Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Pamela Coe. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Pamela, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I’d worked as a creative director in the corporate marketing space for about fifteen years. I had the chance to work with huge companies on some amazing campaigns, but I was woefully burnt out. I think I was clocking 80-hour weeks or something in that ballpark. My Mom had just passed away a few months prior, so it was a stressful period. In late July 2019, I started having these intense headaches that really rocked me. One, in particular, gave me these vision issues where I’d get this prismatic effect in my right eye. Then my right hand went numb. I remember I couldn’t hold a pen to sign my name. I went to my primary doctor, and we figured it might be a pinched nerve, but she wanted me to get an MRI scheduled just in case. The following day, I couldn’t form complete sentences and had balance issues. My wife, Courtney, took me to the ER, and we discovered I had an ischemic stroke. I was 36 at the time.

I’m not a smoker, I don’t drink, and I ate a relatively healthy diet, so it was a big surprise to have something like that happen at such a young age. The doctors I worked with seemed to believe the stroke was caused by the birth control I was taking. As far as strokes go, mine was pretty mild, thankfully. My biggest hurdles were rehabilitating my hand and working on the aphasia.

This was the first time I had slowed down in over a decade, so it was a huge shift. My daughter was on her summer break, so she helped to keep me entertained. A few months before my stroke, she had asked me to put together some flashcards to help her learn to read Tarot for herself. My family has a folk-practicing pagan background, so I grew up surrounded by it. I let my daughter find her path, allowing her to ask questions if she ever became curious. I didn’t have a chance to work on anything while I was working, but now that I had some downtime? I was all over it.

The amazing thing is that it gave my daughter and me something to bond over and helped rehabilitate me. My therapist was stoked when I told him about the project, and we incorporated it into my exercises. I typed up the content for the flashcards, and slowly I started regaining strength in my hand. I started speaking with more clarity, so I think the visual and mental stimulation helped to “rewire” my brain, in a sense. Once we finished the flashcards, folks started asking for copies. Then came the requests for stickers to put on Tarot cards. And then, finally, we stumbled upon the idea of incorporating everything into a physical Tarot deck. With my background in print and graphic design, it was a no-brainer. That’s when I created the Tarotorial Tarot deck.

I tried finding a printer in the states that could take on the printing, but most were astronomically expensive. I’m a go-big or go-home type of person, so I rented a printing press and got to work. My wife and I printed all the cards, boxes, and inserts. Every deck was handmade: coated, scored, trimmed, and assembled in-house. I ended up not going back to work after my medical leave ended. A few months later, we were doing well enough that my wife could quit her job and work on Raven and Rogue full-time, too. This was huge for us, because my wife is transgender. She was an automotive master technician, and the male-dominated garages aren’t exactly the most inclusive spaces for those in our community.

Our biggest driving force is to make spiritual tools accessible to folks interested in learning. It can be hard for people to know where to start, and even more difficult if they’re neurodivergent or have memory issues.

Pamela, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We’re not the types discouraging newbies, which can be a big problem in the spiritual space. I love helping inquisitive folks. Everyone learns differently, so making diverse, inclusive tools is vital to my wife and me.

The first Tarotorial deck is text-based, which is like a flashcard deck. The cards have additional meanings like planetary and zodiac associations, so it’s a deeper dive than your traditional Tarot deck. We have a new iteration of Tarotorial launching in March of this year. It’s called Tarotorial Expanded: more associations on the cards, artwork at the center, and a companion guidebook. It was a two-year-long project, and we’re so excited it’s finally getting out in the wild!

We have more decks in the works, like a Thoth training deck (Thoth is another type of Tarot deck), a Lenormand training deck, and an oracle deck. We’ll be launching a training site later in 2023 as well. Lots of things coming soon!

We also have spell kits with guided instructions and all the tools needed to start. Each is themed around a particular topic, like “abundance” or “protection.”

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

My wife and I have known each other since we were fourteen. We were high school sweethearts. We dated for three years, but then parted ways before college. She was male-presenting at the time and started a career working on vintage cars for an investor, and later had kids. I dove into college and a career.

We remained friends through the years and later found ourselves simultaneously going through pretty painful divorces. We bonded over that and found comfort in one another. We realized that we must have gotten it right the first time around. We’ve been together for almost eight years now.

Two years ago, she started transitioning from male to female. She’d always known she was transgender, but having grown up in the deep South surrounded by very alpha-male personalities, she had a tough time coming to terms with it. She had a fear of coming out to me as well, thinking that I’d bolt. But I couldn’t imagine life without her. We joke that it’s just a “meat suit” that she’s riding in. She’s my person. Always will be.

Now, we’re able to catch up on lost time and get to work with one another every day. We detail our journey on our TikTok channel, @ravenandrogue.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We put all our savings into funding the equipment and supplies to start. We’d do bi-monthly preorders for our Tarot decks, and that business model served us well for quite a while. Our operation was pretty small in those first few years. We worked through the pandemic with all of the shipping issues and supply chain woes that came along with it. We just wrapped a successful Kickstarter for our new Tarotorial Expanded deck, which has allowed us to work with a printing partner to do larger print runs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ravenandrogue.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ravenandrogue/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ravenandrogue
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ravenandrogue
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEeoRe9W0tppuvNrA_2DJqw
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ravenandrogue Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3T1YqsR5OIHyqkTnxhie7w?si=b162fad30dc44920

Image Credits
Raven and Rogue