TO STEP into the podcast world, looking for stimulation, is not unlike entering a busy freshers’ fair. For the fresher, guided only by an inchoate sense of what might be interesting, the breadth of choice can bring on paralysis, particularly when there is no sense of how experienced or well-informed one must be in a subject or activity before signing up.
I offer this preamble as justification for bringing you How to be Human (available on Spotify and Apple podcasts, released each Tuesday). The blurb has plenty to entice: “How to Be Human is a guide to exploring the common and often confusing themes of humanness including spirituality, connection, wellness, self-acceptance, and more.” And more! What more could there be?
It turned out that the answer was: Tarot. The generalist impression given by the blurb proved grossly misleading; for the presenters, Anna Toonk and Nina Endrst, are professional Tarot readers, and this episode was not aimed at the spiritual dilettante. The listener was treated to discussion of minor arcana: of which Tarot deck — Motherpeace or the Wild Unknown — best suited one’s personality, and the cultural politics of card-reading.
And yet the minor arcana of other people’s specialities can exercise a real fascination; and, notwithstanding their patois, festooned with “likes” and featuring the arresting neologism “chemistrate” (as in, “What you said really, like, chemistrates with me”), the presenters opened up for us initiates a culture previously quite unknown. Forget those pseudo-medieval decks in which the skeleton Death hobbles over the corpse-strewn ground, or Cupid hovers with his bow over the Lovers. Contemporary decks reflect feminist and post-colonial themes.
Controversy swirls around what one might call the pneumatology of Tarot. Ms Toonk and Ms Endrst despise “the whole spirit thing”, and the readers who say that they are led by a force outside of themselves. Similarly, they have no time for the sort of client who is terrified that, on the very day that they are taking the cat to the vet, they have drawn the Five Pentacles. According to our hosts, Tarot is not predictive, nor is it about spiritual channelling. It is no surprise to hear that both the presenters had aspirations to train as psychoanalysts; nor that they regard Tarot reading as a form of self-therapy.
In contrast to the world of spiritual wellness, in which anybody can be a healer, Inside Health (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) reported on the world of palliative care, for which training and strict supervision are required. Nevertheless, strains on the NHS have made more attractive projects that allow close friends and family to administer medication to the dying, particularly when the alternative is admission to hospital. A trial project is running in north Wales, and proponents are keen to emphasise the restrictions under which this operates; but one cannot but feel anxious that the driver here is lack of resources.
