belong to a tradition of WCA where. We are, we sort of see ourselves as having a patron goddess and a patron God. This is very much the patron goddess as I perceive her and interact with her.
But the thing that really fascinates me about that goddess is we don't have a ton of precedent for her in the ancient world. She's not exactly the same as any of the goddesses that we know from world mythology. There are goddesses that she has a lot in common with. She has a lot in common with. Artemis, she has a lot in common with Demeter or with isis, but there's this really interesting specific figure that if I tell you I worship the goddess, by and large, you understand who I mean.
You understand that? I mean, a goddess who is earthy and associated with the moon and the tides, cyclicality and transformation, a lot of the time she's associated with motherhood. She might be a triple goddess with a maiden mother crone aspect. There's a very specific. Picture that we have of who this goddess is, and I really wanted to dive in and explore who she is and how people started worshiping her in the modern day.
There's a little bit of history in this book. I try really hard not to do too much history because no one enjoys the history as much as I do, but there's a little bit of history in this book and it's a lot of exploring who the people were that helped bring. Goddess worship into the modern world. They were in conversation with ancient paganism.
But as Paganism was rebooting in the 20th century, what are the ideas? What are the influences? How are people talking about the goddess? And how do we see all of that in the way that we worship the goddess today? So that was this book. I'm so proud of this one. It's currently out of print, but hopefully at some point in the not too distant future, I'll get a second edition out.
[00:11:08] Journey into Wicca and Spirituality
[00:11:08] Risa: Okay, so before we get into the two other books in more detail, can you give us a little bit more of that story of how you become a Wiccan, how you become a goddess worshiper? How you become a high priest of gardener? You seem like a. White American dude. How did it happen?
[00:11:30] Jack Chanek: I am a white American dude. Very perceptive of you.
Yeah. You know, this story changes a little bit every time I tell it, and not because I'm being deceptive or anything, but just because there are so many things that go into this story. Of course.
[00:11:45] Risa: Yeah.
[00:11:45] Jack Chanek: I was raised in a. Pretty firmly atheistic household. My father was raised Catholic. He was angry about that until the day he died.
My mother. Not particularly religious or a religious in either direction. It's just not a big part of her life. But I grew up in a house where there was this default assumption that if you were a smart person, if you were capable of critical thinking, then you weren't interested in spirituality. And that spirituality was something sort of for.
Uneducated people who didn't understand science, that kind of just turned out not to be true. I think that fundamentally you could put people under a microscope, and there are two kinds of people. There are people who get something out of spirituality, and there are people who don't. Around the time I left for college, I started to realize much to my chagrin.
That I was the former, I was the sort of person who really got something out of, in particular like myth and symbolism and ritual, right? And I wanted something ecstatic. I didn't want like sitting in pews in a church, listening to someone talking, you know, I wanted dancing naked under the full. I had been reading tarot since I was a kid.
I got really into tarot starting at age 11 through tarot. I started exploring spirituality with the resources that were available to me, which ended up being a lot of public domain texts available for free online things like texts from the Golden Dawn, which is how I got into a lot of kabbalistic magic.
And then from there I was experimenting with things. I was doing things largely on my own for a couple of years. Eventually, I found a Wiccan group. I found a Gardnerian group in New Jersey, joined them and stayed with them for the better part of a decade. I was with them all the way up until I finished my PhD and moved out here to Salt Lake City where I currently live.
Going back to. We were talking about Kant at the start of the conversation. And this idea of things that are provable and things that are unprovable and that there's still value in engaging with those unprovable things. I think I grew up in a house that sort of said, well, if it can't be proved, then it doesn't exist and it doesn't matter.
The journey for me was really coming to realize. That these are things that I'm interested in. These are things that I care about and I get a lot out of doing magic. I get a lot out of the particular brand of Paganism that I'm involved in and that it doesn't matter whether that's provable because what matters in doing that is what it does for me.
[00:14:36] Risa: I think that's so beautiful and I'm glad you found some people you could dance naked under the moon with
[00:14:42] Jack Chanek: me too. Dancing under the moon is my favorite thing.
[00:14:45] Risa: It's so rad. We have a really diverse cove in, we're like 400 people from around the world growing all the time. A lot of them not Wiccans. It seems to me like.
Kabbalah really makes sense from a Wiccan perspective in a way. It's kind of right there in some of the origin, as you say, but can you talk about. Well, one, like maybe let's do an intro to the kind of Kabbalah you're talking about for people who are hesitant about engaging with a close practice, and then where do we see it in our lives?
How do I, as someone who's not Jewish, not a golden Dawn secret society member, not Wiccan, but I love trees and the tree of life is in my soul. Talk to me, Jack.
[00:15:31] Jack Chanek: Yeah.
[00:15:32] Introduction to Kabbalah
[00:15:32] Jack Chanek: So I'll do my very quick version of the history of Kabbalah. As you noted, Kabbalah comes out of Judaism. It coalesces in the medieval period round the 10th century.
You get a strand of Jewish mysticism that is incorporating. A lot of esoteric and philosophical currents present in the Mediterranean at the time. You have alchemy, astrology, neo platonism, and all of these things coming together with a Jewish community and.
They're, they're sort of being incorporated into the mysticism that that Jewish community is practicing. Jewish mysticism itself goes back further than what we can reasonably pinpoint as Kabbalah, but Kabbalah is a type of Jewish mysticism that emerges in the 10th century, and it is a body of received wisdom that connects the Jewish people with their God.
The word Kabbalah is derived from a Hebrew root meaning to receive, and the idea of Kabbalah is that it is received wisdom. It is direct mystical revelation that you receive Jewish Kabbalah. Still exists today. It emerges in the 10th century. It survives for the next 1100 years. It's still practiced today.
You will still find people doing Jewish Kabbalah. That is not the kind of Kabbalah that I'm talking about. That's not the kind of Kabbalah that I wrote a book about. I have no authority to talk about that kind of Kabbalah, the thing that happens. Pretty much as soon as Jewish Kabbalah comes on the scene is that a whole bunch of Christians in Southern Europe go, oh, that looks fun.
That's mine. Now, Christianity develops a form of mysticism that is rooted in an appropriation of Jewish Kabbalah and Christianity sort of attempts to absorb Kabbalah and claim it for its own. This was also concurrent with extreme antisemitism. There were pogroms happening all over Europe at the time.
There was a lot of anti-Semitic violence happening, and this was all part of a project of cultural erasure to try to get rid of Judaism by banning the parts that were too different from Christianity by subsuming the parts that were similar enough to Christianity, so that Christianity would be the only thing around.
That is bad. Just, you know, but this happens very quickly after Kabbalah comes on the scene and that Christianized form of Kabbalah very quickly works its way into Christian magic, Christian Esotericism, and it works its way across the European continent. Eventually, it reaches a point where it becomes divorced from Christianity entirely, and it becomes a significant part of.
Magic in Europe, the religious language, either Christian or Jewish, has almost entirely been stripped from it. The religious context has been stripped from it, and it is just a sort of magical system that underlies a lot of esoteric conversations happening in Hermeticism and elsewhere across the European continent.
By the late 19th century, Kabbalah is the gold standard of European magic and mysticism. You get some secret societies, in particular, a secret society called the Hermetic Order of the golden Dawn that try to use Kabbalah as a grand unifying system of magic Kabbalah, the kind of that makes its way into European magic.
Is largely structured around a symbol called the Tree of Life. And let's see if I can find an image of it. I realize this is a podcast and people who are listening at home aren't gonna be able to see the image, but since you and I are talking, we'll just pull up that image here.
[00:19:33] Risa: Can you describe it for folks who like, just sort of.
Deadly
[00:19:36] Jack Chanek: not in full. The Tree of Life is a two dimensional image that is understood to be a map of different types of magical energy. It's a way of diagramming magic and how different magical energies interact with each other. It's also a veiled allegory for the creation of the universe. It talks about the structure of the human soul.
There are all kinds of things you can do with the Tree of Life, but it has a set of 10 sort of circular Loki, which are usually called the spheres in Hebrew. The word is, or the singular of that would be sfi. And these 10 spheres are connected by 22 lines that make 22 paths on the tree of life. And so the spheres themselves are different kinds of pools of magical energy.
You have a magical energy that deals with intuition and sexism. You have a magical energy that deals with harshness and severity and so on. And then there are paths connecting them that show the different ways that energy can flow between those different sort of magical pools. And this became a model for how to do magic, for how to understand the different types of mental magical energy that are out there and for how to understand what you can do with them.
If we look at. Kabbalah today there is still Jewish Kabbalah and it looks very different from the kind of magical Kabbalah that was used by the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. Jewish Kabbalah is Jewish, right? It involves a lot of biblical exegesis engagement with Jewish religious rituals and so on, and in the magical Kabbalah of Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, you see some things that are holdovers from that initial.
Appropriation of Jewish Kabbalah that happened a thousand years ago. You see some Hebrew words in it, but it's really. Absent a religious context, it also has a lot of magical components that you don't see in Jewish Kabbalah. One of the big ones is there are 22 paths on the tree of life. Those 22 paths correspond to the 22 cards of the major arcana in tarot.
So if you are looking at. Trying to understand how to connect two types of magical energy or how to balance between them. You can look at the archetype or the symbol of a particular tarot card, and that will help you to work magically with those energy. Just as an example, there were two spheres near the top of the Tree of Life.
Kita sits at the very top. That is the energy of absolute divine unity. It's pure oneness, it's undifferentiated, it's absolute potential. And then kma is the next sphere down, and that is the one that deals with energy bursting forth, change, dynamism, driving force. And if you want to understand. How to bridge between those two very different kinds of magical energy.
You look at the tarot card that connects them, and in this case, that tarot card is the fool, which is all about this sort of potential to be anything, right? That divine oneness can go anywhere. Hasn't done anything yet, but the big thing about the fool is that the fool is. Starting their journey, the fool is beginning to move forward.
And so we have that leap from stasis and oneness into this kind of radical, overwhelming, divine chaotic change that we don't know where it's gonna take us. So there's a lot of. Magical stuff going on in the kind of Kabbalah that the Golden Dawn used. One of the things you said was, how do we use this?
What good is it to us as witches, as magical practitioners? How do we make sense of this? And I think a lot of it comes down to Kabbalah is a framing device. Kabbalah is a way to help you structure and organize the magic that you're already doing. So I think a lot of people especially, which is sea Kabbalah, and they sort of go, oh, that's ceremonial magic.
I don't wanna do that. That's scary. And they feel like it's going to, Kabbalah is going to involve wearing fancy colored robes, doing things on planetary hours, and you have to get a belt made out of lion's skin. All of this ridiculous overwrought stuff that is very much at odds with the way that a lot of witches like to do our magic.
And I don't think that's what it entails.
[00:24:21] Understanding Magical Kabbalah
[00:24:21] Jack Chanek: I think that fundamentally the magical Kabbalah that I write about in this book is a way of organizing and perceiving the magic that you already do to make it easier for yourself to keep doing that magic and to go further with it. One of the great things about the Tree of Life is that it groups things together by likeness.
By similarity. So there is a particular kind of energy that is associated with love, romance, pleasure, artistic beauty, all of those sorts of things. It's also associated with social connection, the bonds that we feel with other people. And once you have that framework for that kind of magic.
[00:25:05] The Tree of Life and Its Symbolism
[00:25:05] Jack Chanek: Anytime you are doing a spell or a ritual that connects to that energy, you can come back to the Tree of Life to Kabbalah.
You have a whole range of potential symbols that you can incorporate into your magic. You have a whole range of. Magical ingredients that you can use. You know, crystals and incenses and herbs and so on that all sort of connect in and correspond to this particular kind of magical energy. So I like to describe Kabbalahs as a sort of magical, um, I.
Filing cabinet. That's not the word that I'm looking for, but like an an index card system. Uh, card catalog. There we go. That's the phrase I'm looking for. It's like a magical card catalog. You look up the reference for the thing that you're working on, and then all of a sudden you have this wealth of other stuff that's available to you that you can incorporate into your magic in order to take the things that you're already doing and just add an extra layer of depth to them.
[00:26:04] Risa: It's interesting and chiming with me differently to hear you talk about it than when I read the book to hear you talk about it as different types of magical energies rather than divinities or faces of divinity. Or aspects of divinity. Right.
[00:26:21] Jack Chanek: It is also that, yeah. So the tree of life is a lot of things at once.
It's a way of taking any magical, religious, spiritual thing and breaking it down into component parts so that you can look at it and understand it and see how it interacts with itself and. In talking just now, I focused a lot on magical energy because not everyone who's a witch has a religious practice, has a devotional practice with gods.
[00:26:52] Risa: Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:53] Jack Chanek: But also, yeah, if you are pagan, if you're worshiping deities, the deities that you worship you can engage with through that kabbalistic lens. You can say, okay, here's a solar deity. Who has myths associated with X, Y, and Z. I can find those myths. I can find things that are reminiscent of that deity in Kabbalah.
Working through that lens gives me new ways to approach this deity and to go about worshiping them. I think I have a story in the book about a Slavic God that I was working with at the time. And I built a shrine to him using kabbalistic symbolism in part because this is a deity who we don't have a ton of historical information about.
So there the historical record of exactly how he was worshiped. It's a little thread bear. And in order to to make that more robust, to give myself something I could really work with, I pulled in some kabbalistic symbolism that was familiar to me. The idea was sort of like, okay, these are the things I know about you.
Based on these things I know about you. Here are other things I think you would like. Here are other things that I think you would connect with because if I go to my Tree of life, if I look at Kabbalah. Other deities who share these features with you are also often associated with X, Y, and Z. So why don't I try X, Y, and Z with you and see how that feels
[00:28:25] Risa: and did it work?
[00:28:26] Personal Experiences with Magic
[00:28:26] Risa: Slash here's my real question. Will you tell us the story about a time magic worked to the degree that you were like, fuck, that fucking worked.
[00:28:37] Jack Chanek: So my ultimate success story,
[00:28:39] Risa: yeah.
[00:28:41] Jack Chanek: Is a time I tied up the wind, which is old Folkloric magic. You read about them books, right? But you don't think that anyone actually does it.
And this is several years ago at this point, I was hosting a Beltane ritual in my backyard, and it was so windy that day. There was a storm that had blown up from the south and it was so unbelievably windy. It was forecast to be windy all through the next day that it would be impossible to do the ritual outside.
And so I went into my backyard, took a big piece of rope with me, and I, I danced around my backyard and I had this rope with me and I'm twining the rope around myself. And I talked to the spirit of the wind and sort of made a game out of it. Said, you know, we're gonna play a really fun game. It's called The Quiet Game.
I talked to the spirit of the wind and said, Hey, I just need you to be still until after this ritual is done, and then you can huff and puff and blow the house down. And at the end of that, I took my big piece of rope and tied a knot in it. About an hour later, the wind died down completely and stayed gone until the ritual was over.
I untied that knot and it picked right back up again. Anytime I. Doubt myself magically. I always come back to that experience because it was such a vivid and direct. I did magic for this concrete, practical purpose, and I got the thing that I did it for.
[00:30:17] Risa: I love hearing these touchstone experiences for people.
It makes me think of this line you quote in your book that. Magic is just other people's religion. It's a way we have a of categorizing other people's practices or lifting up our own versus other people's. I wanna ask you this, the phrasing of it sort of sounds jokey. Ask this often, because I am so electrified by magical people.
I hope you'll know what I mean when I say this, but when I picture you dancing in your backyard or veering away from an atheist upbringing into something deeply magical, who or what gave you permission? Like how do we give ourselves permission to be that powerful? How did you do that?
[00:31:02] Jack Chanek: The answer is I had a pen pal.
This was the golden age of Pagan YouTube, and I'd been watching a lot of Pagan YouTube. I'd been reading a lot of the things that were available to me for free online, but I was sort of holding it all at arm's length and not really sure if this is for me. And you know, there was a YouTube channel that I followed.
Very small. I don't think she has the channel up anymore. I really. Appreciated her perspectives. She was smart, thoughtful. She talked a lot about her background in atheism and how she came into Paganism and why she came into Paganism. I sent her a message and said, Hey, I'm trying to figure out this whole Paganism thing.
Can we talk? We were pen pals for years, probably three years or something. There was a lot of back and forth with us talking about ritual, talking about theology, talking about how you hold on to that vision of yourself as a smart and critical person while still giving yourself permission to go dance in your backyard with a piece of rope, as if that's going to change the weather.
She was. Incredibly formative and incredibly influential on me. We lost touch a long time ago. Gosh, I haven't thought about her in years, but there's your answer.
[00:32:19] Risa: Oh, I love a YouTube stranger. I have a YouTube Stranger Origin story too. I'll tell you one day. But it involves a YouTube stranger sending me a ukulele.
[00:32:28] The Power of Tarot in Magic
[00:32:28] Risa: I want to talk more about magic that works, but I wonder if we could talk more about the new book Tarot for the Magically Inclined. I think you'll really. So it's not just like how to read tarot, how to do tarot for divination, how to use tarot for introspection or creativity. Those are all really interesting and deep practices.
But this has a lot of stuff I hadn't thought about before for actually using tarot in shaping the universe to your will. Do you wanna talk about some of that in particular? I find it so accessible and interesting. Do you wanna talk about stacking the deck?
[00:33:05] Jack Chanek: Yeah, absolutely. This book is about the intersection between tarot and magic, and some of that is magical correspondences that can help you with reading tarot, right?
Understanding the four elements, understanding astrology and how astrological correspondences show up in the deck. Those things can enrich your divination, but then the flip side of it is. Magic works through symbolism and tarot has so much symbolism already built into it. So using tarot for your magic is just the easiest and most natural thing.
When I first started doing magic, much of the magic I did. Was structured around tarot because it was a symbolic language that I already spoke, and it was easy for me to take that symbolic language and apply it to expressing what I wanted to see happen magically. There were a couple of techniques that I talked through in the book.
One of the ones that's near and dear to my heart is stacking the deck for a reading. Which I should say, don't do that. If someone asks you for a reading, like if someone says, Hey, I'm trying to decide whether I should do A or B, can you give me a reading? Don't stack the deck. That's immoral.
[00:34:20] Risa: I thought it was so interesting that you were like.
Don't even pull a clarifying card. Like if you see the answer, you have to say the answer.
[00:34:28] Jack Chanek: I am sometimes a little too harsh on clarifying cards. I think there are circumstances in which they're appropriate, but I find that for myself more often than not, if I'm in a reading and I want to pull a clarifying card, it's usually because I already got an answer and I didn't like the answer I got, and I'm trying to sort of.
Make it be something else. So I try really hard not to use clarifying cards because I'm, I'm sort of trying to. Police myself because I know that I'm naughty and underhanded and if I can get away with it, I will try to avoid having a reading that has an answer I don't like.
[00:35:11] Risa: Yeah, I felt very called out by that part of the book.
I definitely do that where I'm like, well, no, this is, I often just am reading for myself, no,
[00:35:22] Jack Chanek: that's
[00:35:22] Risa: so dark. Let's get a different take.
[00:35:25] Jack Chanek: I think. Stacking the deck when you're doing a divinatory reading, very much a no go. If you are doing a spell. Where you want to affect the future. You want a certain thing to happen in the future.
A really easy way to do a tarot spell around that is to stack the deck so that you know what cards are going to come up. And then you create a ritual space. You do all the things that you would normally do when you're doing a spell build energy in whatever way you're gonna do it. And you lay out the cards.
So you say, here's the past, here's the present, here's the situation. And then you lay down that future card and you say. And I am ritually declaring that this is what is going to happen in the future. I am deciding here and now that my future is the three of cups. And if you do it in that context as an act of magic, then it goes from being a tarot reading, which is sort of this passive, you know, the symbols are there and you interpret them, and you learn something to an active piece of magic where you are taking the symbols and you are setting them out with intention and saying, these are the symbols that are going to shape the outcome.
And it's a really. Powerful kind of magic. I really, really love that technique.
[00:36:49] Risa: Do you wanna tease a couple of the other magical practices that people can find in the book? Yeah. And also tell us when the book's coming out.
[00:36:57] Jack Chanek: Yeah, absolutely. Some of the other practices involve path working and meditation with tarot.
Writing a spell that draws on tarots symbolism without necessarily using the cards themselves. Talk a little bit about working with certain kinds of spirits using tarot, if you like to do magic by forming spirit relationships. There were a couple of really fun and interesting ways that you can do that.
Using tarot as a tool to help build those connections. There are a couple of other techniques in there as well. The book comes out in the US at least in July of this year, so we are only like two months out from release date, and I'm super excited. This is definitely the most experimental book that I've written.
It's the most personal in the sense that this has a lot of my own magical experimentation in it. The Kabbalah book. Has some of my magical experimentation, but a lot of it is kind of taking established OC cult tradition and then translating it in a way that would be accessible and valuable for a Pagan or Wiccan audience.
This book, tarot for the Magically Inclined. There's a little bit of the tradition upfront so that we're all on the same page, and then the rest of the book is really like, okay, here is all of the wild stuff that I have tried with tarot in my magic over the years. Have fun.
[00:38:19] Risa: So fun to be at a point in your practice and in your writing and your confidence as a public.
Quicken. Public magician, public witch, that you're like, come on everybody, here's what I like to try. Let's do it.
[00:38:34] Jack Chanek: Well, and really importantly, there's gonna be other stuff that I haven't tried, right? If anything comes out of this book, I want people to see how much room there is for experimentation using tarot in your magic.
I give you the techniques that I use and that I have used in the past, but other people are gonna come up with things that never even occurred to me, and I hope that people feel. Excited and empowered and able to try those things because tarot lends itself so well to magical experimentation.
[00:39:07] Risa: I wanna open it up for questions, so folks who are listening, this is your cue.
If you have questions, you can drop 'em in the chat or you can raise your hands and we would love to chat with you. I wanna ask one more question first, while folks are maybe sorting out whether that's gonna be possible for them.
[00:39:24] Collective Magic and Activism
[00:39:24] Risa: What is your feeling or what are your practices on magic? For not changing your own life, not going deeper, not changing your material reality, but magic we can do collectively to make the world more just less
[00:39:44] Jack Chanek: terrifying.
I wish that I were more optimistic about this than I am. I'll start by saying that I think it helps to maintain perspective on the scale that magic operates at. If I as one person do a spell, it can accomplish things that I wouldn't accomplish By normal, mundane means. But it can accomplish the same kinds of things that one person can accomplish, right?
I as one person, am not going to be able to cast a spell that ends world hunger. That is at a scale that I can't influence. Now if I get together with my coven, I am no longer just one person. I'm a group of people, and we are all working together toward a concerted, magical goal. But a coven is still only depending on the type of group that you have, the size of your group, it's still only anywhere between, you know, five people to some online covens might have like a couple hundred.
You're still only a couple hundred people now. A couple hundred people can do a lot if they're working together, right? You think about the ways that petitions can affect local politics. You think about the ways that if a couple hundred people go and volunteer at the local food bank or soup kitchen, that can make a big difference, but it makes a difference at a certain scale.
I think with any magic, not just magic for activism, there's a real question of, am I targeting this magic at a scale that is appropriate to what I or this group are able to accomplish? The more careful and attentive we are about the scale we're operating at with our magic, the better our chances are. So I do political magic, especially because it's a really scary political time right now.
But I do really local political magic. I do political magic to protect people in my city. I do political magic to affect ballot initiatives that I am voting in because those are the things where I feel like I as an individual have the ability to put my thumb on the scale. Now I know a lot of people who do magic that is targeted at a much larger scale.
I don't mean to be dismissive of that kind of magic. I don't mean to say that people shouldn't try it. It's just that I think where I have landed is that I find my magic is more successful if I think really carefully about how big I am versus how big the problem is, and I try to scale myself accordingly.
[00:42:39] Risa: Yeah, that's super interesting and pragmatic and fair. It can feel like throwing pennies in the ocean sometimes. Doing magic on great big world problems.
[00:42:50] Navigating Safe Spaces in Witchcraft
[00:42:50] Risa: What type of advice do you have for people who wanna pursue finding a wicked coven to assess whether that's gonna be a safe space for their identity, for their ways of thinking about magic?
[00:43:02] Jack Chanek: Honestly, I think there are dog whistles, right? If a coven says on their coven listing or on their coven website, we welcome lgbtqia plus people, that's generally a good sign.
Now their version of welcoming. May not. They may think they're being welcoming and not actually, you still need to suss them out. But if they say we're pro queerer, that's a good sign. There's a thing with Gardnerian Wicca in particular, where there are transphobes, there are queer phobic people in Gardnerian Wicca.
It's a community like any other, and it reflects the diversity of political beliefs that you encounter kind of across the spectrum of the us. So there are going to be. Very progressive, queer, inclusive, liberal minded people, and there are also going to be people on the other end of the spectrum. There is a thing that has emerged in the past, eh, five years or so with the Gardnerian Wicca community specifically, where a lot of the.
Trans exclusive groups, a lot of the groups that are really gender essentialist, and then usually there's some homophobia mixed in as well. But trans people are really the ones who get thrown under the bus because they are just. The punching bag for everyone right now. A lot of those groups will try to identify themselves as traditional Gardnerian in opposition to progressive Gardnerian or reform Gardnerian.
It's bullshit terminology. We're all just Gardnerian. If you see people using that language, that is a potential red flag. Not always, but it is potentially a red flag, and it's at the very least an indication that you need to stop and ask more questions. But the biggest way to find out. Is to ask someone point blank, are trans and gender non-conforming people welcome in your group?
[00:45:24] Risa: That's a great answer. I think I'm the type of person that gets pretty spooked by religion and it's not so much because of the religion I grew up in. I can see it being used. As a tool in a way that scares me a lot of the time.
But I have to remind myself that I see people using hammers for good and evil too. I see people using religion for a lot of beautiful things.
Are they going to be welcomed as the gender that they are, or are they going to be required to act as if they had the gender they were assigned at birth? Generally speaking, if you ask that question, point blank, the groups that are pro. Queer and gender inclusive are going to say yes, and the groups that are not are either going to say no or they'll sort of talk you all the way around the world.
But if someone can't give you a straightforward answer to that question, that is your answer.
[00:45:46] Jack Chanek: Yeah.
[00:45:46] Overcoming Religious Trauma
[00:45:46] Jack Chanek: Well, I mean, and it's particularly interesting here in Utah because. A lot of my seekers are ex Mormon. They grew up Mormon, and that's a whole different kind of religious trauma, like Catholic religious trauma.
I recognize, I know what to do with it. Mormon religious trauma, I'm just like, I am sorry you lost me like three paragraphs ago. It's not that I don't sympathize, I just don't know what's going on. But I think that for any, and this is true of witches, but this is also true just in general, for anyone who no longer has the same religion or spirituality that they were raised with, there are positives and negatives, right?
The positives are the things that you really liked about the religious attitude that you were raised with. And that you find a way to incorporate into what you do. There are gonna be things that you bring in, and that's good. That's what people do. We take the things that work for us, and then the, it's not even a negative, but I think the challenge that everyone has to face is thinking about a.
The assumptions that we were taught to make as children and unpacking those assumptions and unlearning them to make room for something else. Something that I see with a lot of people who are first coming into witchcraft, not just wca, any kind of witchcraft, is this fear that they're doing it wrong.
There is a way that it has to be done and someone is looking over my shoulder, someone is peering into my mind. Not like tele telepathy, but you know, like the gods are peering into my mind and if I'm thinking the wrong thing, then they're gonna know. And that's an attitude that a lot of the time is a holdover from.
A previous religious upbringing and that's something that we have to be attentive to and it can take a lot of work to consciously let that go. And regardless of what someone's religious upbringing was, I think we all have that kind of baggage that we have to stop and interrogate and let go. And that's true of the atheists just as much as it is of the Catholics.
[00:47:53] Connecting with the Author
[00:47:53] Risa: Do you wanna tell us where people can find you, how they can support you, how they can get involved in the work you're doing?
[00:48:00] Jack Chanek: Yeah, absolutely. I am not super present online anymore just because a lot of social media has gone up in flames. I do have a YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is just my name, Jack Chak. You can find me pretty easily if you search for me. I also have a tarot blog that I run intermittently. It's, it's Jack of Wands, WAN ds tarot wordpress.com.
There's contact information on my blog, which is how you initially reached out to me. I'm not always great about responding, but I do try. And yeah, I am. I just try to be around. So by all means, uh, if you're interested in talking to me, connecting with me, please do reach out. I do try to respond and if I don't respond, it's because I saw the email thought, oh, I should get back to this when I have time to write out a nice, good response, and then it just disappeared in my inbox.
[00:48:54] Risa: Thank you for your time. Jack.
[00:48:55] Jack Chanek: Thank you all so much for stopping in. It's been a really great conversation and thank you, especially Risa. This has been just. Fabulous.
[00:49:02] Risa: Really fun. So cool to meet you. We'll be in touch more.
[00:49:06] Jack Chanek: Alright, have a great night everyone.
[00:49:08] Risa: Safe travels everybody. Bless it. Fucking be
[00:49:11] Jack Chanek: bless it.
Fucking be absolutely.