Rachel Pollack, Tarot, and Me

As someone who devoted her life to mythmaking, Rachel Pollack’s self-transformation carries an appropriate sense of magic. On a frigid winter night in early 1970, the twenty-four-year-old, then newly married and teaching English at a college in upstate New York, was giving a fellow instructor a ride home. The woman dangled an intriguing offer: Shepherd me through the snow, and I’ll give you a tarot reading.

Already a fan of The Waste Land, in which T. S. Eliot invokes fictional tarot cards like “Belladonna, the . . .