Brittany Carmona-Holt - Tarot for Pregnancy: A Companion for Radical Magical Birthing Folks

Tarot for Pregnancy

Brittany Carmona-Holt Art by Kimberly Rodriguez

To the parents who are ready to raise the generation that will change the world.

BMCH

To all the abuelas and birthing people in my family.

Our stories continue through your seeds.

Thank you for your wisdom and love.

KR

w elcome to Tarot for Pregnancy, a companion for radical, magical birthing folks. Im elated that you have found your way to this book.

I am a full-spectrum doula, tarot reader, poet, photographer, mother, partner, aunt, and friend. I am of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and American settler descent, and I grew up on unceded Anishinabewaki land in so-called Belleville, Michigan. My magical practice is rooted in both the attempt to heal and reckon with the harm of my more immediate ancestors, while also reaching back to the preChristian Inquisition pagan traditions of my more ancient ancestors. So, while this book may mention or refer to traditional practices from other Indigenous peoples, African diasporic cultures, East Asian Indigenous traditions, and so on, those are not cultures I belong to nor the lens through which I can teach. The tarot itself is not only a pagan European practice (as you will soon read, the History of Tarot chapter by Sanyu Estelle Nagenda delves deeper into this history for edification and clarification).

I am not a decades-long expert on either witchcraft or pregnancy and birth (at least not at the time of writing this book). If you were hoping for guidance from someone whose wisdom comes from an impressive number of years, put into this lifetime alone, then youll likely be disappointed here. I am simply someone who is a voracious, insatiable student of birth, a witch finding her way back to what spirituality looked like for her ancestors before Christianity, and one who has a particular knack for connecting what the two topics of pregnancy and spirituality have to do with one another.

I have a lot to learn. I have a lot to share.

Chetna Mehta, creative wellness facilitator and artist

Since the first time I found out I was pregnant, the investigator in me was awakened. Even when I was just a pregnant person with no intentions of entering this field, I treated that experience like I was getting a PhD in pregnancy and birthresearching the root of things, and then the root of that root, and the root of that root and so on. To be clear, I do not have an actual PhD in anything.

In this book, you wont necessarily find a culmination of all that Ive learned, because that type of scholarly literature is and has been led by Black birth workers

I want pregnant folks, or trying-to-become-pregnant folks, to consult this guide and be shaken by the shoulders with this message: Your intuition holds valid weight; it is powerful and should always be consulted when you make your choices during pregnancy and birth. I believe when tarot is used as a tool for introspection and spiritual connection, it has the ability to reignite your intuitions flame and can assist in deciphering whats intuition and what is fear-based thinking instilled by the overculture.

Tarot can be enlightening; it can be reassuring. And I want you to enjoy the process, but also, I want you to see where connecting to our ancient wisdom is the greatest gift we can give ourselves as pregnant, birthing beings.

I want pregnant folks or trying-to-become-pregnant folks to consult this guide and be confronted with another message, toothat choosing to have children is choosing to continue your ancestral legacy. Do you like what youll be passing on? Are you even aware of what youll be passing on? What do you need to heal or dismantle in yourself so that you arent passing it on to the next generation?

Over the years of building a relationship with my tarot decks, I have learned that the cards are a proven confidant who will not bullshit you. Sometimes they are rude as hell and hurt your feelings. They can be a bitter, necessary medicine from your guides who want whats best for your souls growth, comfort be damned. Or the cards can be the bolstering, loving embrace of the ancestors who are proud of you. It is my firm belief that there is a place for both kinds of self-reflections in the movement toward improving birth outcomes in the United States.

I also want folks consulting this book to be routinely reminded of and rooted back into how magical and capable your body is, no matter your intersection of abilities and identities. I am still going to argue that for you to be here reading this book, you and the vessel in which you plan to grow a human are magical. You are embarking on the alchemy of cell division. You are the magician alchemizing your creative fire, nutrients from the Earth, water, and your very breath into a new human.

Tell me thats not magic by its most basic definition.

Unfortunately, this world, as it is right now, will likely try to instill fear and self-doubt in you at some point in your journey. The white-supremacist, capitalist, ableist patriarchy is deeply woven into the foundational fabric of the medical industrial complex, where most pregnant people will birth in the United States. So, I hope that youll let this guide be a continuous reminder of the truth of your magic, the validity of your intuition, and the innate dependability of your bodys physiology.

1. and on social media @mosaiceye.
2. . The works of Loretta Ross, Dorothy Parker, Chanel Porchia-Albert, Shafia Monroe, Racha Tahani Lawler, Margaret Charles Smith, and Stephanie Mitchell come to mind, to name a few.
3. . Reproductive justice is a term that marries reproductive rights and social justice defined by Loretta Ross as a framework created by activist women of color to address how race, gender, class, ability, nationality, and sexuality intersect. It was first coined in 1994 by a group of Black women called Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice.
4. . Honoring that in precolonial cultures, spirituality and birth were never separate, what Im talking about in this book isnt revolutionary, its remembering, for some reclaiming, and for others, like myself, repair.
5. . The concept of intersectionality was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberl Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics intersect, compounding oppressions and adding nuance to the experiences of folks who exist in identities that have been marginalized by the white-supremacist patriarchy.

T his book is organized by Minor Arcana first, then the Embodiments (Court Cards), and then lastly the Soul Archetypes (the Major Arcana). This arrangement is because the aces through tens of the Minor Arcana correspond energetically and numerologically with the months of pregnancy from conception to birth, so I wanted them to be first for anyone reading along with their same month of pregnancy.