Welcome to Tarot for Scholars!

The Fool. The Hermit. The Queen of Swords. How can the richly resonant cards of the classic tarot deck help you unlock the unique creative power of your scholarship?

Writing experts Helen Sword and Margy Thomas launched Tarot for Scholars in 2024 to explore how tarot can be a tool for scholarship creation. The project grew from our shared fascination with the ancient wisdom and modern metaphorics of the tarot, which we translated into practical principles and writing prompts to guide your scholarly work.

Together, we worked our way through the entire tarot deck, creating a post for each card complete with reflections on various meanings and interpretations, as well as writing prompts to help you build your own sense of the card’s meanings.

Margy is currently on hiatus from this project but plans to return with a new Decan Walk series in 2027. In the meantime, check out the new series that Helen is running from March 2026 - March 2027: Embodied Tarot, created with the help of her AI assistant, Genai ⚔️. Each week, Helen draws a tarot card and works with Genai to design a short somatic practice that turns symbolic insight into physical release, interrupting patterns of desk-bound tension and screen fatigue. (For more on how and why Helen brings together the ancient wisdom of the tarot with the modern sorcery of generative AI, read this post on Dancing with GenAI).

Whether you’re a mystic or a sceptic, a novice or a cognoscente, we hope this resource will help you draw on the 78 cards for inspiration as you explore your own inner world and write with a sense of pleasure and purpose.

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