But you want to learn more. You want to understand. You don’t give up.
Trying out different approaches, different mediums is a great way to trigger that “penny drop” that “aha! moment” when suddenly things start to fit together, to make sense, when connections don’t seem so random but you begin to sense what is behind them.
Enter Fortune’s Wheelhouse.
Tarotistas M.M. Meleen and T. Susan Chang have created over 70 podcast episodes, each one a deep-dive journey into the esoteric worlds of each card of the Rider-Waite-Smith and Thoth Tarot decks.
You can listen to Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcasts while you garden. Or clean house. Or walk your dog. It’s Qabalah for the gal on the go. It’s Alchemy and Astrology for the guy on the move. It’s esotericism for all and it’s fun, accessible and some of the best information you’ll find anywhere on the meanings of individual Tarot cards.
And while it is true that you can listen while doing other things, you could also just as easily sit down with a cup of very strong tea and fill a journal with notes from each of these information-packed episodes.
⁂ Fortune's Wheelhouse can be found on most every podcast platform, iTunes, Podbeam, etc. etc.
In case you are unfamiliar, M.M. Meleen is best known as the artist and spirit behind the Thoth-based Tabula Mundi Tarot and also the Rosetta Tarot. She is the author of Book M: Liber Mundi, a 240-page companion book to the Tabula Mundi. Book M is an in-depth exploration of symbolism covering topics in mythology, religion, history, alchemy, Qabalah, Thelema and astrology. (more info)
T. Susan Chang is the author of the all-encompassing book of symbols and their meanings, Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers.
She also teaches an online course, The Living Tarot. (more info)
In Fortune’s Wheelhouse, Mel and Susie bring together their vast knowledge of the Tarot and share it with us in podcast form. And they do this in a style that is so natural and so fun it feels effortless. (However, as you will see, it is far from effortless.)
Their passion, humor and endless curiosity for these topics makes
listening to their show a pure pleasure and gives you the feeling of sitting around the kitchen table with two very bright, very funny, very tarot obsessed friends.
All that’s missing is the red wine and snacks.
Mel and Susie graciously answered a few questions for us here at Cult of Tarot about their show and here are their responses.
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JM: I want to begin by asking some questions about the podcast itself. First, the podcast has a beautiful rich sound that reminds me of old-time radio shows. Where and how did you record Fortune’s Wheelhouse?
MMM: That's all Susie, the wizard behind the scenes doing all the sound editing.
TSC: For in-person sessions, we use Samson Q2U mikes (very affordable!) and a Scarlett 2i2 mixer that goes right into the laptop. Then I edit it in Audacity, run some dynamic compression and noise reduction, add effects, music, intro and outro. Recording each episode takes about an hour, but post-production takes about three!
We record either at my house or at Mel's. My house has decent acoustics but a lot of human interference. Mel's house is generally more peaceful, but I spend a solid half-hour each episode finding and filtering out the sound of her fridge kicking in!
Sometimes when we can't get together we record over Skype, which gives remarkably good sound if you fiddle with it a little. In those cases I use a virtual mixer called Voicemeeter. But in-person human interaction is best when we can swing it.
JM: I so admire your dedication to the project. 79 episodes must have seemed like a daunting task, especially after you got started. (5 down, only…74 to go!) How long did it take you to complete the whole series?
TSC: We started recording in May of 2017 and launched June 13th, 2017. We did the major arcana over the course of 22 straight weeks, not knowing whether we would fundraise enough on Patreon to do the minors as well. We met our goal just before we completed that series, took a few weeks off, and then started right back in with the Ace of Wands in January 2018. And then we continued for 56 straight weeks! completing with the Page of Pentacles/Princess of Disks in January 2019. So, a year and a half total.
MMM: Making multiples of anything always takes so much longer than one thinks - I know that from making tarot decks. It was definitely hard at times, to make time around the rest of life's happenings to do something on a strict schedule, for that length of time. But the show must go on! There was definitely a lot of cramming in the day or two before each recording session because we both do a lot of pre-prep. We both have a strong work ethic so neither of us wanted to be the one to throw a wrench in the schedule.
JM: One thing that I really love about Fortune’s Wheelhouse is just how deeply into the subject matter you both are. I get the feeling you could talk for days about a single Tarot Card. Your conversation is so natural it sounds completely spontaneous, yet you remain always focused and on topic. Can you tell us a little bit about how you would prepare for each episode?
TSC: I start by putting together a graphic image showing the different versions of the card we're working on, and printing out an episode outline. I try to get a sense of the overall themes raised by the card first, and then I hit the books - typically the Golden Dawn's Liber T and Liber Theta, Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Crowley's Book of Thoth, Other mainstays are the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, Austin Coppock's 36 Faces, Paul Huson's Mystical Origins of the Tarot, Aryeh Kaplan's edition of the Sefer Yetzirah...oh, and my own Tarot Correspondences, once it got published. It's at least a dozen titles per episode. The floor of the office usually looks like a library exploded.
I think some of the spontaneity may come from the fact that if we weren't recording a podcast, we would probably be talking about very much the same kind of thing as long as we were in the same room - it's just what we're interested in. But the podcast offers a structure and some motivation to get a little more organized!
MMM: The first thing I do is print out a single page with all of the versions of the card in color, so I have that in front of me. Then I write my notes all over that page, starting with whatever jumps out and continuing with book research. You would laugh if you saw it, as I write over the images as well as around them, with circles and arrows, and tiny writing going every which way. I can barely read it myself!
I reference the books Susie already mentioned - but we both probably use so many more, and it changed from episode to episode for me. To add a few more I looked at semi regularly I'd say for Thoth in addition to Book of Thoth and the College of Thelema's Liber Theta I often referred to Crowley's 777, his other writing like the Book of Lies or The Vision and the Voice, Phyllis Seckler's two wonderful books on Thoth, Astrology, and Qabalah, and Duquette's and Snuffin's Thoth guides. For RWS I mostly relied on the Pictorial Key! Qabalah regulars were Knight's Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, Bonnor's Qabalah Magical Primer and Wang's Qabalistic Tarot. For symbols in addition to the Penguin guide I like Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols, for Mythology the classic Bullfinch's Mythology, and I even refer to my own Book M: Liber Mundi (which is hilarious to me since I find things in there I forgot I wrote.)
There were so many other books as well - too many to mention and some obscure stuff. Sometimes it's the astrology that calls me, and maybe I pull out all sorts of stuff on fixed stars and star lore or look at the Evangeline Adams astrology book ghostwritten by Crowley. Other times it may be something random not in one of our usual resources, just some wormhole I was drawn into, often from a seemingly unrelated (non tarot) source in some esoteric book or on the web. It's funny because it's both planned and spontaneous, as often I find myself just riffing off of some thought that arose from something Susie said, and I'm sure that is happening in both directions. We both come in with things we think we want to say, but it evolves organically from there, sometimes in unexpected ways.
JM: Very often while listening I got the feeling that you were discovering new things about the cards, making new connections on the spot as you were recording. I found this to be one of the real charms of your show, that even people with as much knowledge and background as you two have, you are still finding new and surprising things in these very well-studied decks.
Did it surprise you when you made these new connections, found these little “easter eggs” you hadn’t quite seen before?
MMM: Tarot is one of those things with so many layers, you can study for years and still find something new. Through the course of making these I continually learned new things, as we both have unique perspectives and it's so much fun to discover something that resonates that you wouldn't have come up with without your exposure to another person's mind. We often come to very similar conclusions but through different pathways, and that is really fascinating to experience.
Sometimes we really were discovering things on the fly, using our combined knowledge to speculate on how a certain color or number could tie into the various correspondences, and wondering how much of that was consciously embedded.
TSC: Well, not surprised in the sense that I've never felt my knowledge of tarot was comprehensive, and it would have been shocking if we'd uncovered nothing new!
Still, speaking for myself anyway, I'm always delighted when one of us points out something the other didn't know, or when we uncover something together. We are constantly going down wormholes in the research process - I'm remembering with great fondness the time we tried to figure out what every different sword in the Thoth 8 of Swords was, or the many times we had to stop everything to count the number of yods on something or other.
JM: Can you share a bit about how making the podcast might have helped you grow in your tarot practice and studies? Did completing this project together change you in any way? What did you learn in the process?
TSC: I learned so much! both from Mel and just from having the conversation, with every episode. We have complementary bodies of knowledge, and where we differ in interpretation it's helped me enlarge the scope of what I see in each card.
Because this all happened at the same time that I was writing Tarot Correspondences, it made my tarot practice both more systematic and organized on the one hand and more organic and far-reaching on the other.
I was also starting to read for people in person, and seeing the cards come to life in people's lives was just magical. It was as if the book and podcast were a working theory, on the one hand, but then on the other, I'd see the cards walking and talking, at the crystal shop. It was weird - as if the meanings of the cards became both more concrete and more expansive at the same time.
It's as if I'm now fluently speaking a language I could only order food or ask directions in before.
MMM: I love the way Susie integrates the card meanings so literally into the fabric of daily life, like the 8 of Swords having to do with sewing or the 3 of Wands with being a well behaved guest. Seeing the way someone else interprets the cards using the same esoteric framework was great, it keeps the card meanings from being static and stale, as we all tend to get into a bit of a groove if we don't shake things up once in a while and look at things from a fresh angle.
Doing this just exploded the tarot meanings exponentially, and taught me how much is packed into even a single card. It's like fractals. Who would have thought that we could talk about a single card, in some of the longer episodes, for over an hour?!
JM: I’m still working my way through the Major Arcana and have not yet embarked on the minors, so correct me if I am wrong here, but, Susie you end every broadcast with “Smells and Notes”.
My initial reaction was, “WTF?”. This was all new to me and utterly amazing. Can you tell us a bit what “Smells and Notes” is about?
TSC: Well, we only do those for the major arcana really. The musical note system corresponds to the Qabalistic color scales of the major arcana. It works really neatly because - essentially - there are seven colors, seven musical notes, seven planets. It's just a matter of matching them up.
Similarly, the scents key only to the major arcana in that they strictly correspond to the astrology of the majors: 4 elements, 12 signs, 7 planets (that adds up to 23, but Saturn and Earth overlap in the World card).
It's possible to extrapolate musical and scent correspondences for the minors, but they would be based entirely on which major arcana go with which minor (for example, the Tower and the Emperor for the 2 of Wands), and thus seemed redundant since we'd already addressed the majors.
The research is based loosely on 777 and the natural correspondences found in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Learning about the natural correspondences for both the book and the podcast really is what has drawn me into the study of magic (particularly planetary magic). I'm captivated by the idea that everything one perceives with the senses can be connected to everything else, and that by working with those connections you create effects in the world around you.
MMM: Likewise I've always been interested in what we call the natural correspondences. They form the basis of so much in magic, that things have a certain resonance and that one can use those things with a similar vibration to "tweak the web" a little and cause what I call inclinations towards a desired outcome.
Susie has a musical background and is a singer so was a natural for the notes. As an artist I am really motivated by color theory. But musical notes and colors are related - the both fall on a scale.
I think we are both into the other natural correspondences in complimentary ways, as she makes her astrological perfumes and is a cook, and I've spent a lot of time practicing aromatherapy and herbalism. And of course we are both interested in magick. One can make magical scents, tastes, sounds, and images.
You can say "Mars" in so many ways.
JM: Indeed you can.
Editor’s note: Susie has created a selection of perfumes based on astrological correspondences. She also makes custom perfumes. (more info)
JM: There is a point at about the 3rd or 4th episode where you introduced a “drinking game” to go with the podcast. Would you like to share what that’s about?
TSC: Phallic references! You can't talk about tarot, and Crowley in particular, without getting into the phallic imagery. We can't help cracking up when that happens. We are basically 12-year-olds.
MMM: It comes up all the time! (That's what she said.)
JM: OOF!
Fortune’s Wheelhouse is available at the usual places podcasts are found. But you also have a Patreon Site dedicated to the show. What kind of extras can people find at the Patreon shop?
MMM: We give great prizes out to listeners, each and every week, and members from the second tier and up are automatically entered. The prizes are really great too, and sometimes of things that can't be purchased. Often too we can use the site to expand on material that there wasn't time to fully unpack during the course of an hour's recording.
TSC: Lots of articles, membership in the 78-playlist Tarot Music Project, entry into the weekly giveaways, and at the higher levels readings and special gifts from us. But the real attraction is all the content on the site, which is available to anyone at any level. We have 32 posts on Kabbalah alone!
(more info)
JM: I know both of you have a lot going on. Are there any upcoming projects either of you have that we can be looking for or that are available now?
TSC: New book! We've just signed a contract for an esoteric guide to tarot, which will bring together what we did on the podcast into book form. Llewellyn will publish it, by 2021 sometime.
I've really been enjoying teaching my "Living Tarot" course, which is intended for anyone at any level. It's a way of learning tarot that emphasizes seeing everyday life through a tarot lens, rather than memorizing. That, as well as all my tarot cases, perfumes, readings, etc., can be found at www.tsusanchang.com.
MMM: I'm working on a couple of new deck projects.
I just finished the Majors for a new deck called Pharos. It's an exploration of the Golden Dawn color scales through the medium of watercolors - light and water. It's named after the Pharos lighthouse of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and a metaphor for guidance. Each major is an allegory for a different part of the lighthouse or the world surrounding it. Pharos doesn't have its own website yet but you can see the majors posted to date at www.tabulamundi.com/Pharos.
I'm currently debating whether to release a special majors edition, to do the minors, or to abandon it and concentrate on one of the other decks and ideas I have started. So many ideas, and who knows how much time!
If anyone wants to hear about the new projects as they evolve in real time they can sign up for my (infrequent) newsletter linked here.
Also, Fortune's Wheelhouse podcast is about to start back up again in early June, so right around the corner it seems. We took a break after the 78 episodes but are gearing up to start again with a new format and new ways of looking at the cards. The work goes on!
JM: Last question, during the show it is often said that symbols are for everyone. Could you explain what you mean by that?
TSC: It's easy to forget where symbols come from - even though you can look up what a symbol "means," the meanings come from us as humans, not some rarefied authority out there. I think what makes tarot so powerful is that nobody owns what the cards mean. Even though we try to examine what the creators thought they were doing iconographically, what you see in the cards is just as valid.
For example, we talk about the red feather on the Fool's hat as a symbol of the life force, and we talk about how it looks different on the Death and the Sun cards. But you might see that feather and remember your pet parrot from when you were 5, and that will have meaning for you that is equally special, valid, and magical - moreso, because it's yours.
A symbol means what you think it means, and that is equally powerful whether everyone agrees on the meaning or they don't. The meaning of a symbol doesn't come from a book (though we do love the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols!) or from on high - it comes from everyone, everywhere.
MMM: Many people have said to me about the creation of tarot art, that once you release it to the world, in a sense it no longer belongs to you. It's really true of any art, as art is created to be experienced. Someone (even if it is the experiencing part of you) has to receive it and perceive it with the senses. We can embed, we can guide, we can allude to meanings with color and symbol - but we can't control another person's perceptions and interpretations as that is every individuals unique task.
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What a beautiful way to finish.
I want to thank Mel and Susie again for taking the time for this interview.
Tabula Mundi's Fortune card and Magus card.
The name Fortune's Wheelhouse came from the combination of those two cards: Fortune's Wheel for Jupiter since Mel is a Sagittarius - and House for the meaning of Mercury/the Magus' Hebrew letter Bet, since Susie is a Virgo. Both Susie and Mel have those two signs prominently in their charts so it worked out as a brilliant name for their show.
