Cassandra Snow

Cassandra Snow is a writer and tarotist living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They read and teach tarot from a radically queer and intersectional perspective with the intention of helping others find their own paths in their own way. With two decades of tarot experience, Cassandra brings a wealth of knowledge for both the clients they read for as well as the aspiring queer tarot readers and witches they write for. In addition to providing individual tarot readings and publishing a growing number of books, they offer many free tarot, witchcraft, and occult resources on their social media and via their email newsletter, as well as a number of additional unique offerings on their Patreon.

Cassandra was raised in the Bible Belt of the United States, in South Carolina. Their parents, who were both fairly liberal, divorced when Cassandra was young, and while Cassandra felt relatively safe at home, they ended up spending quite a bit of time with close friends whose families were much more conservative due to some difficulties surrounding the divorce. Cassandra’s home church was progressive for the area they grew up in, but they still received a lot of mixed messages about queerness throughout their childhood. Their parents had some LGBT+ friends, but their mom told them that she had three wishes when Cassandra was born, and one of them was that Cassandra wouldn’t be gay. Cassandra had some minimal exposure to queer people on MTV’s Real World, but was also loudly told by the adults in their life how wrong those lifestyles were. Coming of age before shows like Will & Grace or Glee meant that there were not a lot of cultural references that offered solid queer representation.

Cassandra knew they were attracted to women at a very young age. They were told they’d grow into an attraction to men, but this never happened. Because of the overarching cultural norm of compulsory heterosexuality, Cassandra never considered that they might be anything other than straight until they were in college. Their upbringing included moments of intense confusion and uncertainty around a strong throughline of not knowing what options were available to them or what desire truly felt like.            

Cassandra was a committed Christian until college, when they were exposed to tarot by friend. While they don’t believe that tarot and Christianity are mutually exclusive, their experience with tarot and how helpful it was to them in so many situations so quickly led them to begin to question their faith, what they had been taught, and what their church might have lied to them about. As they dug in deeper, the faith they’d grown up with unraveled.

During their first year of college, in 2003-2004, Cassandra and a couple of their fellow theatre major friends started experimenting with witchcraft. They were all self-taught, learning from the books they could find at the closest metaphysical shop, which at the time were rooted in what Cassandra would call “neo-Wicca.” Many of these books pretended not to be rooted in Wicca, which they found confusing, and resulted in them carrying around what they now view as quite a bit of misinformation for a long time. In the midst of all of this, however, Cassandra found some resources such as Silver Ravenwolf, who they found to be very straightforward in her approach, and who they cite as one of their biggest early influences until they found themself in a more active community in Minneapolis around 2010.

Cassandra originally came to Minneapolis to work in arts administration, but they ended up burning out on the desk work. (They still create and are involved in the performing arts to this day.) When the time came for them to move on from their last full-time job, they decided to lean into the fact that they’d been reading tarot a lot, and dedicated themself to building a business around tarot and writing. They picked up other odd jobs and work-from-home opportunities that allowed them to stay afloat while they established themself in this work, but now tarot and writing are a full-time job, which they credit to multiple facets of their spirituality, including a connection to spirit and a strong grounding and protection practice that have allowed them to arrive at a comfortable place in this career.

Cassandra feels that in some ways queerness is their primary religion, while their spirituality is rooted in eclectic witchery and neo-Paganism. In particular, these aspects of Cassandra show up in their work and interact most around the idea of owning what one desires and bringing those things to oneself. If they weren’t so fundamentally in touch with who they are and who and what they desire, they don’t believe their witchcraft would have been successful. They are dedicated to and passionate about queer and witch community, and finding other queer witches to commune with has transformed their life in beautiful and provocative ways.

Cassandra has written and published three books so far—two books on tarot, and one book on witchcraft. Two of the books, Queering the Tarot and Queering Your Craft, have an explicitly queer slant. The third, Lessons From the Empress, deals with creativity and self-expression, but Cassandra and their co-author included quite a bit of queerness in that book as well. Queering the Tarot walks the reader through Cassandra’s journey of learning tarot as a queer person and reading for many queer clients over several years. Queering Your Craft is a witchcraft primer for would-be LGBTQ+ practitioners. Cassandra’s hope for the book was to break away from what they see as some of the more problematic elements of witchcraft, such as a reliance on hierarchical covens and a binary view of deities, instead focusing on the deities between and beyond that binary. Lessons From the Empress is a tarot workbook with simple, witchy rituals. It is a book that intends to help the reader come into their own creatively, and for the sake of creativity itself, as well as spiritually or where tarot is concerned. Their books are available wherever books are sold.

(This biographical statement was written by Alyx Hanson for a Queer and Trans Theologies class at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities with information from Snow's website and an interview with Snow.  The statement has been reviewed by Snow.)

Biography Date: December 2023

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