Added Hornbein approval date

content/interviews/hornbein-tarot.md

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+---
+narrator: Drew Hornbein
+subject: Tarot
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-08-22
+approved: 2025-09-16
+summary: "Summoning experiences of magic through art, divination, tattooing, and software."
+location: "Denver CO"
+#headshot: "first_last.png"
+topics: [art, divination, open source, ritual, software]
+links:
+  - text: "Personal website"
+    url: "https://www.dhornbein.com/"
+  - text: "Ritual Point Art & Divination"
+    url: "https://ritualpoint.studio/"
+---
+
+*Drew, let's begin with how you like to introduce yourself.*
+
+I introduce myself as Drew Hornbein. Depending on who I'm talking to, I'll say technologist, activist, or mystic. If I want to get more of a rise out of people, I'll lean on mystic or anarchist. The edgiest one feels like mystic. The easiest one feels like technologist.
+
+*Where does your practice of tarot fit into those different ways of introducing yourself?*
+
+At the core, tarot is an intuitive practice of seeing what's going on and elevating it. Tarot is about surfacing the subconscious into the conscious realm. When it comes to technology, that's about taking the feelings and ideas and making them manifest on screens---a very potent magical power.
+
+In activism, it's about connecting with the feelings of my human animal that bristles against the inequities and bad design of the systems we find ourselves in. There's something viscerally there but hard to articulate---being able to draw the connection between feeling something's wrong and recognizing what is not right.
+
+With tarot, it's about doing that on a personal level---noticing something but you can't put your finger on it. Let's find out what that thing is. You have a question about the way a system works, whether an internal system of your own or in your local area. There are throughlines for all these things that the practice of being with tarot can make more clear.
+
+I was an activist before I ever picked up a deck of tarot cards. I was a technologist before I picked up a deck of tarot cards. Tarot feels downhill from all those things.
+
+*When did your relationship with tarot begin? Where does that story start for you?*
+
+The first reading I remember getting was a friend pulling cards for me in New York City, on their bed. We did the Celtic Cross, a ten-card spread. I don't remember any notion of tarot before that, and I don't recall how it showed up in my life after that until my best friend and business partner got me a deck as a gift.
+
+It must have been something on my mind that they were able to track. I remember it clearly because I got the Robin Wood deck, which is a very accurate reimagining of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. I remember because it was on the solstice. I got the deck, then I did DMT for the first time.
+
+I had a very profound experience of blasting off. I don't remember what I did when I went to that realm, but I remember coming back and having this experience of realizing that I'm a consciousness in reality, and oh, there's other consciousnesses, oh, and we're all in bodies. That's right, I'm a consciousness and a body with other consciousnesses and bodies, and we're playing this game of existing.
+
+That set the stage for how I began this process of unraveling. Before that, I had been very much a materialist rationalist. I was in the James Randi atheist, skeptic world that rolled its eyes at astrology and saw tarot readers as charlatans---a very low-level charlatan, in the same category as water dowsers and mediums and psychics. That moment represents this fulcrum moment when I went over the other end.
+
+I remember that night as well because I went to an ecstatic dance. In the ecstatic dance, if you're not familiar, it's a solo dancing experience. You go and dance for yourself. The community there, after the dance---we all sit down and they do this woo-woo stuff. The skeptical, materialist, rationalist part of myself bristled against that.
+
+But then there was a moment where I'm like, "Okay, let me just let it in." Do the breathing exercise, and sit, and imagine the energy from the earth coming in through my feet and filling me up and shooting out of my crown chakra. When I started playing along, I became---it was just more interesting. Letting a little bit of this magic in felt nice. It just felt nice. Letting the magic in felt nice. I started doing it more and more.
+
+*What did getting into it mean? What kinds of practices did you start developing?*
+
+There are two practices I developed. One came a little before that, on a road trip. A friend of mine, while we were driving from North Carolina to Ohio, introduced me to the concept of chaos magic, which is attached to this fake religion that started in the seventies called Discordianism. It has this tongue-in-cheek idea---and a little bit of a colonizer frame---that's basically: you allow for any entity or god or spirit to be real so that you can interface with it. You believe it.
+
+One of the practices in chaos magic is noticing coincidence---noticing happenstance and coincidence and when random things align magically. That became a bug in my mind where I would notice synchronicity and take note of it.
+
+Once I started getting into tarot, it became a matter of study, to learn the cards. I'm in this process of noticing the magical things happening around me and studying this encyclopedia of archetypal energies. You begin to make these connections.
+
+My practice with tarot started with pulling a card every morning and journaling about the card. I got into that rhythm and practice. Through that, I filled up a whole notebook and got fairly close with many of the cards. My next move was, once I finished the notebook and was bored of journaling, I got a little sketchbook and would pull a card and sketch my interpretation.
+
+Thirty cards or so in, it dawned on me that I was drawing my own tarot deck. That became this phenomenal curse that haunts me to this day: I didn't intend to make it, but I did, and now I have this artifact that continues to speak to me and unravel itself. It represents my deepening understanding of this protocol around tarot. I've written my own fork of the protocol.
+
+*When you think of the story of tarot, in relationship to your own story, how important is the history of it? For some people, the authority or power of tarot comes from its relationship to claims that it derives from ancient Egypt or other ancient cultures, or early modern Europe. How is the story of tarot and its history part of your relationship to it? Or do you take a different approach?*
+
+I think I take a different approach because tarot feels---it has multiple histories.
+
+The story that I always liked was: it was a playing card game, then Aleister Crowley and his wacko friends turned it into a divination tool. They created story around it being this divination tool, where it was never really that in deeper history. Something about that story makes it feel more accessible.
+
+There are so many practices that feel colonized and taken without permission, or used in the wrong ways---practices that have deep, deep lineages and histories. Having something that is: some weirdos in the twenties just turned this playing card into something that it never was, and it became this fun thing---that gives me permission to interact with and change and play with the tarot.
+
+At the same time, from a protocol lens, tarot is this very interesting, open-source project that has been developed over hundreds of years to catalog different archetypal energies and stories of the human condition. The major arcana describes huge life cycles, then the minor arcana describes the smaller, more mundane things that happen in our world. Each illustrator and writer takes these concepts and adds their own twist---essentially, a fork of the protocol.
+
+It's an interesting protocol because the more people who take and remix it, the more robust it gets. It's not like we're changing something and then the interoperability diminishes. It actually increases the potency of each card, because now---at least in my practice, when I encounter a new deck and they explain something, or when I give a reading and a person reflects something about a card---I'm constantly finding out new angles to look at the same thing. It's expanding, constantly expanding, always growing. The information that is entangled with each card is constantly expanding through other people's decks and other people's interpretations.
+
+*How did you begin to learn to the point where you felt you could wield this practice? What kinds of things did you discover in readings that other people did for you? How did you begin to develop a sense of mastery?*
+
+I think the honest answer is that I saw how differently everyone did it. It's less about perfectly accurately interpreting the card than it is about giving people an experience of being seen.
+
+When I'm reading for somebody, the work we're doing is taking what our body and our subconscious knows and understands and getting it into language. We're moving it into the conscious construct and limitation of the symbolic language that we're all---as Cormac McCarthy described it---afflicted with. We've all been afflicted with language, and it sits on top of our much larger understanding and knowing. That is our intuition. The tarot is the thing that bridges it.
+
+I remember doing a reading once, and somebody who has much more knowledge of tarot than me asked: "Could you just rip pages out of a magazine and give a reading like this?" The answer's yes, because the way I read is about asking a person to notice things and come up with a story about this image that's in front of them.
+
+It doesn't require historical accuracy about the actual meaning of the card. It needs to connect to something that creates revelation for the person---to do the magic, to do the work. All it has to do is connect. That is the primary purpose.
+
+The way I've been brought up as a man in our current society, it says you can just have a seat at any table, you can go anywhere, you don't have to---just call yourself a tarot reader. As problematic as that orientation can be, it helped me because I was able to come with confidence into the space. It's more the confidence that---I know that you and I, if I'm sitting down with you to read these cards, I'm confident that you and I will land somewhere. We'll get somewhere if we both want to get somewhere.
+
+From the skeptical mind, I can explain the way tarot works as: it's two people sitting down and trying to reach a destination---that is, to have a magical experience. As long as you're sitting with someone who's trying to play the game with you, then you will have that experience.
+
+It's also a matter of memorizing the cards, and that means reading the booklets enough that you don't have to read the booklets. You can just look at a card. What I do is look at a card and ask questions. The card becomes a prompt for me to ask questions to a person that seem---they're looking at a card that's so abstract, then I ask them this very pointed question: "Where are you if you were on a boat and weren't in control? Where would that boat be taking you right now?"
+
+It is this confusing, potent question that is prompted by the Six of Swords, the card about passage. It's moving from the Five of Swords that is about conflict into the Seven of Swords that's about getting a thing at any cost. The more I build that knowledge, the more I can ask weird questions that sit in a coherent reality with the cards.
+
+I think it's about building and cultivating a confidence that everybody---the cards included---want the game to succeed, want the magic to happen. Everything else on top of that is just making the process easier.
+
+*I wonder if you could say a bit more about what a magical experience is, and maybe what it's not---when it doesn't work. You talked about games a lot. Is it in the same category as Monopoly or chess, or is it something different?*
+
+I think it's in the same place as Monopoly and chess, insofar as it works when both players come to play the game.
+
+*Do we call it a cooperative game then?*
+
+Yeah, it's definitely a cooperative game. Like chess is a cooperative game. You and your partner sit down and agree to have a chess experience together. If you both happen to know the same rules then chess happens. If you've ever played chess with a little one and they move pieces willy nilly, you're playing a different game.
+
+When tarot fails, it's almost entirely because the other person isn't taking their place in the game. They're not playing their role. When I sit with you and read your tarot, we are agreeing to have a tarot experience.
+
+I think the magic is that you come with both the question and the answer. Then we play the game to make the connection and to make it in a way where it feels like you didn't already come with the answer.
+
+If you don't participate in that, if you pick my king up and throw it off the board, the experience---if you come and you expect me as the reader to just reveal everything to you---I don't think it works either at all or as well. It's a collaborative process.
+
+The thing that causes it not to work is the person ceding their agency and power. A lot of what I do is about illustrating to people that they come with both the question and the answer. The magic that I hold is self-evident.
+
+I am not trained. I didn't go to the monastery and pass through the rites of passage. There's magic systems that require that sort of dedication. I'm simply allowing what is---I'm reaching out and grasping what's right in front of me, and if I can do it, then so can you. My job as the reader is to help you tap into your birthright, your ability to sense the field, your ability to move from the pattern symbolic world of language and reach into yourself for the symbolic felt sense of the subconscious and make meaning around that.
+
+The game is---this is why it can be done with ripping out paper, with looking at tea leaves, with beholding pixels on a screen. It's all just looking at the world and making sense out of the chaos of all of this.
+
+*How has that magic shaped your own life?*
+
+There is this idea that neuroscientists are in some level of agreement that there is no free will, that you are just a chemical reaction playing out. The prenatal conditions of your mother's womb has more to do with your success and actions in the world than almost anything else. We are these beings that might have absolutely no agency, and really, all we're doing is retroactively coming up with stories about why we inevitably did a thing.
+
+Magic helps me deal with that---the chaotic nature of reality. It helps me come to grips with the way I'm out of control, and it creates all this rich story about why things happen and the meaning that comes out of the things that happen, because everything's just random shit going on. Stuff you can never prepare for or foresee. The story you create around the things that happen to you is whether or not you have a good or bad time here.
+
+*Have you encountered debates about legitimacy---for instance, people telling you that you're doing it wrong? Or have you seen others be told that they're doing it wrong? Are there boundaries around this practice that perhaps you're anxious to not cross, or that you've seen others cross?*
+
+My only experience that comes to mind is meeting people who do put in the work and get really deep into it. I'm thinking of a particular person. They had an orientation around what is the right way. There's a right way to do it, and there's all this history and knowledge to gain and study to do. You gotta understand astrology and the Kabbalah Tree of Life, you gotta study the Thoth deck and the Rider-Waite-Smith, and you gotta read Jordavotsky's book on tarot, and you have to listen to all these different people.
+
+Then they see other people who didn't do that work still getting outcomes. I think that's---the proof is in the pudding. If the objective is to find the places of revelation, and people are receiving that through my ignorant manner of doing it and through their extremely well-researched and perhaps more correct way of doing it, what's the difference?
+
+It could be that I might be bringing in harmful things because I haven't studied. There might be huge consequences to the loosey-goosey way I do this, I am certainly taking a risk. In my experience, though, the feedback I am getting from people and the world is positive. I don't think there is a wrong way to go about it.
+
+Other than telling people the future. If I'm telling you the future, if I'm speaking to the dead, if I'm channeling spirits, that's outside of my wheelhouse. I don't know how that works. The only way to do it wrong is to create unrealistic expectations about what is happening.
+
+I very firmly believe---I have made the decision to believe that magic is real, that there are forces beyond our control and understanding that are shaping the way things unfold. But all of that belief, I can drop down into the rational brain. I can explain to you rationally how studies have shown that the placebo effect is real. Your belief in things changes your physiological body. I can point to the rational scientific way of understanding reality and make all this stuff work, because I'm not talking to entities outside of reality. I'm not doing things I don't have training in. I'm interfacing with what is self-evident to me and dressing it up in fantastic story.
+
+Magic is the story we wrap around the things happening in consensus reality.
+
+I'll give you an example. This was the moment that I made this switch into allowing magic to be real. I was in this terrible year of grief, and for some reason, I started noticing angel numbers on phones---when it's 11:11 or 12:34. I start noticing these numbers come up, and the rational part of my brain says, yes, this is called cognitive bias. You see something, you notice yourself see it, then you notice yourself noticing it more. Nothing special or magical about it. You look at your phone all the time, and you throw away every time you look at it that doesn't have a magical number, and you keep all the times that it does. This is just how brain cognition works. Nothing special going on.
+
+Through the year of grief, I'm noticing these more and more, and I'm allowing myself to get into it. I'm throwing away all the time I look at my phone when it doesn't have something special---I don't remember it. But every time it does, I'm making a note of it.
+
+At the same time, I'm reading *The Man Who Could Move Clouds* by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, which is about a Colombian woman whose grandfather was a magic man and against tradition taught his daughter, Ingrid's mother. Throughout the book fantastic magical things happen to the family. She describes how her Western colleagues in America saying, "Oh, you called this a memoir, but it's actually magical realism." She's saying, "No, this all happened." It's this book very much about practical, real magic, and it's speaking to me. Giving permission really.
+
+One night, I'm out late, sitting on my porch. It's early in the morning, I can't sleep, I'm still in this grief. This bright light fills the sky. I thought a helicopter was shining a spotlight down on my house. I stand up and look out over the western sky, and there's this huge green fireball breaking up in the atmosphere. I see this phenomenal meteor.
+
+I look down at my phone to note the time (so I can look on Twitter later), and it's 3:33.
+
+It's the confluence of me reading this book, me stepping into this patterning of recognizing the time, then coincidentally being at the right place at the right time where this event happened at this randomly specific time. With those facts laid out in front of you, you're presented with a fork in the road where you can say the world is meaningless, that all of this is coincidence and none of it is connected. Or you can turn towards: the world is fantastic, there's magic everywhere. All things are connected. Everything is happening in relation with something else.
+
+I chose that path.
+
+*What do you do when somebody is not playing the game, when somebody hasn't chosen that path yet? How would you do a reading for the version of yourself before you had chosen that path?*
+
+That's both the magic and the skill of divination---very quickly intuiting where someone is, then speaking to them in a language that they understand. If I came to myself and did a reading and talked about the interconnectedness of all things and magic, framing it in that way to my 23-year-old self, they wouldn't have been able to hear me.
+
+But I would explain it to them this way: tarot cards represent patterns that show up in life. It's the illustration of archetypal patterning throughout our shared history. It's simply a catalog of things that humans do and roles they play. Those things show up in our life because there's only so many ways that interpersonal conflict can come out in the wash. There's gotta be a perpetrator, there's gotta be a victim, and they're perpetrating from some trauma, and the victim is---all these things that happen to us, and it's usually about dads and moms.
+
+There is a finite amount of reasons that drive people to react and respond to things. The cards simply try and illustrate those reasons, and we can use the cards to ask questions and reveal a random piece of nonsense that triggers a connection in your mind, because your mind works through symbolic connections.
+
+When you think of water, you remember---it flows through every experience you have of water, and not just literally being in water. It's tied to stories about big waves, it's tied to paintings of water, it's tied to the first time you drank water and it went down the wrong pipe. We can explore concepts by firing up this web of neurons.
+
+It can be explained rationally. Magic is way larger than rational frameworks. Magic interfaces with more of reality, and thus it's very easy for the rational frameworks to hold a piece of it.
+
+Everything I do and believe, as a fun game, I like to figure out how to put it into rational terms, and I think that's part of my orientation, my power. I've played that game with everybody. I have friends that have seen aliens, and I know people who have spoken to many different permutations of God or have had profound experiences dancing. I'm always asking the question: how can we live in a reality where all these things are true, even the ones that are contradicting each other? How can we make it all work together?
+
+The practice is about identifying where a person is at and speaking to them in a language that they'll understand.
+
+*What is the relationship for you between the work you do with cards---drawing cards, both making them and playing them---and tattoo? It seems like these practices are deeply connected. As you were developing your deck, the deck looks like your tattoo art in some respects. I'm curious about how you think about the relationship between the medium of the card and the medium of the body and skin.*
+
+As you ask that question, it becomes immediately clear and obvious, but I don't think I've thought about it. The tattooing and tarot---the way I practice both is about revealing meaning.
+
+I sometimes describe tattooing like this: the tattoo is in your skin, and my job is just to uncover it. In the same way, the answer to your question is already inside of you, and my job as a tarot reader is simply to uncover it, then for us to put together these shapes and patterns.
+
+In tarot, it's about creating a story around shapes and symbols, and then in tattoo, it's about taking a story and turning it into shapes and symbols. In a way, it's just a directionality thing. Let's uncover the meaning by pulling out shapes and symbols, and then the other one is, let's take the meaning and turn it into something that can live on you. Tattoos are scars that remind us of something.
+
+The two are very interrelated. There are ways of doing tattoos that are just aesthetic, but I focus on a very ritualized, meaning-rich orientation toward the art of tattooing. It does have a symmetry with tarot.
+
+I'm only making that connection now that we're talking about it, but it's so obviously what I've done and been doing. This is very much like my tarot deck. I created the tarot deck, I did the thing, and now I'm retroactively making meaning around it.
+
+I started doing the tattoos through an intuitive sense---I feel like doing this and thus I am going to do it. That's how I've been trained as an artist. You can try to plan things out, but really you just follow what you're already doing.
+
+This ties back to the subconscious. It is this enormous ocean, and our conscious experience of it is so limited. We exist in the pattern language world that is unable to encompass the ocean of subconscious feeling and expression and emotion. We're all moved by the subconscious. We're constantly animated by it, and then it's only later that we can tell a story.
+
+I started doing tarot and I started doing tattooing, and in this moment right here, live, in this interview, I'm adding to the facade of my practice. Now I can speak to it as: we reveal the meaning with tarot, then we cement the meaning into the body in tattoo.
+
+You can see the loop that's there---we pull out from the subconscious, then we make it permanent on the body so that it is constantly there to speak to the subconscious and influence the subconscious and create right action. You've put the right symbol there that will trigger a response in the conscious and subconscious. All of that, I never considered until now.
+
+There is an example of the synchronicity. You and I met so many years ago so that we could eventually come to this moment and have that revelation, and then that revelation is going to influence somebody down the line who's gonna get a tattoo on their finger that does some work in their system and helps them on their path. They're going to meet somebody, and the meeting will only happen because the other person sees the tattoo on their hand. The web of magical influence---once you start to pay attention to it, it's mind-bogglingly complex because the world is mind-bogglingly complex. Having some frameworks around explaining it or telling a story about it can be fun and useful.
+
+*Does that same resonance occur when you think about writing code? It seems like one could imagine an engineering-like practice being separate. But you're also engaged in symbolic design when you do web design. Does that also feel like a part of that work of magic, or does it feel like something else?*
+
+It definitely has a different flavor, but it's working on so many of the same systems. What immediately pops into my mind is the hamburger button---the hamburger icon, which is three straight lines. We have agreed as a society that that opens up a menu. You click that and you expect a list of links that take you different places.
+
+My specialty is in front-end engineering. It's where the code and the art collide. The designer wants things to be and act in particular ways, and the developer is limited by what technology can do and by what are best practices. Melding those two worlds has always been such a fascinating thing. I'm working within the physical limitations of computational power or the box model of cascading style sheets---how do you create a circle when everything is a box?
+
+Taking the art and translating it---the art is all these---it's very potent because it's so much of it is illusory. The button is given a bevel so that it looks clickable. There's so much going on in all of our interfaces where we have to explain without words there's more to this, and you have to scroll down the page. How do you explain that to people?
+
+Then all of humanity is feeding back into that system. We don't understand what a hamburger menu is, and nobody clicks it because we're lost. Or if you don't use the hamburger, nobody clicks it because two horizontal lines isn't enough. There's all this feedback happening in the interfaces.
+
+There's something about the code, which is just electrons moving through a lattice of silicate. Then we abstract---the physical little gates inside your CPU that are on or off a billion times a second, and out of that absolute nonsense comes all these abstracted layers of meaning. Then it hits normal people and they're dumping all of their meaning-making into it. All of this stuff is arising at the collision point of incredible magic---moving electrons through sand.
+
+Now, with large language models, we have these reflections of our symbolic languaging that we can interface with. We have an economic bubble whose entire basis is, to put it simply, our ability to make story about inanimate objects and to breathe life into things that have no life. It's not that the AI is conscious, it's that we're able to ascribe it with consciousness. You put googly eyes on a water bottle, and your mind will be like, "Okay, yeah, that's a being that has agency." We have this entire economic bubble that is: this fancy autocomplete is alive, and I can talk to it, and it can do anything. There's an incredible amount of magic and divination and profoundness swimming around in the technological sphere.
+
+*As we come to the end, I wonder if you could share a bit about what you're working on and developing in your practice right now. What areas of growth are you building? How are you advancing your work with these protocols?*
+
+The main thing is that I am trying to finish what I started with my tarot deck---making the booklet that goes along with it. That's been an interesting process because it's been months and months and months of not doing work, not selling my tarot deck, not promoting my tarot deck.
+
+I feel like I'm missing the boat. We're going into an economic downturn. Tarot cards were hot three years ago, and now that this shift is happening, and the market's oversaturated, I missed the moment. I'm deepening my practice by being okay with it, allowing it to unfold as it's supposed to unfold.
+
+Fucking up feels like the practice. Not having the discipline or not having the energy to do the work---all of that is learning to see the magic inside of it. Inside of the self-judgment and the annoyance and the feeling like I'm doing things wrong, all of that is---that's been the work of trusting that everything is unfolding at just the right pace, and I don't need to push and try and make things happen any faster than they can or will.
+
+Allowing all the things to unfold in their right time is the practice---it's the practice I feel as an activist. Things are just unfolding, and I am starting to get real with where my agency is in the unfolding.