The People's Bureau of Spiritual Labor Has Audited Your Tarot Empire and Would Like to Discuss Your 'Intuitive Revenue'
Let's begin with the numbers, because the Bureau always begins with the numbers.
In the fiscal year just concluded, the spiritual services sector — comprising tarot readers, oracle card practitioners, astro-cartographers, human design analysts, akashic records consultants, and at least one person who charges $175 an hour to communicate with clients' deceased houseplants — generated somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.2 billion in the United States alone. A meaningful chunk of that came from people who post things like "eat the rich" between their Venmo payment links.
The Bureau has noticed.
What the State Found When It Opened Your Books
Meet Cassandra — not her legal name, obviously, but the one she legally changed it to in 2019. Cassandra runs what she describes as a "multi-dimensional healing practice" out of a converted garage in Asheville, North Carolina. She offers three-card readings ($45), full Celtic Cross spreads ($120), and a "Year Ahead Akashic Immersion" package that retails for $850 and includes a linen tote bag.
Last year, Cassandra netted $47,000. She paid herself in "energetic exchange," filed taxes as a sole proprietor under "Other Services," and told her Instagram following of 34,000 that she was "anti-capitalist to the bone."
The Bureau of Spiritual Labor Assessment — a body that, under our hypothetical centrally-planned economy, would have been staffed entirely by economists who find wind chimes personally offensive — spent eleven days reviewing Cassandra's operation. Their findings were thorough.
From the official report:
"Subject has demonstrated the following transferable competencies: pattern recognition across large data sets (78-card deck, recurring client pool), cold reading and behavioral inference, customer relationship management across a subscriber base of 2,300 individuals, and the ability to deliver ambiguous information with sufficient confidence to generate repeat business. These skills have been reclassified. Subject is reassigned to the Bureau of Agricultural Forecasting, Drought Assessment Division, Sector 9, Western Kansas. Start date: Monday."
Cassandra's linen tote bag was not addressed in the report.
The Skills That Betrayed Them
Cassandra is not alone. The Bureau's audit swept up a remarkable cross-section of the wellness-meets-social-justice economy, and the reassignments tell a story.
The Human Design Analysts — practitioners who charge between $200 and $500 to explain to clients why they are a "Manifesting Generator" and therefore not responsible for finishing projects — were found to possess sophisticated systems-mapping abilities. They have been reassigned to industrial process optimization at a fertilizer distribution network in the Dakotas. The irony of this was noted in the report's footnotes. The footnotes were then removed.
The Astro-Cartographers — specialists who overlay birth charts onto world maps to determine where clients should live for maximum cosmic alignment — demonstrated, upon review, a surprisingly competent working knowledge of geography, topography, and population distribution. They have been reassigned to the Bureau of Internal Migration Planning, where their job is to tell people where to live. The difference, they are discovering, is that nobody pays extra for the linen tote.
The Akashic Records Consultants — a category the Bureau initially had to Google — were found to be skilled interviewers who excel at drawing personal narratives out of clients, synthesizing emotional data, and reframing negative experiences as growth opportunities. Reassigned, every last one of them, to the State Grievance Intake Processing Centers. There are many grievances. The intake backlog is significant.
The Customer Database Problem
Here is where it gets particularly cold, and the Bureau does love a cold utilitarian pivot.
Cassandra, like most successful spiritual entrepreneurs, had spent years building a customer relationship database. Names, email addresses, birth dates, rising signs, recurring themes from sessions, notes about which clients were going through divorces and therefore receptive to "transformation-focused" package upgrades. It was, from a pure data architecture standpoint, an impressive operation.
The state found this database extremely useful. Not for spiritual purposes. For census supplementation, health survey targeting, and — in what the Bureau described as "a natural alignment of existing infrastructure" — agricultural cooperative recruitment outreach in three underserved rural counties.
Cassandra's 2,300 clients received a letter. It was not about their Year Ahead Immersion packages.
A Note on 'Intuitive Labor'
The Bureau spent considerable time wrestling with the question of whether tarot reading constitutes labor in the Marxist sense. Does it produce value? Does it require skill? Can it be quantified?
The answer the Bureau arrived at is both more and less satisfying than you might hope: yes, it produces value, the value is real, the skill is genuine, and the quantification was completed last Thursday. The value produced, per hour of spiritual consultation, was determined to be roughly equivalent to 0.4 hours of grain sorting. Which is why the grain sorting facility in Salina, Kansas now has a waiting list.
"I kept telling them I was a healer," Cassandra said, in the single interview she gave before her reassignment paperwork was finalized. "And they said, yes, we know, and healing is downstream of eating, and eating is downstream of harvesting, and harvesting is downstream of soil assessment, and we would like you to assess some soil."
She paused.
"They had really followed the logic all the way down."
What You Should Do With This Information
If you are currently operating a spiritual services business and you also post regularly about eating the rich, the Bureau has a simple suggestion: pick one.
Not because the two are incompatible in theory. But because in practice, the state does not distinguish between the rich you want eaten and the $47,000 you made reading cards for them. Revenue is revenue. Pattern recognition is pattern recognition. And the drought assessment division has been short-staffed since April.
Cassandra's Substack is on hiatus. Her Instagram bio now reads "resting." She is not resting.
The cards, for once, did not see this coming.