Can Tarot Readings Offer a Salve for Climate Anxiety?

Artist and activist Adriene Jenik has worn down her personal ECOtarot, a deck they designed to provide free climate future readings. “I’ve done more than 1,600 readings all over the world at this point,” said Jenik, who is also a professor at Arizona State University. 

Their deck features environmental iconography based on the original tarot set, which is hand-painted onto cards. For instance, the ECOtarot representation of the tower—the card that traditionally represents realizations, disruptions, and a need for change—depicts Superstorm Sandy, a climatic event that shifted the way Jenik thought about the climate.

“Before that event, people were like, oh yeah, climate change, whatever.” But after the superstorm, she felt a pull toward environmentally focused art. “ I describe my work as developing systems and processes that help us connect to ourselves, each other, and the land,” Jenik said.

Brooklyn-based artist James Leonard started giving climate-focused tarot readings to strangers in 2015 as part of “the Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies,” a traveling performance art piece. To create a comfortable setting for querents, Leonard and his team carefully fabricated the divination space. In the tent, the diviner and querent can peer out a sky oculus to be present with their surroundings. “You’re very aware of the ground below you,” Leonard explained.

His team designed the tent to look as if it appeared in a storybook, a traveling show that comes to town overnight. “Just setting up a table at an event with tarot cards wouldn’t have really created the right consistent context, both to read in and or readers to approach,” Leonard said.