Would you marry authenticity... or the Empress? This week I’m joined by Lane Smith, author of 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World, as we pull three cards and play one very important game: ❤️ F**k 💍 Marry 🪨 Push Off a Cliff This week’s cards: 🥾 Eight of Cups 🌿 The Empress 🙃 The Hanged Man What begins as a ridiculous game quickly becomes a conversation about authenticity, embodiment, desire, projection, relationships, kink, astrology, boundaries, and why sometimes the card you push off the cliff is the one you’ve already learned the lesson from. As always, the ridiculousness is part of the point. What happens when we stop asking what a tarot card means and start imagining what it might actually be like to be in relationship with it? Which qualities do we desire? Which make us feel safe? Which ones have we already spent quite enough time learning from, thank you very much? Before you listen... play along! Who would you f**k, marry, and push off a cliff? Make your choices before hearing ours, then let us know whether you agree; or whether we’ve completely lost the plot. About my guest Lane Smith (they/he) is a transgender writer and activist living in Baltimore City, Maryland, and the author of 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World (Sounds True, 2024), a book exploring tarot as a tool for personal and collective liberation. Lane also has a personal essay on the Tower in the forthcoming Major Arcana Anthology: 22 Tarot Experts Share Their Stories, edited by Jane Meredith (Llewellyn, 2026), and a piece of flash fiction in Volume 3 of The Rebis, a print anthology celebrating tarot, art and creative writing. Their work brings tarot into conversation with writing, activism, social justice and liberation, asking what our symbolic practices might reveal not only about ourselves but about the worlds and structures we inhabit. Lane is also an unwaged single parent of two young children and, in their own words, a “quadruple Sagittarian menace.” You can find Lane on Instagram at @leftlanesmith, Bluesky at @leftlanesmith.bsky.social, and through their website. About your host I’m Molly, the creator of Bone & Mirror Tarot. My approach to tarot is rooted in depth psychology, embodiment, mythology and transpersonal psychology. Rather than predicting the future, I see the cards as mirrors; doorways into understanding ourselves, our stories and the archetypes that shape our lives. Boner & Mirror Tarot is the cheeky little sibling of that work. We take tarot seriously; we just don’t take ourselves too seriously. Want to play with your own cards? I’ve created Tarot After Dark, a completely free field guide to desire, projection and questionable relationships with archetypes. Inside you’ll find the game from the podcast alongside a collection of other ridiculous ways to get into relationship with the tarot; because sometimes asking “Would I marry this card?” tells us far more about ourselves than asking “What does this card mean?” Underneath the chaos, Tarot After Dark explores some of the ideas at the heart of my work: projection, desire, archetype, and what happens when we stop treating tarot as something to decode and start treating it as something we can have a relationship with. Download it free via the link in my Instagram bio, grab a deck, and make some terrible decisions of your own.
