About Hermit’s Mirror

My name’s Thomas, and I guide curious seekers who’ve become lost in the spiritual wilderness back to their Self through tarot. I help tarot readers awaken to their true, aligned selves. Together, we will transform your practice so that you can explore your past, reclaim your present, and weave your future fates.

Opening Portals to Inner Wisdom

Divination is a versatile tool for deeper knowing about our lives and the world around us.

I use tarot and oracle cards as a mirror to reflect brilliance back into the hidden corners of the mind. The power of the tarot, as I practice and teach it, is the way that it can help focus or expand one’s thinking about a specific topic. It’s as if we open doorways to forgotten insights and reclaim the power of our inner wisdom.

Finding Magic in the Mundane

Divination is a useful supplement to a thoughtful life, like counseling or coaching.

But the wonder that tarot and oracle cards can bring into your life is nothing short of magic. I don’t think of the cards as inherently magical even though I’ve had plenty of experiences with them that I can’t explain as anything but magical. And I don’t think of the future as written out before us, but I do think that divination allows for a more profound and more spiritually aligned life as we move forward.

Reflecting Light into Shadows

Divination reminds us what is important, and tarot can help us see what we know, deep down, is coming into our lives.

I help clients uncover hidden issues, confirm suspicions, address their shadows and expose their inner light in order to consider what it would mean to live their future more fully.

The cards can’t predict the next winning lottery numbers, and they offer no promises about someone’s ex returning to them. But my tarot readings can help you plan out that next big project that will earn you a windfall, and they can certainly help you recognize obstacles standing in the way of finding love.

Schedule a session if you’re inspired to chart your empowered future.

My History

For many years (decades, really) I dabbled with tarot, doing the occasional reading for friends or myself. Eventually I discovered that I was drawn to it as more than a fun pastime or party trick. In many areas of my life—as a trainer, a manager, an advisor, a teacher, and a fitness instructor—I look for ways to help people by providing them with new ways of solving their problems and teaching them skills that they can use on their own. For me, tarot is just a different way to achieve that same larger project of helping people rediscover wonder, solve their problems, and grow in all facets of life.

All that said, I do think that there are more literally spiritual experiences that one can have with the tarot, and I’ll be happy to explore those with you if you are interested in something more woo, such as past life experiences or lessons from forgotten ancestors. I’ve written several posts on my blog about my own spiritual development through the expansion of my tarot practice, and I encourage you to read through those if you’re interested.

Services and Tools for Transformation

For current services and classes, see my Readings, my Classes, and my Coaching pages.

To read more about tarot and related topics, check out my blog. My tarot spreads, tarot tips, and tarot card meaning deep dives are especially relevant for practicing tarot readers.

Or go deeper and transform your tarot practice with my books. Dive into the new tarot method I developed called the Tarot Tableau. Learn how to bring the court cards to life in your tarot readings and everyday life with my in-depth workbook, Awaken the Court Cards. Use tarot as a powerful tool for writing with my Page of Pens Workbook. Connect with the astrological energy of the seasons with astrologically inspired divination workbooks.

Find new life in old faces with my powerful and playful Life Line decks. The Life Line Tarot reimagines the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith with single-line art that opens up your intuition to new worlds of possibility. And the Life Line Lenoracle combines the precision of Lenormand cards with the broad-minded perspective of oracle cards, all hidden in one deck of playing cards featuring single-line art. Or you can grab a copy of the Seaborn Kipper, which I co-created with artist Siolo Thompson (a dream collaboration!), now available through Llewellyn Worldwide. I have a new collaboration with Eric Maille and Michael Anthony of the Diviner Life coming to Kickstarter soon: Apothecary Spirits Oracle.

Learn More through my Interviews

And you can catch me on some tarot- and spirituality-related Podcasts:

• The Tarot Diagnosis with Shannon, where we explore the edges of shadow work

• Tarot Heroes with Erin, where we talk about the Hermit

• Tarot Bytes with Theresa Reed, the Tarot Lady, where we chat about awakening court cards

• Psychic Happy Hour with Travis Holp, where Travis interviews me about my spiritual development and I conduct a prescient reading about his future success

• Knit-A-Spell with James Divine and Katie Rempe, where we chat about my Life Line decks

• Wildly Tarot with Holly Adams, where we also chat about my Life Line decks

• Inner Work with Josephine Hardman, PhD, where we talk about the Akashic Records and feeding your demons

• Coming Out of the Tarot Closet with Seth Vermilyea, where Seth interviews me about being a queer tarot reader, we talk about shadow work, and we learn who officially won the 2020 election in real time

For those who find such things important, I am a Certified Biddy Tarot Reader. During the application process for that certification, I had to interrogate my own practice and answer several key questions. In case it helps to spell things out more clearly for you than my little introduction above, I share my reflections on my practice and answers to those questions below.

What is Tarot and how does it work?

Tarot is a tool that helps you connect with universal and karmic energies in order to divine information that is most useful to your current situation. This information allows you to see the current trajectory of events and helps you reflect and act upon your own behavior and mindset in order to either reinforce or alter that expected outcome. I believe that tarot works by helping us activate our own intuitive knowledge, helping us focus on the information we already possess within us, as well as information beyond us that we could access anytime we’re properly connected but which is easier with a focal tool such as tarot cards. In order for a tarot reader to complete a reading for someone else, it’s important that there’s an energy exchange of some kind that helps the reader serve as a bridge between the universal divine energy & knowledge and the querent’s own personal energy & storehouse of wisdom. 

How would I define or describe Myself as a Tarot reader?

I help guide my clients toward recognizing the source of their limitations, and I provide them with ways to rethink how they approach the world in order to do more than they previously thought possible. My ideal client is someone who is feeling stuck and ready to transform; they’re excited, even if nervous, to explore what’s lying underneath the surface in order to move ahead with new energy and sense of purpose. In the language of intuitive entrepreneurs, I am a shadow worker and coach. Within that combination, I can work with clients on a mundane and therapeutic level, but there’s also room for spiritual and magical work for those who are interested in diving further. Depending on the question and querent, I may incorporate astrology or esoteric knowledge, but psychology, intuition, and coaching skills are my primary tools. 

My Code of Ethics

As an ethical, professional tarot reader, I will treat my clients as the Hermit would treat someone seeking him out for advice beyond their own present ability: such seekers are brave, mature, and capable of achieving great things, but they are in need of some assistance too continue on their path. They may approach their current situation with confusion, their past with a sense of longing, or the future with mirth, but each one deserves to be heard and empowered to continue their own journey, however worthy or trivial it may seem to another and however impossible it may seem to themselves in the moment. With guidance, I support and challenge my querents to look into themselves and the energies surrounding them in order to shed light on past, present, and future. From there, they can act in their own best interests and highest good.

I will always expect my clients to engage with the reading as authentically as they are currently able and to treat the reading as an examination of how things might be or might have been, not as a guarantee beyond their own control or the effects of others. Rather than give promises that no one can reasonably make, I will ask questions that get at the root of problems and propose potential solutions. There may be ways to examine the future as a forecast, much as a farmer might forecast their crop yield or an economist might predict market events. In this way, I can suggest actions to take that will likely improve outcomes or times that may be auspicious. But without a basis for future events—such as accidents or Radom events of games of chance—there is no steady thread of fate to follow toward some likelihood; it is always shifting in the loom.

Regarding areas or modes of working that might be taboo, I stand by one main philosophy: if an event can be deemed to have a trajectory or a psychological, spiritual, or karmic root cause, we can predict a likely path or identify the source of the issue, but the reading relies on the energy of the querent who connects with me through their query or presence, and so it is limited to that querent’s field of influence. The querent brings their knowledge and expectations with them, and that is the scope of my insight, even if I’m connecting to divine energies and universal knowledge beyond an individual. I cannot see into another’s mind through them; I can only read into their perceptions of another. Similarly, what is not knowable by them—at some level—cannot be known by me except through speculation. There are things that I cannot claim to know and that the querent may not know, yet we can still explore their possibilities together. The cards cannot provide the expertise of a professional, but they can offer new ways of looking at a situation. They cannot say with certainty whether something will happen, but they can highlight strategies that may affect outcomes in predictable ways, and they can remind the querent of wisdom they already possess.

To me, the power of the tarot reader is as a guide and mirror that helps the querent examine and reflect on their own secret knowledge before resuming their journey to find the information and take the actions they need to create the outcomes they want. Beyond that, tarot is a place for thought experiments, kitchen wisdom, or speculation.

Requests that fall outside of these areas may be redirected, with the querent’s consent, into new questions or to other service providers that may be able to help the querent with their expected outcomes. Certain requests outside of my own personal best interests or which cannot ethically be considered to assist a client in marking forward advancement with new insight, such as curses and spells, are neither honored nor redirected, and they will be rejected or refunded as appropriate. However, I may provide additional suggestions for how the querent might learn more about those areas on their own, using their own time, energy, resources, and karma.