A Series
Tulsa Through the Tarot
One of twenty-two cards turned.
What if Tulsa were a tarot deck? Twenty-two cards, twenty-two landmarks, and a city's story told through the archetypes the cards have always carried: the oil boom, the crash that followed it, the music and the art, the history the city tried to bury, and its reckoning with it.
The spread
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI
- XII
- XIII
- XIV
- XV
- XVI
- XVII
- XVIII
- XIX
- XX
- XXI
The Series
How to Read This Series
Tulsa is a beautiful city, and like most beautiful cities it has a complicated history. The tarot is a useful way to tell that kind of story. Its cards are archetypes: patterns of experience that each of us lives through alone and that a city lives through together. The Fool sets out. The Tower falls. Judgement calls up what was buried. This series applies those patterns to Tulsa, one card and one landmark at a time.
Each card page does three things. It says what the card means in plain language, it tells the real history of the landmark with sources at the foot of the page, and it makes the case for putting the two together. The cards are laid out in deck order, from The Fool at 0 to The World at XXI. A face-down card has not been written yet.
A new card turns face up each week, the same day it posts on Instagram and Facebook. Follow there, or come back here. The spread keeps the score.
Sit with the deck in person
Every card in this series is in the deck on the table at a private reading in Tulsa. Readings run fifteen, thirty, or sixty minutes.