Interview With Rosetta Magdalen
Stacey Clarke sits down with the popular tarot reader and manifestation magician.
What do you do? How did you get here?
I’m a professional tarot reader and tarot teacher for over 20 years, and I combine traditional manifestation techniques with folk magic practices for faster results — because everything is always better with magic.
Raised as a Catholic, I took the power and magic of the rituals and holy days (which are mostly syncretized pre-christian practices) and left the rest.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time walking in the woods, hearing messages in nature, and developing my channeled tarot readings and future-self readings, which I began to share with others.
What is tarot?
Tarot is a powerful medium to pull guidance from the collective unconscious or from whomever you want to tap into.
Tarot cards became popular in the US among the general public first in the 1920s, had a resurgence in the 1960s, again in the 1990s, and is probably the most popular ever right now due to social media and YouTube.
A traditional tarot deck has 78 cards separated into major arcana (22 life path cards) and minor arcana (56 cards dealing with daily life).
The easiest deck to get started with, as a beginner, is to look for a Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) tarot deck or one that is based on the RWS.
What is manifestation?
Manifestation techniques are based on the concept that our beliefs, culture, thoughts, and emotions profoundly affect what happens in our lives.
Whether or not you believe you can do something, you’re probably right. So what we choose to think and believe is the most important predictor of the life you’ll have.
If you feel defeated, and think that you can never have the life you want, there are many ways to change things.
I’ve spent decades fine-tuning how to make manifestation actually work, and work quickly.
My manifestation framework is easy and fun, with the magical ingredients that get women the quick wins, the continuous wins, and proof that this works and keeps getting better and better.
But, it’s important to choose manifestation practices that you love and that come easily for you.
Some of the things you can choose from are visualization, living from the end, my easy manifestation planner, adding your personal heroes or people you admire to your spirit team, affirmations, folk magic — if you build it, your dream life will come.
Words, all by themselves, are creative energy and they cast spells (whether you know it or not). We can curse or bless ourselves with each hard-wired thought.
An important part of manifestation is often reversing the conditioning we’ve received from others, and preventing future negative patterns from getting through to our energetic field.
Talk to the woman who is intrigued, but skeptical.
First of all, you’re in control of who is speaking to you through the cards. It can be your inner being or higher intelligence. It can be the god or goddess you worship. It can be a beloved person who has passed. It can be the wisdom of your future self.
You are in charge of the entire reading process, when you are reading for yourself.
Many women ask, how does this work? Or why does it work?
The images on each of the cards in any RWS-inspired tarot deck give you direct messages (that only you can decipher for yourself) based on whom you’ve chosen to speak to you through the reading, and what question you’ve asked.
Psychologist Carl Jung famously used tarot cards as part of his practice with clients, considering each card as an ancient “archetype” of part of the human journey.
Tarot is not part of any religion or belief system. Anyone can start reading tarot for yourself or get a tarot reading with someone like me.
Just try it. See if tarot speaks to you and if you feel drawn to explore it further.
How can a novice use tarot? What can you do with it?
I think it all starts with the right tarot deck. Here’s why. (And then I’ll talk about what beginners can do with tarot.)
The deck: If you start with a deck that’s not fully illustrated with pictures on every card (and not just a picture of seven cups or three pentacles, etc), there isn’t enough of an image on each card to give you a strong message about its meaning.
Then what happens is you have to start looking up the card meaning in a book for each card you draw . . . and then it doesn’t feel like it relates to the question you asked, and pretty soon, it gets frustrating and you give up.
So, what to do instead.
Go to Google Images and search for “RWS-based tarot decks.” You can browse the images and find a deck that appeals to you.
What to do with it: Don’t worry about memorizing card meanings. Just spend some time looking closely at each card in the deck. What is it saying to you? What do you think it means?
You can start by pulling just one care for the vibe of the day, or ask a specific question and then pull just one card for the answer.
Look deeply at the card you pulled, and ask it “What does this mean for my day"?" or “How does this answer my question?”
You will get messages or feel emotions that will guide you.
Tarot really helps you to get clear about what’s specifically causing you stress, or what’s on your mind.
I’ve written an entire free ebook for exactly how to start reading tarot cards for yourself the easy way. This is where I walk you through everything step by step.
Why do you think women can be drawn to tarot at midlife?
I think this often happens because when women hit their 40s, they start to believe in their own wisdom (even though they may not like some of the things their life experience has taught them).
They’re interested in tarot as a system to make sense of things and decide what’s next — in many areas of life.
They’re wondering “what’s my next era,” and, “can I really do this thing or get this life that I want?”
Many times, they want to explore more than the beliefs that they were taught growing up. They often wonder, “Is there more that can help me? What’s the next level?”
I believe that everyone is psychic, but most people need a way into their own deep insight and knowledge. Tarot (and learning manifestation techniques, too) can help you do that in astoundingly powerful ways.
Can tarot help with overwhelm and stress?
Yes! When you read tarot for yourself you can intend that your deck brings you direct messages from someone who is your expert and guide in whatever is the cause of distress.
You can ask for wisdom from your own inner being, visualize advice from the best work mentor you ever had, get divine downloads from an angel you like to meditate with, or hear from your favorite grandma who used to make things better when she was on Earth. The possibilities are literally endless.
You can meditate on that person or being as you think about a problem and ask for guidance on it.
If a solution comes to mind, you can check whether that’s the right path by shuffling your deck and pulling a card.
Or you can simply ask for your guide to show you the best path to take by pulling three cards.
You can start by setting your intention that, “Five minutes from now, I will feel more (fill in the blank with how you want to feel) and I’ll know my next step.”
Can people become too dependent on tarot? Can it become a crutch or obsession?
Yes, that can happen. And the chief way it happens is obsession in asking tarot about love relationships.
You’ll know that you’re out of control with tarot when you keep trying to twist the answer the cards are giving you into the answer you want.
When you keep reading over and over again on “How does he feel about me?” “Can I make him come back?” “When will I meet my soulmate?” it’s a clear sign that you need to increase your fascination and focus on yourself and your own life and stop waiting for some magical person to show up, or change, or come back.
So, that kind of obsession is the moment that you realize you’re completely out of balance and centering some person (or hypothetical person) and giving them way too much power.
One last thing about this: If you do find that you’re becoming obsessed around any specific question you have for the tarot, the answer is in reflecting about why you’re in a continuous loop about that subject.
When you understand the “why” you have the answer about what to do next.
How can the tarot-curious person fit tarot into daily life? How to make it something you want to do rather than just one more thing on the to-do list?
If you really feel drawn to tarot, a fun thing to do is to get a journal, and take one card a day, starting with card 0 The Fool. Every day, hold the next card in your hand, look deeply at it, and let it speak to you.
You can even say, “What do you have to say to me today?”
Then, just stream of consciousness, write what it’s telling you.
The same card may give you different messages on different days depending on what you need to hear.
Like anything in life that we want to learn, we can’t know it without forming a relationship with it. Just spend a little time every day with your tarot deck until she starts feeling like a close friend.
Tarot is a conversation not a transaction.
How do you combine the practical parts of life with the magical?
The magical exists to help with the practical. It helps you to access comfort and solutions that the practical and mundane aren’t always equipped to give you.
Powerful magical practices are often very simple and unlock so many aspects of yourself that you couldn’t reach or incorporate in your life before.
To begin, it can be as easy as:
before you open your eyes in the morning, clearly visualize and intend how you want the day to unfold, or
when there’s a problem you can’t solve, recruit a guardian spirit or elevated ancestor to give you the answer or next step in a way you cannot miss.
Finding ways to access your own accurate intuition is one of the strongest forms of magic — and everyone can do this.
There would be no magic if humans didn’t want to change the conditions and outcomes of our day-to-day (practical) lives.
Everyone has special everyday objects that can be the basis of their magic: Your lucky charm, your special jacket, your attraction ring, your banishing scarf . . . .
Not into enchanting your favorite things?
Words are the original magic. What you focus on multiplies (for good or bad). Speak it into reality. Or starve it out of your reality.
Your intention and your repeated action draws to you everything you need to have the life you want.
Where can we find you? How can we work with you?
Schedule a tarot reading with me here.
Schedule manifestation coaching here (for a specific plan to shift your life in the direction you want).
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