Date: Sundays September 20, 27, October 4, 11
Time: 2pm Eastern
Admission: $145 General Admission / $120 Patreon Members. To become a member and enjoy exclusive discounts, click here.
This course will be conducted through Zoom, ensuring a convenient and interactive learning experience for everyone. Additionally, to accommodate the diverse schedules of our participants, all classes will be recorded. These recordings will be made available to all participants, providing the flexibility to engage with the course material at your own pace.
Tarot is the unconscious creation of thousands of artists across dozens of cultures over half a millennium, functioning for most of its history as little more than a gambling device. It was only in the 20th century that the English occultists of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, building earlier French occultists, transformed it into a tool for divination, giving rise to the Pixie (RWS) and Thoth decks that define Tarot today.
Yet, this was not the Golden Dawn’s only legacy. Annie Horniman, one of its prominent members, went on to found the British Repertory Theatre, helping popularize the model of a permanent artistic company under centralized management, that would later shape the organization of early film studios in Britain and, eventually, Hollywood. Through this lineage, the Golden Dawn’s fascination with spectacle, symbolism, illusion, and theatrical transformation found its way into the emerging art of Cinema.
The works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell on the recurring patterns in world mythologies gave both filmmakers and Tarot readers a shared language for their respective crafts. Sallie Nichols’s Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey established the Fool’s Journey as the framework through which the Major Arcana are read today; while George Lucas explicitly mapped Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces unto the mythological beats of Star Wars, cementing the defining narrative templates of modern storytelling.
In this workshop, we will dive deeper into these parallels between Tarot & Cinema, learning to imagine ourselves as protagonists of a film. Every reading, in this light, becomes a consultation with eh script of our Soul’s progress, a way of glimpsing the path toward the happy ending we’re working to earn. Across four sessions, we’ll map the 78 cards onto the defining elements of film, so that every movie watched afterward becomes another iteration of the deck itself, deepening our grasp of each card’s symbolism and the story it carries.
Session 1 — Introduction: The Visual Narrative of Tarot & Cinema
A comparative reading of the Art of Tarot & Cinema, tracing their defining elements, influences, and inner workings side by side. This session lays the foundation for the method we’ll use throughout the workshop, establishing how each medium can illuminate the other.
Session 2 — Major Arcana: The Universal Structure
The 21 Triumph cards, plus the Fool, are mapped onto Syd Field’s three-act structure for film scripts, revealing how the Fool’s Journey and the arc of a screenplay flow the same architecture of setup, confrontation, and resolution.
Session 3 — Minor Arcana: The Individual Variable
The 16 court cards are mapped onto recurring character types, while the 40 pip cards are mapped onto the building blocks of scene structure, showing how the Minor Arcana operates as the connective tissue of a story.
Session 4 — Oracular Creator: Directing One’s Fate
Techniques for approaching a Tarot reading as a director would approach a film in progress, identifying the motifs, directions, and actions needed to move the plot, and one’s own progress, forward.
+++++
Safa Mirror is a trans-disciplinary artist, researcher, and tarotière based in Amsterdam. With a background in engineering and performing arts, her work merges ceremonial magick, Sufi poetry, and contemporary ritual into practices of transformation and resistance. She is a resident reader at Black Moon Botanica and a researcher of esotericism at the Embassy of the Free Mind.
Safa offers rituals, lectures, and workshops across Europe that awaken mysticism through embodied experience, having presented at the European Network for the Study of Islam and Esotericism, and led workshops at the Occulture Conference and La Società dello Zolfo. Her practice seeks to bridge Eastern and Western occult traditions, using both scholarship and performance to reclaim ancestral knowledge as a living force.
As a queer Muslim living in Europe, Safa’s work is rooted in lived experience—transforming historical practices into tools for survival, healing, and political agency, while embodying resilience through her art and teaching.
Date: Sundays September 20, 27, October 4, 11
Time: 2pm Eastern
Admission: $145 General Admission / $120 Patreon Members. To become a member and enjoy exclusive discounts, click here.
This course will be conducted through Zoom, ensuring a convenient and interactive learning experience for everyone. Additionally, to accommodate the diverse schedules of our participants, all classes will be recorded. These recordings will be made available to all participants, providing the flexibility to engage with the course material at your own pace.
Tarot is the unconscious creation of thousands of artists across dozens of cultures over half a millennium, functioning for most of its history as little more than a gambling device. It was only in the 20th century that the English occultists of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, building earlier French occultists, transformed it into a tool for divination, giving rise to the Pixie (RWS) and Thoth decks that define Tarot today.
Yet, this was not the Golden Dawn’s only legacy. Annie Horniman, one of its prominent members, went on to found the British Repertory Theatre, helping popularize the model of a permanent artistic company under centralized management, that would later shape the organization of early film studios in Britain and, eventually, Hollywood. Through this lineage, the Golden Dawn’s fascination with spectacle, symbolism, illusion, and theatrical transformation found its way into the emerging art of Cinema.
The works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell on the recurring patterns in world mythologies gave both filmmakers and Tarot readers a shared language for their respective crafts. Sallie Nichols’s Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey established the Fool’s Journey as the framework through which the Major Arcana are read today; while George Lucas explicitly mapped Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces unto the mythological beats of Star Wars, cementing the defining narrative templates of modern storytelling.
In this workshop, we will dive deeper into these parallels between Tarot & Cinema, learning to imagine ourselves as protagonists of a film. Every reading, in this light, becomes a consultation with eh script of our Soul’s progress, a way of glimpsing the path toward the happy ending we’re working to earn. Across four sessions, we’ll map the 78 cards onto the defining elements of film, so that every movie watched afterward becomes another iteration of the deck itself, deepening our grasp of each card’s symbolism and the story it carries.
Session 1 — Introduction: The Visual Narrative of Tarot & Cinema
A comparative reading of the Art of Tarot & Cinema, tracing their defining elements, influences, and inner workings side by side. This session lays the foundation for the method we’ll use throughout the workshop, establishing how each medium can illuminate the other.
Session 2 — Major Arcana: The Universal Structure
The 21 Triumph cards, plus the Fool, are mapped onto Syd Field’s three-act structure for film scripts, revealing how the Fool’s Journey and the arc of a screenplay flow the same architecture of setup, confrontation, and resolution.
Session 3 — Minor Arcana: The Individual Variable
The 16 court cards are mapped onto recurring character types, while the 40 pip cards are mapped onto the building blocks of scene structure, showing how the Minor Arcana operates as the connective tissue of a story.
Session 4 — Oracular Creator: Directing One’s Fate
Techniques for approaching a Tarot reading as a director would approach a film in progress, identifying the motifs, directions, and actions needed to move the plot, and one’s own progress, forward.
+++++
Safa Mirror is a trans-disciplinary artist, researcher, and tarotière based in Amsterdam. With a background in engineering and performing arts, her work merges ceremonial magick, Sufi poetry, and contemporary ritual into practices of transformation and resistance. She is a resident reader at Black Moon Botanica and a researcher of esotericism at the Embassy of the Free Mind.
Safa offers rituals, lectures, and workshops across Europe that awaken mysticism through embodied experience, having presented at the European Network for the Study of Islam and Esotericism, and led workshops at the Occulture Conference and La Società dello Zolfo. Her practice seeks to bridge Eastern and Western occult traditions, using both scholarship and performance to reclaim ancestral knowledge as a living force.
As a queer Muslim living in Europe, Safa’s work is rooted in lived experience—transforming historical practices into tools for survival, healing, and political agency, while embodying resilience through her art and teaching.
