Originally published in the Seeker's Journey
Volume 1 · Issue 3 · Jan. 04

An Evening with Flash Silvermoon

By Greyhound

Some of you may not have heard of Flash Silvermoon… she is the force behind a Tarot deck with which I have recently become acquainted. Flash is more than a Tarot deck creator, however… she is a musician, songwriter, animal communicator, gifted psychic and teacher. Flash Silvermoon wrote the Wise Woman’s Tarot companion book. In it, her passion for teaching and for her animal friends comes through.

The art for the deck itself was painted by Barbara Vogel, and was based on Flash’s writing and studies. It was my pleasure to interview her one recent evening and hear more about how her unique deck, the Wise Woman’s Tarot came into being. I wish you all could have been on the phone with me, because I had to shorten the interview quite a bit. We talked until we ran out of tape. Flash was a very gracious subject.

If you haven’t visited Flash’s website, you really must. There are images of her deck, information about her classes… you can listen to some of her music and even enter her monthly contest to win one of her Wise Woman’s Tarot decks.

Greyhound: (GH) How did you first start working with the Tarot?
Flash Silvermoon: (FS) I was probably about eighteen years old, and I’d always been a little bit different… I’d always known about and been interested in the metaphysical realm. I knew someone who worked with the Tarot and actually let me see what I could do and it was just a natural thing for me. I probably did Psychometry* a time or two before I did the Tarot. It just really fit. I know people that say you should always be given your first deck. I was given my first deck and used it for several months. Then my book and deck disappeared… never to be seen again. I thought I should wait for a bit, and one day I was walking by a bookstore when I saw Tarot cards in the window. I thought, “Oh, I’m not going to wait for someone to give me another deck”. So I bought the deck and took it home and that night someone called and asked “Are you still reading cards?” That was confirmation… I’ve read solidly ever since. It’s always been easy for me.

GH: I’m so glad you said that, because a lot of people are told they need to be gifted with a deck…
FS: People can get into so many… my feeling about magic in general is that if it feels magical to you, then it is! If I tell you… you must wrap your Tarot cards only in white silk… a lot of people have heard that. That’s the only way to do it… that’s the best. But what if you don’t like white silk? Then it’s not magical to you is it? It becomes more personal and one size fits all rarely fits many. There are different rules… supposed to do it this way, that way. I don’t go for that. In my class, I try to keep words like always and never out of my vocabulary.

GH: Before you created the Wise Woman’s Tarot, did you have a deck that you favored at that time?
FS: Well, I started like many, with the Rider Waite… or should I say the Pamela Coleman Smith Rider Waite… I worked with Crowley a bit… a couple others. For years I used and taught the Rider Waite Tarot. Really, I never intended to make my own deck. My students kept egging me on, saying “We like the way you teach… we learn… why don’t you write a book with these techniques?” I said I would… I began and I started one little page. My original intention was a good how-to for the Rider Waite. I wrote this one little page… Native Americans would call it being coyoted… being tricked into something you didn’t intend to do. There was one little page called “visions for a new deck”. It was only going to be a page or two. [Laughs] That turned a five-year project into a twenty-five year project. It did take me a good twenty-five years… from the time I decided to do a book to the time I came out with the Wise Woman’s Tarot. It was a huge project… My intention was not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes people that create decks get an idea in their heads… they want to do Egyptian, Native American, the something Tarot… the Tarot of Chinese Vegetables… some idea of what a deck is going to be. Everything gets geared around that viewpoint. I knew that there was ancient lore that was so deep and so important, that before I started changing things around, I wanted to know it inside and out. I took a lot of time and I did make a lot of changes… very radical ones. It was with love and reverence for the Tarot and not arbitrary or to prove a point.

GH: Could you explain for our readers that have never seen your book, your position on reversed cards?
FS: Ironically, I started doing reversals… like many people, I bought a beginners’ book and it had reversals in it. I could read them upside down, inside out and every which way. One day it just occurred to me that I didn’t want to do that anymore. A woman that came close to being a teacher for me, a ninety plus year old woman in New York called Rev. Phylliss Woodbury, she said, “Yes dear, that’s correct… one doesn’t really need to use them at all. After all, when you reverse a picture, it’s something negative isn’t it?” Afterward, I reflected on magical practices and Voodoo, when you reverse the picture of something or someone… you mean them harm. So, I was already thinking I shouldn’t do this, but that gave me a feeling of, “Yeah… you don’t need to go there”. And if you learn to read the cards in context, with all the things around it, you know everything you need to know. You’ve learned by observing how it functions within the reading… look to what surrounds it… and that will help you understand the A to Z of what that card can mean. And of course, let your intuition guide you… and I think it’s enough. As a matter of fact, I tell my students the only rule I have is not to use reversals. If you’ve got your heart set on doing it… who am I to say? But that is pretty much the only rule I ask my students to follow. The main one is free will. You don’t have any business touching any of this stuff if you don’t believe in that.

GH: I found the stories about your animals fascinating. How did you first discover your abilities as an animal communicator?
FS: I’ve always been an animal lover… and I’ve been a professional psychic for close to thirty-five years. During those times, I’ve been called upon to find missing animals… missing people too, but missing animals a lot. That’s the very hardest thing I do. It is just very hard, but immensely rewarding… when someone has lost a dear, dear familiar… that’s just horrible. And if you can help get people and their animals together, it’s such a great feeling. My first experiences with combining animals and mysticism or psychic studies in that way… having animals all my life… living with them, loving them. They start teaching me. One of my very special critters… his name is Bear; there’s a picture of him in my book. It was my relationship with him that brought me into animal communication. He was a huge teacher! After I found him, I was playing at the first women’s spirituality conference in the south. I was teaching with Z. Budapest and Fiona Morgan… with a few other women, and also doing a concert there. He had been abandoned in the park in New Orleans where I was. Within a couple months of having him, I knew how sensitive he was… I had a client in my office that was an incest survivor. She was having a very hard time processing things. It was one of her first places of working on this. She started just crying and crying, and he got up into her lap (he was a big boy) and started pressing himself up against her heart. A little bit later she left and he had a heart attack. I had to rush him to the animal emergency. He was almost two and they told me he might not live past three. I was devastated and I knew I had to change those odds. I found this woman who became my mentor… Kay Cornish-Mann. We worked together, probably about six years before we ever met. This was totally on the phone. Through her teaching me to let the animals teach me, that’s sort of how it started. And that dog, who wasn’t supposed to go beyond three? He lived until he was about twelve or thirteen. Basically, it’s about listening. People tell me all the time, saying, “I talk to him all the time! I’m always talking!” But they don’t listen. That’s the main thing… just the listening part. Just the same as when you’re working with people. In some ways, animals are easier. They don’t try to hide things… Occasionally some of my animals can be very stoic though… and some of them are tattle tales and really want everyone to know. Just like people, the animals are all different. But for the most part, they’re easier to read, except when they’re your own, that gets tough. The hardest is reading for your own, at least it is for me. What Kay taught me, is that the difference between me and somebody else is that I expect to hear from them…

GH: I liked the subliminal symbolism in the borders of your deck. It’s something that I haven’t seen done anywhere else. Where did that idea come from?
FS: That was actually the idea of my publisher, Tara Allen, to put those in. She actually ferreted out an image from within each one,and we’d talk about and decide what colors to use. That was her idea and it was very, very late in the game, right before we went to press.

GH: I really liked that… so many decks are rehashed and redone…
FS: Let me tell you about my process of getting the images… I didn’t just say to myself, “Let’s see, we want Native Americans for the Queen of Pentacles and we want a Celtic maiden for swords…” I immersed myself in years of study and mythology from around the world. I just sort of let it sink in. I’m a double Pisces, so I wanted to get there in an intuitive manner. I was full of the information and I let it bubble up. Let’s see… who’s going to be the 7 of Pentacles and Chicomecoatl came to mind… and as I actually wrote and explored using that Latin deity, it turned out that her ritual for the corn maiden actually took place in seven steps. That was not me trying to put it together… that was something coming to me. As I fleshed it out, not only was it a good idea, it was a great idea. That’s how they all kind of took their place…

GH: Is there any one particular thing that the Tarot has taught you that has meant the most to you personally?
FS: Gosh… so much… I suppose one thing it shows me is that you can ask one question… you can have an agenda, but often Tarot will tell you not what you want to know, but what you NEED to know.

GH: I wondered if, because your deck was such a departure from the traditional Tarot, if you were nervous about how your deck would be received?
FS: Rightly or wrongly, no. I was not nervous. I had a contribution to make. I did thorough, good work. It’s not that it’s not for men, and it’s not that it’s against men. I’ve been accused of that… some reviews have criticized me for having so many female images. It seemed unfair, when people would critique me that way. One woman actually said the only person that could get anything out of my Lovers card, was a poly-amorous lesbian. I thought, “Geez! This person doesn’t get it at all…” Now, I am a lesbian and I’m very happy to create something that gay people can relate to, because that’s been left out. But I was deliberately showing, in my Lovers card the three that are sort of in the background? That’s not about a threesome… that’s about a time in the dawn of humanity, where we could come in and out of form. When we were not necessarily always in a body, and not necessarily out of a body… and it’s showing that swirling ability to come in and out of form. During that part of our evolution, in my opinion, we were more like a single-sexed being. Beyond gender… It was not black and white. The three represented that kind of flow. Below, I’m showing a couple… more like the materialization of what we think of as the Lovers. I intentionally made it so that it could look like two women, it could look like a man and a woman, and it could basically look however you wanted them to look. Hopefully people can see what I’m doing as an evolution. As I’ve worked with Tarot, I’ve become aware of it as an evolutionary tool. It was not intended to be rigid.

I had to ask myself, what was different about my deck? I used Rider Waite forever and ever, I used Crowley, and I used the Dakini Oracle. I stayed away from getting to into the other female oriented decks, because I wanted this to be fresh. I didn’t want to be influenced that way. So, how did my deck make me feel different? I’d say my access to ancestral energy would be one, past life information would be another. It just took me deeper in every way. For a long time, the deck existed as photos of the paintings… I really did need to use them before I wrote the book. I needed to flesh out the experience of using the deck. I used them for a long time before they became available to the general public. I use them for everybody and anybody any more. Everybody has accepted them very nicely.

GH: If you had to describe your music, could it be categorized? I’m not sure it fits a single classification…
FS: It’s high energy, it’s eclectic, it’s intense… it’s very bluesy. There’s a Spanish guitar, you can be in a cantina in some border town and it’s a totally Latin music sound, but I’d never refer to myself as a Latin artist at all. It’s very flavorful and it comes from different places, probably different lifetimes. People want to put you in a box and assume, wrongly in my case, because I’m a teacher a psychic and a healer, that I’m going to be playing very ethereal music. Some of it is, but a lot of it isn’t. I like variety… I really do.

GH: So tell me a little about your current projects?
FS: I have two books that are finished (or so I think). One is called “Planetary Playbook”. It’s an astrology book. I started realizing that different signs had different needs, so I began writing a book that would give people access to visualizations and meditations for the different signs… then I made it bigger and did a whole portion on astrology as well. The other one that I’ll probably be doing a little editing and revising on is called “Temple of Isis”. That’s a channeled writing of my past life as a priestess in the temple of Isis. That was captivating, writing it… It’s chock full of lessons, but it’s teaching that comes in an exciting way. Very transporting. When I was writing it, I noticed that whatever the theme was would play out in my day. There was one day, I remember, where everything was going so beautifully in my life that I didn’t want to write a word, because there was interplay between what I was writing and experiencing. I didn’t want to write myself into a crisis.

GH: I know that you teach Tarot… Is there something you feel would be an important message for new students to Tarot to hear?
FS: A couple of things… One is that I really do discourage new readers from reading for themselves too much. If it’s a hot issue, let someone else do it. If it’s an emergency, of course it’s OK. If it’s about self-exploration, that’s a good time to read for yourself, but if it’s a really hot issue, leave it alone. Usually what you get is your panic about your emotions surrounding that issue. Then, “Oh, let me read it again because I’m sure I wasn’t thinking right.” Correct! You weren’t! Then you get even further away from the truth because you have anxiety about the emotions from the first reading and so on and so on. You can end up with ‘the Tarot cards out the window’ phenomena… “Damn cards! I’m throwing them away!” People can avoid a lot of heartache if they leave the tough stuff for the experts… not even the experts, just someone else. Someone not you…

Probably the most important thing above all else, and it doesn’t just go for Tarot. If it feels right, it’s right. If it feels wrong, it’s wrong. I know that sounds really simplistic, but women more than anything, need to become their first place of reference regarding information. Everybody in this culture is taught to look elsewhere. Women are taught in all situations to devalue themselves. One of the most important things I stress with everybody is when you get that first hit of information… keep it! It’s the best news you’ve got. Very, very first thing (and not your intellectual response to the very first thing).

If I can teach you anything, it’s that the first hit’s the right one. That first piece of information is right. You don’t have to worry about trusting this one, that one, the other one… trust yourself.

*“A method of sensing or 'reading' from physical objects the history of each object”