This session investigates *desire* in Contemporary Paganism through the aspects of trauma recovery on the one hand and the use of Tarot as a spiritual technology as a relational system to reveal emergent possibilities. Survivors of religious trauma, especially emerging from coercive childhood backgrounds. As survivors of trauma seek strategies for healing, this can be viewed as a subset of the wider effort to expand the range of praxis. Individuals and collectives seek agency in the midst of temporality. Divination becomes a way of engaging in participatory consciousness by widening the fields of possibility and interpretation, making future trajectories possible and reframing pasts in a more usable context. In the specialized case of religious trauma and recovery these strategies and others are foster, in the words of one panelist, “autonomy, personal growth and purpose.” In the words of our other proposal, this is all toward the goal of an expanded present, where these become actionable through relational technology. This session also features an expanded Business Meeting as the unit seeks to strengthen and grow its Steering Committee.
This paper explores tarot as a technology of desire: a relational practice that reorganizes perception and unsettles linear time. Expanding interpretations of tarot as divination or symbolic projection, I argue that it operates as a participatory device that activates what I call the expanded present—a temporal field in which past, present, and future coexist as dynamic potentials.
Drawing on feminist theories of desire and the “otherwise,” I frame desire not as lack but as generative orientation toward individual and collective becoming. Within contemporary Pagan contexts, tarot does not predict fixed futures; it stages encounters with the “not yet,” making emergent possibilities perceptible. By foregrounding co-presence rather than sequence and participatory consciousness rather than detached rationality, the paper suggests that tarot exemplifies an alternative epistemic and temporal framework—one that reimagines both magical practice and scholarly thought beyond linear secular models.
When survivors of spiritual trauma leave the religious communities that harmed them, where do they go? For many, the answer is somewhere unexpected: Contemporary Western Paganism. This paper follows that journey, asking what it is about Pagan practice — its attunement to the rhythms of the natural world, its insistence that the individual is their own spiritual authority — that resonates so deeply with people rebuilding their spiritual lives after harm. I argue that Pagan healing philosophies offer a rich and largely overlooked framework for understanding recovery from spiritual trauma. To explore this, I listen closely — through trauma-informed qualitative interviews with survivors, and through a longitudinal study of the communities they have built on Reddit. Together, these methods trace both the intimacy of individual healing and the contours of a much larger, quietly growing movement of spiritual reconstruction.