The Feminine Genius: Taylor Swift’s “Mastermind” and The Magician Archetype
Taylor Swift and The Tarot
Once upon a time, the planets and the fates and all the stars aligned—and Taylor Swift quietly redefined what power looks like when a woman wields it on her own terms. “Mastermind” isn’t a love song. It’s a confession of the lengths someone will go to create the world in their own image, disguised as pop. It’s Swift unmasking the archetype that’s governed her entire career: The Magician, the card of willpower, manifestation, and transformation.
When Cris and I wrote Pop Culture Tarot: Learning the Tarot From Your Favorite Fandoms, our mission wasn’t to make tarot mystical—it was to make it readable. We wanted to show that learning the meanings behind tarot cards isn’t just memorizing esoteric facts about New Age symbolism; it’s all about pattern recognition. Every story, every character, every pop culture icon plays out an archetype. You don’t need a a degree in numerology to understand the cards—you just need a TV, a Netflix subscription, and maybe a bit of media literacy.
(Granted, judging by how some corners of the internet still manage to misread Swift’s lyrics in the most conspiratorial of ways, maybe that last requirement is asking too much.)
So today, I’m embarking on a journey to teach media literacy and esoteric symbolism in a language Swifties will understand.
The Magician: As Above, So Below
The Magician is the number one card of the Major Arcana, the moment the Fool—innocent and untested—discovers the ability to shape reality. His right hand points to the heavens, his left to the earth, embodying the mantra “as above, so below.” He channels cosmic energy into action. The symbols of the four suits lie before him: the wand, the cup, the sword, and the pentacle—tools of creation. He is manifestation made flesh, the architect of potential.
As described by Arthur Waite in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the Magician represents “the divine motive in man, reflecting God.” But that power comes with a caveat: it’s creative, yes, but not yet wise. The Magician has knowledge but not maturity. He’s as likely to conjure chaos as he is to manifest beauty.
Labyrinthos calls him “the master of manifestation,” able to translate dreams into reality through focused intent. In reversal, however, the Magician becomes a manipulator—illusionist, trickster, con artist. He’s all smoke and mirrors, playing god with borrowed light.
In Pop Culture Tarot, we summed him up this way: “Artist and con artist.” The genius and the grifter share a toolkit. The only difference is honesty—about motive, about method, about control. And that’s where “Mastermind” comes in: Swift makes the confession that The Magician rarely does.
“Once upon a time, the planets and the fates / And all the stars aligned…”
Swift begins in mythic register, invoking fate and cosmic orchestration—the external forces the Magician usually claims to harness. But by the time she hits “checkmate, I couldn’t lose,” it’s clear she isn’t surrendering to destiny; she’s been scripting it. The lyric collapses the boundary between as above and so below—the Magician’s domain—because the magic here isn’t celestial; it’s strategic.
The opening stanza is pure Magician energy: she takes the randomness of the universe and rearranges it like chess pieces. Where the Fool trusts the universe to provide, The Magician bends it to their will. Swift confesses to setting the dominoes in motion long before anyone else noticed the pattern. “What if I told you none of it was accidental?” is a thesis statement for the entire archetype.
“You see, all the wisest women had to do it this way / ’Cause we were born to be the pawn in every lover’s game.”
Here, Swift names the gendered condition of the Magician archetype. When men manipulate, we call it leadership. When women strategize, we call it deceit. The Magician’s tools—focus, design, persuasion—are celebrated in male archetypes and vilified in female ones. Swift flips the on its head: she’s not a manipulator; she’s a tactician in a world that taught her to survive by scheming.
“I laid the groundwork and then, just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in a line.”
The precision here is not just lyrical—it’s metaphysical. The Magician governs the realm of controlled manifestation, the moment where thought becomes thing. The lyric “just like clockwork” evokes the card’s upright meaning: mastery over time, will, and circumstance.
“No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since…”
In the tarot, the reversed Magician is a warning: manipulation masquerading as mastery. But Swift’s twist is psychological. Her manipulation isn’t malicious; it’s masking. The desire to control is born from exclusion. This verse reframes the archetype as trauma response—the child turned architect, the outcast turned mastermind.
Media Literacy and the Modern Magician
Pop culture runs on illusion. The celebrity persona is a conjured image, a carefully managed narrative that invites belief while hiding the gears. Mastermind doesn’t just confess to manipulation—it teaches the mechanics of it.
In Pop Culture Tarot, we argued that tarot can be a tool for understanding the stories we consume—how archetypes structure our myths, movies, and politics. “Mastermind” demonstrates this in real time: it’s a crash course in reading between the lines.
When Swift sings “Strategy sets the scene for the tale,” she’s not just describing romance; she’s describing narrative construction itself. She’s telling her audience that what they’re witnessing—every album rollout, every Easter egg, every aesthetic era—is deliberate. She invites her listeners to recognize the deliberate design.
That awareness is precisely what The Magician teaches: consciousness as creation. The card’s lesson isn’t “manifest your dreams” in the Pinterest sense—it’s “recognize the forces at play and learn to direct them.”
And for women in particular, that awareness is political. Patriarchy trains women to believe that visibility and control are opposites—that to be seen, one must surrender authorship. Swift refuses that trade. She builds the narrative and stars in it too.
There’s something radical about a woman admitting she planned her own success. Swift’s confession—“What if I told you none of it was accidental?”—isn’t arrogance; it’s an answer to centuries of cultural discomfort with female agency, from Eve’s curiosity to Circe’s spells to the “calculating” woman in every boardroom.
The archetype of The Magician has always belonged to the masculine—even in Pop Culture Tarot, every single one of our examples of The Magician are masculine characters (yes, even Kosh in Babylon 5). Swift claims it for herself and for every woman who’s ever been called “too ambitious,” “too polished,” or “too fake.” She tells us, bluntly, that the performance is the power.
The Lesson of The Magician
In tarot, the Magician’s appearance means: you already have the tools. The only question is whether you’ll use them consciously. “Mastermind” is that lesson sung aloud. Swift doesn’t ask for forgiveness for being calculated—she reframes calculation as care, intention as intimacy.
This is what we meant when we said we wanted to use tarot to teach media literacy: once you can name the archetype, you can see the pattern. You stop believing that stories happen to you, and start recognizing how you participate in them. Tarot isn’t mystical—it’s descriptive. It’s a language for reading both art and self.
So when Swift sings, “It was all by design,” she isn’t boasting; she’s reminding us of the same thing The Magician whispers from his card: nothing is accidental. Every narrative—personal, political, pop cultural—is built by someone who understands how to arrange the pieces.
The feminine Magician is finally visible, unapologetic, and singing from the main stage. The trick was never to deceive us. The trick was to make us look closely enough to see how the illusion was made.
If you are interested in more analysis like this, please check out Pop Culture Tarot: Learning the Tarot From Your Favorite Fandoms and Shakespeare & The Tarot: Archetypes in the Bard’s Work.
And yes, there might be a Taylor Swift and the Tarot book on the way. Keep your eyes peeled.