Holy Tina

The Triumph of Tarot

Reminder: Paper Crowns, a course in a portraiture, visuality and power, begins in just a couple days! {Sunday August 11th} Confront the crown and learn to read these cards with more radical regard. Students will have evergreen playback access and payment plans are available. Enroll here.

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Fringe leather mini dress, single-strap. Feathered blonde enormous hair, so she needs no other crown. In teal heels she straddles a fierce beast and pries open its muzzle as if she is about to reach into the belly to retrieve something of her’s it must’ve swallowed whole.

“Strength in a woman--that's what I am.”

- Tina Turner

Tina isn’t on tour here but her portrayal in the Black Power Tarot is still so rock and roll. Like any other time she took the stage she’s wonderworking like a saint performs miracles.

A real regret is being born too late to not see Mrs. Turner “Break Every Rule,” with her tour of 230 dates in 25 countries. I didn’t have the fortune to see her live, but I’m still one of those fans screaming her name. My earliest memories of Tina’s music are dancing with my grandmother in her kitchen, both of us belting out that iconic refrain that questions a love that expects devotion without romance. The amber jukebox was our altar. We didn’t need to light candles because with a push of the button, this 5-cd, 5-tape music box emitted the warmest glow as we received revelation. In an ecstatic embrace we danced for hours till we couldn’t remember falling asleep to the music we wouldn’t let stop.

Tina was blessing me and my grandmother. This jukebox, only 5 years older than me, is still standing and still singing, and when my grandma passes, it will pass to me.

At 5 years old, I couldn’t appreciate how deeply free we found ourselves in that moment. It was a small house in a rural town with the driest of river beds, but the land gave us license to fill the sound space in a determination that heaven would hear us. And we were rockstars. And I knew it was more than safe to be this loudly buoyant, jubilant. It was sacred.

And while my grandfather fell asleep like clockwork on his recliner in the living room, hours before we would pass out strewn across the kitchen table, I vaguely knew that he was my grandmother’s second husband. I certainly didn’t know of the emotional abuse she survived from my father’s father. She escaped a literal prison guard, with three children from this unfaithful womanizer with an explosive temper. And at that time I didn’t know how Tina survived Ike. How he possessed her, made her his circus act, violated her in ritual torture. And while my grandmother seemed to be just as lost in the music as I was, I bet listening to Tina and knowing of her journey, her strength, affirmed her own. I’m sure Tina’s testimony illuminated my grandmother’s musical enrapture as a shared redemption. From singing to screaming, crying to laughing, was how we gave thanks for miraculous salvation.

“I didn’t have anybody, really, no foundation in life, so I had to make my own way. Always, from the start. I had to go out in the world and become strong, to discover my mission in life.”

Because it’s finally Leo season in this Strength year and only this icon of power could embody and extend the legacy of this archetypal arcanum, we as tarot readers owe Tina a tribute as well. For we find Tina in the Black Power Tarot, created by King Khan and Michael Eaton with guidance from Alejandro Jodorowsky.