ARCANALOGUE: INTERVIEW - Sirona Knight's "Shapeshifter Tarot" Journey

I was introduced to the author and druidic High Priestess Sirona Knight via our mutual friend, Ann Bannon. In 2002, Sirona teamed up with D.J. Conway and illustrator Lisa Hunt to create the Shapeshifter Tarot, a Wicca-themed deck which she considers to be a personal gift from the Celtic deity Lugh. In this interview, Sirona describes the process of receiving the deck, and elaborates on its three additional Major Arcana cards. Read the interview...

Sirona Knight: So, I told my mother about this interview. She’s friends with Ann too, she has been forever, right? And you know, Ann is very open-minded, right?

Tom Blunt: Right!

SK: Well, my mother, she’s okay with gay and lesbian, but she’s not okay with Wicca. [Laughs] It’s like “Mom, come on!” She’d rather have me write about something else. But sometimes you just have to kind of be kind to Mom and understand where she’s coming from, and just feed her more of the things she wants to hear instead of what you’re really doing. It works out better. At least in my life it has!

TB: Mothers have all of these hopes for us, and reality can be... inconvenient.

SK: That’s true. That’s true. People pin all these aspirations and dreams on you, especially your parents, right? And if you don’t follow that course, they get very fearful and upset, and their expectation is kind of dashed on the rocks. But one thing that you have to do, and I’ve had to do it with my mom, is just kind of show her that things work out pretty well. I love her and she loves me, and we just have to kind of work with it. And she gets a lot of the things that she values, like my friendship and my companionship -- and her grandson, you know -- but at the same time she doesn’t really want to tell her parents that, you know, I’m an author. In fact, I told her that Ann had basically introduced you and I, and that you were an artist and a writer, and that when you talked to Ann you were very excited that she knew Sirona Knight! And she just got totally cold on the phone. So you know, Mom -- that's actually that’s a good thing, right?

TB: Yeah, I go through that a lot, because everyone in my family was sort of excited that I wanted to be a writer growing up, but one of the first things I started doing was writing for theater and that was something they couldn’t really relate to at all. Like, “Oh, well, that’s… something.” They didn’t even know exactly what that meant, or how to be supportive for that.

SK: Because it didn’t fit into a niche… And they were worried you wouldn’t make enough money and all that stuff.

TB: Exactly. And now that I’m writing about Tarot it’s so funny, because it’s just yet another category that they just don’t even know how to have enthusiasm for.

SK: Oh that’s so funny, I’ve got my cards in front of me. I always do this when I talk to people. I just shuffle them all up blindly, you know, face down. And then I halve the deck, and guess what card came up? The Mother.

TB: Oh, really?

SK: I’m not kidding you, really! I love it when that happens. It’s like, “Thank you, cards!” So the cards are following the conversation. I love that.

TB: I always love that -- there are so many readings where the cards come up and they might as well be written in Chinese and seem completely unfamiliar no matter how well you know them. Or like, every now and then there’s a reading that is just so incredibly difficult for whatever reason. It’s always such a huge relief when there’s something central that you immediately know.

SK: I mean I shuffled these all up and I was being good, I wasn’t looking and I cut them and now I’m like… “Okay.” I love it when it does that. This is a really special deck, maybe because it really has my heart and soul in it. The way it came about was in August -- the first week of August is Lughnasadh, in honor of the god Lugh who is like the master of all gods. He knows how to do everything. He’s a good god to have on your side, and I’ve had a really strong rapport with him. He always gives me a gift the first week of August. Always. It’s always something really special. I can’t really ever identify what it’s going to be, it just suddenly comes up, and I love it -- it’s like Christmas in the middle of summer! And it’s not always necessarily material things, although sometimes it is. One year it was land. You know, he showed me a piece of land that was incredibly cheap and we ended up buying it and living on it. And while I was looking at it there was a hundred dollar bill on the ground. You know, that kind of thing.

So that one year that I just got the deck, I just sat and I did a deep merge -- I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, but it’s where you just merge with everything and nothing at the same time and you become everything and you become nothing and then you become more than nothing and everything. So you check in or sort of tap in to the cosmic consciousness. You know, there really is a cosmic consciousness.

TB: Yes.

SK: I decided, “Well, I’m just gonna do that.” And I started one evening. I think it was August 4th. So the eve of the great day, of the strongest power, the highest power. I just sat there just said, “Okay, Lugh, I need an idea. I really want to do a Tarot deck. I need an idea.” I’d always wanted to do a Tarot deck, because I’d been reading the Tarot since I was like sixteen and I was just totally into it. It was a good divination tool for me, it was often very accurate. So I liked that, but I always wanted to do my own deck because I always thought the Rider-Waite deck was… Eh. [Laughs] It has a lot of cards in there that didn’t work for me, like the Devil and stuff like that.

So I just merged really, really deeply and I got this idea for the Shapeshifter Tarot, half animal, half human. Because I always felt that people kind of demonstrated their animal natures. I was always very interested in shamanism, especially living on ten acres with my dogs and all the different types of animals here, from mountain lions to bears to foxes to raccoons to squirrels.

I was sitting at the desktop, and it was an old clunker desktop, because this was like ten years ago. And what happened was I started going through the Rider-Waite deck, one card at a time in order, and [Lugh] gave me images of what the Shapeshifter deck would be. And it was like I got these complete, whole images, all the way down to how many acorns should be in the tree, what kind of tree it should be, what animals should be on the card, what the people should be wearing, what colors they should be wearing, the poses, the looks on their faces. I mean I’ve never really had an experience quite that all-encompassing and overwhelming at the same time. It was like somebody was lecturing me and I was just taking notes. So I wrote this all down on the computer -- I stayed up for forty-eight hours just writing this down and getting it right. And then after I got it all down, I went through all of my reference books and made sure I had all the pieces right, made sure that the tree or the plant or the color matched what I was trying to do.

[Click to view the entire Shapeshifter Tarot deck.]

TB: Were there a lot of surprises there for you, as far as symbols you’d picked up on?

SK: It was amazing how much it was correct. You know, like the tree or the plant would be correct, or the color would be correct, or the animal would be correct as far as what I was trying to convey in the card. The correlations and the connections were just amazing. It seemed like it was mostly all correct. So it was easy to do in that respect, because I didn’t have to do a lot on my own. It was mostly just listening. And I know that people say, “Well that was inside of yourself.” Well, maybe so, but at the same time I was definitely connecting with something that was outside of myself. So it was kind of both, because you kind of filter it through your own mind, body, whatever. You have your own filters that you’ve accumulated through the years.

When I was merging and going through the experience, I tried to kind of put the human out of the way. You know, kind of step aside and let someone else dictate to me or give me that information instead of trying to grab it and grasp things in my own mind. I was trying to kind of just let that all come in. And then I had an artist that I’d worked with on a couple of other books. She had that amazing ability to draw and paint really quickly. So I sent her the big pages, the sheets of paper that I had for each card, because each card had like a full sheet of paper that had all the descriptions. And then she went through the sheets of paper just drawing, you know pencil drawings for each one of them, and then I made corrections of things I liked and didn’t like, or things that I wanted to add. And then we brought (author) D.J. Conway into the deal. We did that because D.J. was a friend... and I knew that if we both did it together, [Llewellyn] wouldn’t be able to say no.

TB: Right.

SK: [Laughs] It was strategic. But it worked out really well, because she’s older and wiser so she had a different stance on some of the cards. She has the Moon and I have the Sun. We didn’t change each other’s work at all -- what she wrote, she wrote and what I wrote, I wrote.

TB: So at least you know you got to say your piece and you got to say what you discovered and what you found.

SK: Oh yeah, yeah, I think it worked out really well. I’ve had a few people say, “Well you must hate men because that Death card looks like it.” And I say, “No, I’ve actually been married for a long time. I really like men!”

TB: I’ve seen all of the cards but I haven’t read the book. I’ll have to check it out…

SK: Well that’s what I like about this deck, is that you don’t have to have the book. Because I always hated having to drag the book out right away. And I wanted to make a deck that was so easy to use that you didn’t need a book, that you could just look at the cards and know what they meant. And that way you wouldn’t have to always be sort of burdened by the book. I think we succeeded in doing that, because a lot of people tell me that they just use the cards and they don’t necessarily look at the book at all. Though the book does have a lot of information, because we use a lot of the Celtic mythology.

TB: Yeah, the book is a great opportunity, but I have to say that some of my favorite cards in this deck are the ones that are normally a little obscure for people. For example the Justice card, which I think you have in here as "Nature", is that right?

SK: Right.

TB: And looking at it, it’s very clear. It definitely gives you an impression of the card that’s accurate in a classical sense but it’s also very instinctive -- anyone can understand it.

SK: Traditional Tarot people sometimes get pissed off at me because I made it eighty-one cards. “How dare you do that?” I did that because Lugh told me to do that, and also there’s and old myth in the Celtic tradition that there were eighty-one knights that got together a thousand years ago and said that they’d bring the light back to the dark world. So I used eighty-one. So yes, it’s interesting. And well, you know what Llewellyn wanted to do with the Major Arcana cards? They wanted to put the traditional names on them.

TB: Oh really?

SK: We only wanted the Air element, we didn’t want “Wands” put on there, okay? We just wanted the "Air element". We wanted it to just be the four elements basically. And the major arcana means Spirit, the fifth element, so the divine quintessence basically. And they tried to put the traditional names in addition to our names on the Major Arcana and D.J. and I just said nope. We said if you do that, we don’t want to publish this. That’s the only thing we really put our foot down on, and they backed off. Neither her nor I were going to have “The Devil” put on any card, because in our tradition there is no devil.

TB: Let’s go back a little bit to the extra cards, because I think even from a classical sense it doesn’t matter how many of the Major Arcana cards there are -- the main point is that each one sort of “trumps” the one that came before it.

SK: Right, and that’s what I wanted to do with the ones that I added. I wanted them to kind of extend it a bit.

TB: So tell me a little about these extra cards. We have, “The Double”, “The Journey”, and “The Dreamer” preceding the final card, “Oneness” (which is analogous to the World card in your deck). I think that’s a really fascinating place for extra cards to come in, because if you look at the sequence of the twenty-two cards there, towards the end you have the Last Judgement and the World. I think it’s a big leap between these two cards, because they contain such big cosmic ideas to wrestle with. Taking the time to elaborate there and create more food for thought strikes me as a wonderful idea, and I’d like to hear about them.

SK: Well, the Double represents an experience that you have in shamanism. You know this deck is also very shamanistic, it’s not just Celtic -- both D.J. and I have a huge interest in shamanism and had studied it for quite a while. And that’s pretty much where I came from when I got into the whole paganism and Wicca thing.

The Double is about the idea -- which is also my feeling and my experience -- that we’re living many lives at once. There are many streams. We have the ability to check into those lifetimes if we merge deeply enough. And the Double in our tradition is the ability to “double out”. In other words, to purposely try to tap into those other streams of existence that we’re living simultaneously. And that’s the same principle that “insouling” is based on. Do you know anything about insouling?

TB: No.

SK: Insouling is the ability to move from your consciousness into another person’s consciousness. It’s very possible that’s what remote viewers do. It’s an exercise that remote viewers practice. And the Double is the way for you to actually put your mind into another consciousness or to find another part of yourself. The theory being that if you are able to tap into enough of these streams of consciousness, and enough of yourself, that you’ll become a fuller, more developed person in this consciousness.

TB: I can see that as being an experience that might be really important in leading up toward the Oneness card…

SK: Exactly, because then you see how it’s connected through the streams of consciousness. It makes that much more apparent in your own self. And basically the Double is very much the idea of shape-shifting -- only using consciousness, not necessarily using an animal being or nature. It’s astral travelling from multi-dimensional awareness, so suddenly what happens when you start tapping into these streams of consciousness is your life becomes a lot more synchronistic. You start thinking things, and then they happen. Life almost becomes predictable on that level, which is nice in some ways and is sort of a hindrance in others, because a little bit of the spontaneity goes out. But at the same time, it gives you sort of a leg up, a clue as to what may occur, or what is probable that will occur. As for “doubling out” -- that’s what it’s called in the tradition -- it’s an exercise that you can practice and get very good at. It’s not necessarily something you continue doing. Some people use it for harm. You can double out into someone’s dream and you can screw with their dreams. Not everyone in the tradition is a wonderful person. You know, it takes all kinds, as they say. Still, there are ways you can protect yourself from that happening, and that’s part of learning to double out: learning to protect yourself. And it’s important, I can’t stress enough to people, it’s extremely important to protect yourself, because there’s a lot of ambient energy out there. It’s been collecting for thousands and thousands of years. When you start tapping into some of that stuff it can get a little scary, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have any guidance. You don’t know who else is on the trolley-car. You really don’t. It’s important that you keep that in mind.

TB: And now The Journey, card twenty-two?

SK: To me, life is a journey. And it seems to me that we’re always constantly on a journey and it’s the journey that’s important, not necessarily the end. You know, it’s not necessarily the goal, it’s not necessarily where you end up. But the goal in a sense is to experience the journey one step at a time, and to be aware of that, so that you’re not always ahead of yourself thinking in the future or sitting there wallowing in the past. And as a writer and as an artist you know that’s really, really important. Because you really have to stay in the present moment to move whatever creative work you’re doing along. You know, you can pull from the past -- obviously we all do. And you can pull from the future, because to me it’s all cyclic. I’ve done past life regressions, I’ve done future life regressions, and I’ve done other life regressions, moving into the Double. So I’ve had direct experience that it’s all cyclic. You know, this isn’t the past, this isn’t the future, it’s all happening at once. What you’re tapping into is the consciousness of this time, it’s where you are right now. You’re here instead of over there. You know if you’re over there then you’re not necessarily here, but you can learn to be here and there at the same time with the Double.

The journey is very important. A lot of people just forget that they’re on a journey. And it becomes too goal oriented. Which is good, I mean we all need goals -- goals move us along. At the same time, sometimes that overshadows what’s really happening and what’s really going on. And you miss what’s important. You miss the, um…

TB: …The journey?

SK: Yeah, you miss the experience, you miss that which changes you and moves you along on your journey. Sorry… I’m just playing with the cards here. I do that as we talk.

TB: That’s fine. And the Dreamer?

SK: I’ve always been a vivid dreamer. A lucid dreamer. I’ve always been, ever since I was a little girl. I used to stay in my dreams. I used to not want to wake up in the morning because I’d just want the dream! I would continue my dreams the next day, the next night, whatever. So to me dreaming was always a way to tap into information, and pretty much anybody I’ve ever worked with has become a lucid dreamer -- it’s something that’s not that difficult to do. It’s just technique and it’s just a way of remembering things. Another way of remembering, another way of wiring your consciousness and your memory. And for me, dreams have always been extremely useful and extremely valuable in the sense that I’ve gotten a lot of information from them. I’ve gotten ideas for books from my dreams. I’ve actually had dreams of things that happened the next day, or the next week. To me dreams were always extremely important. The dream world is a part of that Oneness. It’s part of the Double, it’s part of the Journey. It’s that whole shamanic idea of, “What is dream? Are we living the dream or is the dream living us?” You know, what is it? And we spend a lot of time analyzing dreaming, so it seemed to me that that was very important to put in there. That that was perhaps something that was missing from other decks that I had used. People just really don’t put enough emphasis on that.