This post is coming out from watching the Alex Reads Tarot situation unfold on TikTok around June 30th, 2026.
I will summarize the goings-on as I understand them:

Alex Reads Tarot was a TikTok video producer who performed tarot readings using TikTok as a main means of gaining clients and pushing her information. She no longer reads tarot and goes by Alex the Ordinary on the platform now. During her time as Alex Reads Tarot, she apparently put herself forward as an expert after having read the tarot for a few years and gaining a pretty good following on TikTok. I say apparently because I have never followed her, did not know about her situation, and am only just now seeing the unfolding of the situation through the impact it is making in online Heathen, Pagan, diviner, and occult discourse. She recently converted to Christianity after she is supposedly questioned the use and validity of tarot for the last year or so.

What This is About

What this post will not be about is dissecting or coming after Alex for her conversion. I do not know her, I am not her priest or other spiritual advisor. I am not part of her community on or offline. What it will be about is asking folks in the affected communities to be discerning about your diviners. What it will be about is encouraging people to get into community rather than stand outside of it so they are less likely to get taken advantage of. What this post will be about is that I feel that folks like Alex Reads Tarot can have a deeply detrimental effect on the community because community, as such, does not exist in a way that encourages us to develop experience, expertise, trust, or reliability.

Gathering Spaces v Community

The format of many common spaces in Heathen, Pagan, magical, and occult circles, and this is true in my experience of offline and online communities, is individualistic. Communities require shared beliefs, ideas, practices, or ethic systems for communities to form or function. What we have in Heathenry, Paganism, et al are shared identities and, on occasion, communities. It is when we get to more specific groups, big ones like The Troth, or the Fellowship of Fire and Ice, or smaller groups, such as Kindreds, where I feel we have communities rather than shared identity or gathering spaces. While hashtags like Witchtok and Heathentok can help you find people of like mind, it cannot create community, and any sense of community they generate is just that: a sense of it. I am in community with some folks I know from TikTok, but most of the folks I know in that sense I have relationships with off the platform.

Part of why someone like Alex Reads Tarot leaving and denigrating her former practice on the way out hurts so much is that diviners occupy a trusted position in communities. She took people into her care, gave framing for lives, and has now said that it is invalid. At the least she has betrayed folks’ trust. At the most she has grifted, misled, and lied to people. This situation is not new. Before TikTok and Instragram, YouTube has had strings of these. Before YouTube, Tumblr, WordPress, and Livejournal. Then, of course, alongside all of these are those offline who have harmed folks in no different a manner. What Alex Reads Tarot, now Alex the Ordinary has done is neither unique nor unknown to the communities I am part of. What is unique is the way folks can gain followings, monetize, and use them, not that there are followings being built, monetizing being done, or that folks are being used.

Discernment in Divination

This situation exactly points to why we need to practice discernment with everyone, including those we trust to divine. Especially, I would argue, when we make powerful choices based on the results of divination. This is why, when it comes to folks getting the go-ahead to begin projects, start major endeavors, or initiate into a practice, I recommend at least 3 readers apart from the person who could benefit from the project, endeavor, or who is seeking to bring the initiate into the practice. When I take on a student, whether apprentice or mentee, I require this from 3 diviners the potential student trusts, and I do my own divination as well. If the student cannot find a diviner, I will suggest diviners for them and be clear about my relationships with and to my suggested folks.

Why am I taking the time to be so damned clear about this? Because that clarity allows my students, clients, and I to trust the results of divination. I do not teach, divine, engage in spiritwork, or do magic for free. I cannot, per my Ginnreginn. It also means folks who come to me for these things know exactly the expectations I hold, what my place in things is, and what obligations and responsibilities I hold. Likewise, they know what their own obligations and responsibilities are as someone seeking my help or input. I wrote my Spiritwork Services page the way I did because I have seen too many scams over the years. I have seen too many people try to argue or quibble over what their role and responsibilities are in a reading, especially in my early years of divining. I am up front on my pricing, and for bigger works that it must be talked out, because the spiritwork takes me away from time off I could be doing anything else.

I very clearly define what it is I do, for how much, and what the roles, responsibilities, and obligations are on each person in this work. There are too many people out there operating without a clear understanding of all of these things, and they are reading for folks. There are folks trusting diviners with some of the deepest aspects of their lives and they have no idea what the ethical or even the spiritual framework of that diviner is. They are trusting spiritual communication with folks who they have no idea if they understand the Gods as they do, if they believe that spirits are even real, and if so, what relationships these diviners carry with those spirits.

I cannot overemphasize how irresponsible and infuriating it is that folks care so little about their own and others’ lives that they will just throw in with whomever they find. Yes, irresponsible. If you are making life-changing decisions based on the words of a diviner, you owe it to yourself to sit down with a competent one, ideally a diviner whose frame of reference at least somewhat resembles your own. The hyper-individualistic mindset common to a lot of the shared spaces for Heathens, Pagans, witches, etc is getting people hurt and screwed over regularly. Hashtags and groups on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook groups are not, themselves, communities. They are gateways through which you can find community. Witchtok and Heathentok are not communities unto themselves. They are collections of people. They are ways of finding folks of like mind. I hope all those who want to find communities can do so. I also hope that we get more judicious about who we put into these trusted positions.

Divination is a powerful practice that anyone can do, but not everyone will. Whether you come at divination through tarot, Runes, stones, bones, or a myriad of other options, it is a way of communicating with the Ginnreginn, and the universe at large through a medium that can be understood. It is a way of communicating with the Ginnreginn that works with objects to discern what it is a given Ginnreginn or group is trying to communicate. It is a way of understanding how Urðr is weaving or carving with a situation, or where one’s place in it is at that moment. Divination can be worked with for reasons both personal and communal. Divination can be oriented towards this-world needs or otherworld topics. It can be used for fortune telling, or it can be sought out for guidance on major life changes. So long as we are going to consider or follow the advice of divination and diviners, it behooves us to treat it seriously and with attendant care.

A Diviner is a Professional

How do we attend to that care and treat divination and diviners seriously? We define our expectations and we treat diviners as the professionals we expect them to be. In turn, diviners act professionally and adhere to the standards of the communities they wish to serve. A diviner is a professional and you should treat them as such whether or not they are paid. A diviner is a professional and they should conduct themselves as such.

What I am not going to say is that we need to set standards rates. If folks in communities wish to do that, they are free to do so. I charge what I do in part because what I do as a professional is hard work, and has been built with years of training, initiations, and experience. What we do need are clear understanding between diviner and client, the boundaries of practice, and what forms of divination they have expertise in. Some folks will refuse to read on love situations and that is their right. Some folks specialize in the intersection of practical concerns like money, and others on esoteric ones. Many diviners will read on a variety of topics, whereas others strictly stick to one. Folks like myself, who have a multitude of spiritual specialties that they are professionals in, may have a broad scope of practice. Others may stick to one divination medium or another.

Rather than say “we should agree that diviners should pick a specialty and stick to it the rest of their lives or careers”, we should simply require diviners to be forthright and clear on what they are and are not experienced in. There is nothing with expanding or contracting the services you offer or the mediums of divination you work through. What is unprofessional is to give folks the impression you have worked with the Runes for 20 years when you have been divining with tarot. If you are self-taught, that is fine -be forthright with that. If you have taken years of training to get where you are, again, be forthright with that.

If we are to have expectations for diviners we also need to have them for clients. There are solid reasons for why I wrote my Spiritwork Service page the way I did. I have run into clients who thought I overcharged for my work. I have had clients who wanted me to drive to see them in person and only wanted to be charged for the reading. I have had clients who wanted to ask the same question every other week, and so I instituted a rule: you have to work on the question for at least a month before you ask that question again. When literally the same reading drops with the same cards in the same position for three readings in a row on the same question as asked, you need to do the work before you ask me to expend any more energy. I have also had clients who clearly needed mental health services I was not qualified to provide alongside the spiritual information they received, and urged them to seek it before seeking divination again. As a professional I have the right to refuse or place boundaries around my practice, and clients need to abide by them.

Developing Divination and Discernment

I do not expect these things to ‘fix’ the problem with grifters on the Internet or offline. I do not expect these measures to ensure that folks never get hurt, taken for a ride, deceived, or misled. They would certainly help. It would certainly do us some good to be clear about the role diviners and our clients have, and clear expectations of each. It would certainly do us some good to be clear about the role divination plays in our lives, as well as all the other spiritual phenomena we might come across. It would do all of us well to be clear about the role divination and diviners perform as part of the communities we are in, and how we ought to understand those diviners we might work with not inside of our communities. Discernment in these positive directions would do our communities some good. By being solid in our understand of the expectations, obligations, responsibilities, and boundaries each of us need to keep, we can make our communities safer and more supportive. Each of us can and should engage in the discernment necessary to make our communities healthier, better informed, and wiser.

A major way that communities can encourage discernment to develop with divination is to be sure there are standards for them in your community. Having the role of divination defined and the roles of diviner and client each clearly understood will protect both and the community at large. Anything goes with a hands-off approach has not helped keep people safe, and it has not helped develop the practice of divination in our communities. Some of this comes down to lack of training or expectations of understanding in the Heathen, Pagan, and magical communities, as reliant as so many are on self-education. By setting the expectations and giving clear boundaries, we can help give shape to our communities’ practices. Shaping these practices in this way gives clear goals for a diviner to aim for, and clients have clearer ideas of how to discern a useful question and how to work with the answers given. By taking some simple steps in developing divination practices in our communities we allow for richer communication, and the ability to discern useful messages and communication from unhelpful or misleading ones. By developing divination and discernment in these ways we allow for better safety for diviner and client, while also improving dialogue between ourselves, Urðr, and the Ginnreginn.