Abusua Pa – Publisher of Tazama African Tarot and Love Oracle of Eden
Benaia from Minona Oficial is an astrologer and tarologist with a passion for rap, a student of social sciences at the University of São Paulo in Brasil and a convinced Sagittarian.
I found in the connection with ancestry the way to my personal power. I am a scholar of spiritual practices within the African continent and the matrigestion of African women.
Combining my knowledge in astrology, tarot and entrepreneurship I help black women grow their businesses and achieve their personal goals in an autonomous and powerful way.
Tarot made me see my best, it made me realize what I had that was most incredible about me and today being able to work with Tarot is also showing each person who comes to consult with me how much ability and greatness they also have. I started my journey with Tarot to better understand my affective life, about my relationships.
But from the moment I started to look more into this tool, understanding mainly the importance of oracles, from an African perspective, I understood that in fact the oracle is a tool that aligns us with our purpose.
It reminds us of our powers. So, the Tarot began to guide me to an extremely powerful, extremely great spiritual journey, right? And I know that the vast majority of people today use the tarot a lot to think about their relationships and I think that’s great but I don’t think the tarot is limited to that. It is a tool that can make you expand as a human being. There are some objects that I like to use during my service, I like to make it with an African fabric.
That’s why for me today it’s so important to use tarot decks with black references. Because at the same time that while I was using the traditional Rider Waite and he was guiding me to seek a spirituality, for me to seek an African ancestry, I looked at those images and I didn’t see myself. So I started to search for decks where I could see myself and then from there I also started to share the images with other people, I started to share this message of the tarot for other black people, so that other black people can also remember the power they have, that racism made them forget.
During in my readings I always like to use a “buzio” (cowry shell) of Èṣù and ask the Exu who is the Lord of the paths, the Lord of the messages, who is an orisha, a deity of Yoruba origin, for permission.
Certainly, the tarot was one of the most important tools for the elevation of my self esteem, for me to perceive my powers as powers and realize what I needed to improve in myself, to also work on me. But the tarot was a small big step for me to start my journey with my spirituality, to strengthen my spirituality. The tarot speaks to me like this; “Oh you need to take care of your spirituality and to take care of your spirituality is to go back to your ancestry.” I have a very strong connection with Orúmila, which is the Yoruba deity linked to the oracles. So, Òrúnmìlà is the one who has the wisdom. It is the one who knows what you came to do here on earth so always before doing a tarot reading I ask Orunmila for permission. For him to remind us of our path. So the Tarot guided me to this search for African deities, and in this search I came across the Orixás.
I don’t think it’s about “blackening” the tarot, but to look for tools that we have at our disposal to rescue our ancestral greatness. So the internet is not the legacy of our ancestry, but we can use the internet to get closer to our ancestry and it is very much the perspective that I have in relation to tarot as well.
There are people who disagree, but for me tarot is about connection. It’s never just about drawing the cards and interpreting. It’s about connecting with something much more powerful, much more powerful than we imagined.
There is an Ifá proverb, a Yorùbá proverb, that says that “What is not asked is not answered”. So if we want answers from our lives, we need to ask.