Welcome to Tarot for Scholars, a resource that helps you weave the deep wisdom of tarot into your daily life and work. In each post, we offer reflections and prompts for exploring your own inner world and unlocking the unique creative power of your scholarship.
About this video
A Scholar’s View of Tarot launches our Tarot for Scholars project! This video offers a concise yet expansive overview of tarot, providing a foundation and context for the 78 single-card videos that we aim to publish in 2025. We’ll introduce one randomly drawn card each day in January — starting, not so randomly, with the Fool — before relaxing our pace to one card a week for the remainder of the year.
From this 35-minute video based on the classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck and its variations, you’ll learn where tarot comes from, what makes it such a uniquely valuable tool for scholars, and how the structure of the tarot deck can help you understand the structure of the scholarly process as well as of individual works of scholarship (with “scholarship” broadly defined to include any focused intellectual endeavor). We hope you’ll find ways of connecting the archetypal themes of the tarot to your own concrete goals for your work, throughout 2025 and beyond.
Is there someone in your scholarly life with whom you’d enjoy exploring the rich vocabulary and resonant imagery of the tarot — perhaps as a way of deepening collegial conversations and facilitating collaboration? If so, please share this post and invite them to come along for the journey!
Thanks for joining us for Tarot for Scholars! Your hearts, restacks, and comments brighten our day. If this free collaborative resource adds value to your life and work, please consider contributing to our “Helen & Margy IRL fund” so that the two of us (who live on opposite sides of the globe) can meet up In Real Life one day. An annual subscription costs just $1 per tarot card and earns you our eternal gratitude! 💫
Yours in scholarship,
HELEN SWORD is a scholar, poet, award-winning teacher, and founder of the WriteSPACE, an international writing community with members in 30+ countries. Her research-based books, articles, and online tools empower scholarly writers to write more stylishly, confidently, prolifically, and with greater pleasure.
Visit Helen’s website here.
MARGY THOMAS is the creator of ScholarShape, a body of work dedicated to elucidating the patterns of Story-Argument across genres, disciplines, and life itself. Through services and DIY resources, Margy helps scholars use Story-Argument patterns to design their work — and to find its deeper meaning and higher purpose.
Visit Margy’s website here.
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