My name is Erica Phillips, a priestess of the Goddess and a solitary practitioner of traditional witchcraft. I have been reading tarot for the last 20 years. It is my calling to help others heal with tarot. I channel information with the help of my guides through mediumship and emotional empathic abilities, and I consider myself a modern mystic. This website is a second home for my experimental intuitive adventures from Substack. It is all deeply connected to the love of tarot, intuitive living, and its infinite possibility.
Like many others, my foundational years were torn by traumatic experiences, and the aftereffect still echoes. These years were some of the most difficult and transformative years of my life. When I was 17 years old, I was gifted a tarot deck and black lightbulb from a Secret Santa gift exchange in high school. I will always remember this day. I let the giver know, years and years later, about the impact of that gift. Even though the deck was not traditional, I used it nearly every day. I understood how to read the cards intuitively from the start, but I only read for myself at first. The images fascinated me and I bought more decks. When I worked with the traditional Rider-Waite Smith deck, everything opened up in a profound way.
In 2006, I found a goddess temple for the divine feminine. My work with tarot deepened soon after in 2007 when I started my priestess path. I burned through trauma I had been experiencing through ritual, ceremony, honor, self-acceptance, forgiveness, sacred rage, and feminine empowerment. I saw everything clearly for what it truly was for the first time. Most of all, it led me on a lifelong path to healing. I never relented in confronting my shadow side when it reared its head over the years. Therapy, spiritual practices, and hypnosis have proved especially fruitful. Today, I feel better than ever. It is not easy, and I am still not done.
Until 2023, tarot was my medium for insight for both myself and others. I never dreamed it would extend into other uses. That spring, I was challenged to write creatively by a friend. I had never attempted this before, although my academic years proved that I could write in a more formal manner with ease. It was terrifying to release my imagination and intuitive processes to the world. Thankfully, I was intrigued enough to give it a try after some thought on the matter. The process came natural to me with a shocking amount of positive feedback. Now, I am all in.
Naturally, as a new creative writer I went hunting for tools to help channel my imagination. Perusing my bookshelf, I spied a book I bought over twenty years prior, “Tarot for Writers”. Why did I buy this book if I was not a writer? Was a fleeting idea which passed soon after I bought it? It simply stayed on my shelf with all the other tarot books, and I didn’t give it another thought until that moment. It never occurred to me to use the tools I already had to help me with creative writing. Using tarot to write stories is not a new concept, but it was eye-opening to me. A game changer.
I immediately went to work on this new path of tarot work. My Substack was created, and the name came to me intuitively as I was filling out all the little boxes to create the page. It flowed through my typing fingers to the box with no forethought, The Experimental Intuitive. It represents the out-of-box methodology for tarot’s infinite possibility for writing and healing. I found books on writing the shadow, channeling creativity intuitively, and many more. I took copious notes when inspiration struck. It did not take long to develop my own ways of building plots for stories using tarot card spreads and intuition. I post all of my work on Substack and offer a 20% discount on readings for my subscribers.