IN 1980, THE PARAPSYCHOLOGIST Dr. Alex Tanous tested my seventh-grade class for psychic abilities, an event so clear in my mind, and so important to me, that I have questioned whether this actually happened, or whether I simply invented him. Tanous was very real, though, as real as the town I grew up in, a conservative Maine town of extraordinary beauty with a population of about eleven thousand. I once heard Cape Elizabeth called a semirural suburb, which seemed a good way to describe it while still also misunderstanding it. This mix of public and private beaches, two lighthouses, farms, a golf course, a tiny museum of shipwrecks, and empty, decommissioned naval-base buildings together made the town feel at once prosperous and haunted.
Our public schools were good, and we excelled at swimming and theater, competing regularly in the state championships for each. And, at least during this period, we also excelled in psychic research. When I asked my former classmates if they remembered these tests, not only did they recall them, they described other tests I’d never heard about, earlier ones, different from mine.
Tanous had just published a book of his research titled Is Your Child Psychic? And it seems he had been using my middle school to test out his theories for some time. I still don’t know whose idea it was. This was a period, I would learn later, when psychic abilities enjoyed a certain level of respectability with Republicans, due to the CIA’s involvement in trying to develop them as a military tool, but this still doesn’t explain it. My memory of the day begins only with the announcement that the doctor was coming, and the level of seriousness with which the visit was proposed to the class. “Dr. Tanous believes that all children are psychic naturally,” my teacher said. “That it is just a matter of training your abilities. Tests and games that anyone can do.”
For me, it was like a dream come true. My own private belief—and my long-held dream, in fact—was that I was psychic. The idea that we all were, and that some of us were just more aware of it than others, was news I greeted gladly: I was already good at studying. All morning long, as we waited for Dr. Tanous, I dreamed of being discovered as a prodigy and led from the classroom as a valued psychic asset, to join a team of psychics who would train me to use my powers, like in my X-Men comics. Together we would fight crime, of course. Or maybe, because my psychic powers were so overwhelmingly strong, I would be taken away, studied, for the protection of the town, as in my favorite Stephen King novel, Firestarter.
I was ready to be discovered, in other words, and for my story to begin.
Most of my fantasies then were of having to leave. Or they were fantasies of secret power. I felt trapped in this town, tired of my all-white classmates, who couldn’t pronounce “Guam,” where we’d moved from six years before. I still hoped someday we would move back.
Tanous, when he arrived, was a handsome man—friendly, charismatic, yet strangely, utterly ordinary in his carriage. He wore a blazer and tie, the knot a little too big, and looked like any of our teachers. But he was not.
THE TEST I REMEMBER best was a guided meditation in which we were asked to close our eyes and imagine sinking through water, deeper and deeper, and then rising out of the water into the sunlight, before sending our consciousness under a magazine he had flipped open and laid out flat without our being able to see what was on the facing pages.
He asked each of us what we saw—I saw people in a canoe, on a river, with massive white columns rising behind them—and then he flipped the page over. A cigarette ad. The white columns I had seen were cigarettes, massive and rising above a canoe on a river.
The class turned and looked at me, suspicious. I was the only one who’d gotten it right. And my vision hadn’t just been a close call; it was pretty precise. Dr. Tanous was pleased, and smiling. He turned to another magazine and asked that we all do it again.
My memory of the day is that I did well: I passed two of the three magazine tests, well enough to believe that I should have been rewarded with immediate admission into a government-funded psychic warfare program. Or anything more interesting than the seventh grade. Instead, Tanous left. But before he did, he taught us a game with cards to improve our psychic abilities. He asked us to think of a playing card and then run our fingers along the side of the deck, pulling the deck apart when it felt hot. Was that the card we had envisioned? It often was. I did this for years, until I lost interest in the game.
THE BEGINNING OF THE story I had hoped for did not happen. Another beginning did.
I was, after all, a child. And like many children, I had wanted to be more powerful than the world around me. I had read novels of wizards and sorceresses, dragon-riding heroes and lost kings, hidden from their enemies, raised as commoners to protect them, and I had imagined becoming one of them. I had consumed first the mythology section of the town and school libraries, and soon found myself checking out The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, a famous anthropological work on magic. I’d hoped it was a spell book. What I found seemed like instructions on how druids whistled up a wind, and any skill I have now at whistling began then.
After Dr. Tanous’s visit, I began taking out books on parapsychology as well. I developed a plan to go to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where I would study parapsychology. The idea of studying grandmothers who felt they had “the sight” was the best thing I could think of for my life. And, of course, I would study me.
And then my world flew apart in just about every direction. My father was severely injured in a car accident, the safety-glass windshield blowing in instead of out during a head-on collision. The accident left him paralyzed on one side of his body, with internal injuries. The man driving the car he was in was injured less severely, but he died.
I was trying, I can see now, to hold on. I was prepared to declare allegiance to any other reality. I was thirteen at the time of the accident, sixteen when my father died of complications related to his injuries. When I ask myself why, of all the forms of the occult I’d found, the one that appealed to me most then was the Tarot, I know why. After my father’s accident, I wanted to know how to tell the future. I never wanted to be surprised by misfortune again. I wanted one of those mirrors that could be used to see around corners, and for my whole life that’s what I believed the Tarot could be. Given the results of my parapsychology tests, the next step seemed as simple as getting a Tarot deck—Tanous’s card game, but with more features. And so I did.
MY FAMILY HAD GIVEN me what I think of as a whimsical approach to fortunes at best, which is to say they were not something to be taken seriously, or they were taken seriously in ways that seemed comic. I remember my father, for example, reading palms while dressed as a gypsy for a Rotary Club fundraiser: he stuck his head out of a tent—wrapped in a ridiculous bandanna, an earring dangling off his ear—and winked at me. Or his sister, my aunt, who wept in fury when her North Korean inventor husband quit his highly paid chemical engineering job to try, unsuccessfully, to perfect a fortune-cookie-making machine. On their visits, my uncle brought us trash bags full of trial cookies, some with three fortunes inside, some with none. At first my friends loved eating them, but we wearied of them as they grew stale, and eventually used the trash bags they came in to throw them away.
Funny costumes aside, my father really did read palms, though he never read mine. I wonder if he ever read his own. He didn’t live long enough to teach me what he knew or for me to even ask him. When I took to fortune-telling myself, in any case, I was serious. Too serious, in the way that makes you foolish.
I did not go to the University of Edinburgh in the end, but to Wesleyan University, a few hours south of Maine in the Connecticut River valley. I could not major in parapsychology there, but it didn’t feel necessary. Wesleyan was full of people who read Tarot cards, for example, because it was full of people who believed everything. You could, in one week, attend Mass and a Seder, stay up all night consulting a Ouija board, get a Tarot reading, go to a Wiccan moon ritual, wake up and take Communion, and if anyone looked askance, shrug it off. Contradictions were defended proudly, and I joined in. I had left for college bristling still with grief after the death of my father—the numbness and shock had worn off and I could feel everything at once. The first thing I did with the trust fund that had been set up for me by the state—my father had left no will—was go to an Alfa Romeo dealership, pay for a new sedan with a check, and drive the car to college, where I called it my Italian lighter. I affected a lighthearted disregard for money, as if I was a character in Brideshead Revisited, even as I took a job, almost immediately, privately contrite, making sandwiches at 7 a.m. twice a week at a deli near my campus apartment. If some Wesleyan student ever looked at my car and told me I was privileged, in the class harrowing that passed for hazing there, I would shrug and say, “You’re right. I’m privileged. I’m so privileged that my father is dead.” And then whoever it was would run away.
Which is what I sought with this behavior.
My first Tarot deck was the Crowley deck, the brainchild of the famous early-twentieth-century occultist Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris. Crowley was a bisexual, opium-using crush-magnet, feral, fey, and floppy-haired, and Harris was his lover. At the time, men like Crowley were always getting me in trouble, and he was no different. In retrospect, it was the perfect deck for me, a great deal like buying an expensive sports car and using it to light your cigarettes. Crowley and Harris had attempted to take centuries of esoteric occult teachings and render them into a single deck of cards, whose regular use would, for the adept, also work as a kind of mnemonic exercise. While reading the cards you would also learn the relationships between ancient gods and goddesses, astrological signs, planets, alchemical sigils. Each card seemed to be one of seventy-eight windows into the secret life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of existence.
Much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot—archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car: I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming. I wanted to be the main character of this story, and its author. And if I were writing a novel about someone like me, this is exactly what would lead him astray.
The deck was, per Crowley’s and Harris’s wishes, published only after their deaths, a little in the way of E. M. Forster’s famous decision to publish his novel Maurice posthumously, allowing only his friends to read it while he was alive. Forster was hiding his sexuality; I haven’t been able to find out what Crowley and Harris were hiding.
I’D BEEN TOLD THAT Tarot cards had to be given to you, but I wasn’t prepared to wait. And so it was in my sophomore year that I appeared one day at the Magic Shop, a little purple cottage not far from the deli, intent on getting my Crowley deck. The dream catchers banged on the door as I went in, followed by the friend whom I’d brought along to buy my deck for me. I wanted my gift when I wanted it, which was right at that very moment. I felt exultant when my friend handed me the cards—just the sort of power I’d hoped for. But I also felt like I’d trespassed. Both feelings pushed at me as I took the deck home and spread the cards out, eager to master them—both have stayed with me ever since.
I never once thought to look into the history of the Tarot. I never asked, Where did this come from? From the beginning, the cards felt as if they’d always existed. But this is not true.
The conventional history given on most mainstream Tarot study websites says that Tarot began as Triunfo, a card game popular among the nobility in fifteenth-century Italy. It involved neither fortunes nor heresies, though it was informed by esoteric occult knowledge. It did not become what it is to us now until around the early twentieth century, through the efforts of the Society of the Golden Dawn, the group of spiritualists that Crowley and Harris belonged to, who were attempting to codify that esoteric knowledge. They saw their deck as a tool for educating students in everything from Egyptian mythology to astrology to kabbalah.
Tarot is thus said to be an ancient system, but it is more a way of knowing ancient systems than an ancient system itself. There are now many styles of decks, and our modern version of the Tarot is only about one hundred years old.
IN THOSE FIRST DAYS reading the cards, I worked to learn the basics—in particular, the ten-card reading, the Celtic Cross, perhaps the most common layout. It begins by showing the querent—the person who’s having the reading done—at the edge of their fate, with cards representing the querent, the situation, what crosses them, what crowns them, what their foundation is, their recent past, their near future, their obstacles, allies, hopes, and final outcome. To draw the cross, you shuffle the deck, cutting it and either pulling cards from the top or spreading them in a fan, letting the querent choose their cards, and laying them down in the spread as they are handed to you.
My deck came with a guidebook of sorts, which recommended that I quietly hold the cards in my hand and ask the querent for guidance before drawing them. I remember tentatively closing my eyes and doing so. It was an uncomfortable thing to do at first, but that probably says more about who I was at the time than it does about the gesture. Now I find it consoling.
In the occult, good manners matter, as they do in life, and perhaps even more so.
A Tarot deck is composed of two kinds of cards, the Major and Minor Arcana. There are 22 Majors, numbered from 0 (The Fool) to 21 (The World), and they take you step by step along what’s called The Fool’s Journey, a journey to wholeness with 22 steps. The Fool passes from Innocence, in the first card, to the mastery represented by The World, which is the last. These cards typically have more weight in a reading than the Minor Arcana cards. The Major Arcana can be thought of as the gods; the Minor, as the mortals.
The Minors is divided into 4 suits: Pentacles, Swords, Wands, and Cups being the standard types. Pentacles are money, manifestation, bringing ideas into the world in a physical way, labor for which you’re paid. Swords are the mind, the intellect, science, and plans. Wands are the fire of the spirit—creativity, passion for creation, inspiration. Cups are emotion, depths of the unconscious, and a way to measure sorrow and pleasure. Each of the suits is numbered 1 through 10, and each has a court of 4: a Page or Princess, a Knight or Prince, a Queen, and a King. There are 56 of these cards.
You turn the cards face-up as you lay them out, one by one, and consider the symbolism of each, as well as the fleeting impressions you get as you hold a card in your hand. Each card acts as a separate scene or chapter within a larger story, and as you go through the reading, you create a relationship between them. In that sense, it is, whatever truth it tells you, a terrific narrative exercise.
The cards all have standard meanings or associations—destruction, creativity, an affair, a lover, a fair-haired man, a dark-haired one, moving on, and so on. But there are also worlds within worlds, and patterns to learn: some suits are hostile to others, all of the cards mean different things in different positions, and the numbers have their own meanings too. And there are reversed-card meanings, provided you work with reversed cards (some readers do, some do not).
The friend who’d bought me the deck was my college roommate and best friend, Aaron, who, when we got home, asked me for a reading. I agreed. I placed my hand on the deck and closed my eyes, silently making that request for both truth and protection, described in the instructions for reading the cards. When I opened my eyes again, Aaron waited. I shuffled, fanned the cards out, and told him to use his nondominant hand to reach for the cards that felt hot.
This was my version of the instructions I remembered from the card game of my long-lost parapsychologist, Dr. Tanous.
We laid out the cards, and I did my best to interpret them. The Tetragrammaton appeared.
“Whoa!” Aaron said, without his customary tinge of irony.
The Tetragrammaton is a drawn symbol that replaces the name of God for those who believe it cannot be spoken or written in any language. Rendered in red and black, the card looked dramatic, even forceful. The Crowley deck is the only one to contain this card. The card has no meaning, according to the book accompanying the deck, and so it has no meaning within a reading. And yet it was in the deck, and here in the reading. And it did feel very much like it had meaning.
This, out of all of it, felt like a trick.
I don’t remember the details of the reading otherwise. I just remember that at the end Aaron said, “Just for kicks, let’s do another reading. See what we get.”
“To see if we get the same cards?”
“Yeah,” he said, and smiled.
I shuffled mightily and placed the deck down, spreading out the cards in a long aisle from which he drew again, before I laid them out.
Of the ten cards in the reading, seven were the same, and five of those were in the exact same places on the table, including the Tetragrammaton, which was starting to feel like the voice of God, if not His name, saying, “Go no farther down this path.”
“Holy shit,” Aaron said.
I agreed. We put the cards away.
And then, much later, I brought them back out. And did a reading for myself, for the first time.
THE FEELING OF SOMETHING coming true, or of something speaking to you through the cards, is probably the hardest part of reading the Tarot. You read it because you want contact with something greater than yourself. You have questions, and you want the cards to answer them. The problem comes when they do.
Generally, the cards seem most relevant when describing hidden ambivalences or fears, things you normally hide from yourself and that emerge in synchronicity with the cards. Psychic powers are not required. They may even be in the way, or beside the point. Querents are not required to say anything to you about what they are after in a reading, and can spend an entire reading, for example, simply nodding as the reader describes what he or she sees. Frequently, it’s better if the querent says nothing. If the querent leaves out personal information, the reader can read unimpeded by assumptions about the other person. Information from a querent creates an opinion in the reader, which clouds what might otherwise have been a better reading. This is because the reader is building meaning for the listener—making available a story in which the querent experiences his own truth. The real power in the Tarot is in the querent.
This is why, in my experience, you should never read for someone you’re in love with, if you can help it. You may not be able to relate the story without your interpretation, based on what you know about them and what you hope will happen. And they deserve this distance, especially if you really love them.
When Aaron and I saw those seven cards repeated in his second reading, it was a shock to us both. I had shuffled the deck thoroughly, he had picked the cards by hand, the cards were new, so they weren’t marked in ways that would have identified them—it didn’t seem possible. Their reappearance—more than a coincidence, like a repeated message—was not just improbable, if you rely on statistics to guide you; it felt almost like a snarl. As if whatever it was that I’d naïvely asked for guidance from a second time had decided to mock our test even as it met it. When I put the cards away I was scared by how, when I’d asked them a question, something had answered. But when I finally took them out again, I was ready to speak again with whatever had answered me.
With time, I became accustomed to drawing recurring cards in readings, eventually thinking of them like weather that returned with the season. I stopped being afraid of the cards that terrify: Three of Swords, usually the card of a breakup or betrayal; Eight of Cups, which often tells you to move on; The Tower, the card of an explosive change of state—the powerful thrown down, the lowly made powerful; Nine of Swords, the card of mental anguish; Ten of Swords, total defeat. These descriptions are, of course, approximations. They lack the nuance you’d get in a reading, and much of Tarot is about nuance.
But I became impatient with the cards, reading too often, and then disappointed when whatever I thought was going to happen didn’t happen. And so I put them away after a reading, as I always did, and years went by. There was perhaps too much nuance, and this tool I’d meant to guide me often left me confused. When I took the cards out again, I remember I was surprised to see them, but also uninterested in them. But I kept them.
And then one day I became a professional Tarot reader.
IN 1999 I WAS working as a yoga teacher at a studio in SoHo, in lower Manhattan. At a staff meeting the owner asked if anyone read the Tarot and would be interested in reading for clients. I raised my hand. With this began one of the more interesting ways I’ve ever made money.
In New York State, I learned, fortune-telling is illegal, a class-B misdemeanor. Per Article 165.35 of the New York Penal Code, it is legal only if you tell the questioner that the reading is for entertainment. The owner of the studio, an affable Colombian mystic who seemed indifferent to mortal laws, pointed this out to me once I volunteered. “Don’t get us in trouble,” he said. I was incredulous, but when I looked up the law, it was true. I tried then to think of what to say to clients. “This is just for fun” seemed not quite the right note. My eventual disclaimer was sarcastic: “Are you having fun yet? Because the State of New York requires me to tell you this is an entertainment.”
Disclaimers about entertainment aside, reading for someone else is a tricky thing. To do so for money is even trickier. I had agreed to do it in a casual way because I needed extra cash, thinking it would be fun, but I immediately found myself in too close contact with the lives of others. Their pain, their ambition, their lust for power, achievement, money, or love—these can show up not so much in the querent’s cards as in the questions they ask you about a reading, or their expressions as you answer. The mask of the querent drops in their pursuit of an answer much of the time, and you see them in ways they don’t generally share with others. And if they pay, you can see in their face that this is not entertainment. They want real answers. They pay hoping, even believing, it will make the difference between guidance that is frivolous and guidance that is real. The best you can do, I think, is stay focused on the cards and not on the person. To let the Tarot cards be archetypes, impersonal metaphors, intimate experiences of an impersonal kind.
I learned to try to offer readings as a portrait of the possibilities of the present. And to receive them that way also.
IT WOULD BE UNETHICAL TO describe in any detail the readings I have done. Luckily, I also can’t remember them, either. Sometimes friends will ask if I recall a reading I gave them, especially if I predicted something that came true, and I can’t. I don’t know why. I don’t even remember my own. I document readings with photos now. I can say that love and money are what most of my querents wanted to know about, and I think those topics are all that most of us want to know about. Will I be loved, will the love last, is my lover cheating? Will I have money, will it last, will I be cheated? Will I get the new job, the new promotion? Will my book sell? It’s the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there’s a demon lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read.
While training to be a yoga teacher, I learned about the siddhis—the gifts, roughly translated. They were an unexpected part of the literature, which said that the practice of yoga could purify your body such that you’d experience abilities like telepathy, clairvoyance, levitation. These same texts also warned that such gifts were obstacles to enlightenment, challenges—because to have them could make you feel like a god. Even being a yoga teacher could be an obstacle to enlightenment. Anything, in other words, that suggests to you that you’d have undue power over others, that you were somehow better than someone else—this is an obstacle.
It was in this light, then, that I came to view what I think of as the dark side of fortune-telling. I was not immune to wanting to know about love and money, and the more people told me how much my readings helped them, the more I heard from those I read for about how what I’d read had come true—book deals, new jobs, new loves—and the more I wanted to know for myself, and to be able to read for myself. This demon is so ordinary that it is no demon at all. It is the part of you that is so very human.
For all that I wanted to be extraordinary, I was no different from those I read for. I was sending my first novel out to publishers, and wanted to know if it would be sold. I was dating a man I felt seriously about for the first time in five years, and became obsessed with knowing how the relationship would turn out. Was I really going to sell the novel? Was the man really over his ex-boyfriend? Where was he the other night when he didn’t want to come over? I might take the cards out to be reassured, but midnight, when you suspect your boyfriend of cheating, or of still being in love with his ex, is, shall we say, a bad time to draw the cards. I acted badly, I suspect, because of the cards, becoming more jealous or apprehensive than I might have if I’d only seen things as they were, if I’d only stayed within the bounds of what we experience of the world. I’d have false ideas by the time I spoke with the man again, ideas that had nothing to do with what was happening. My interest, I can see now, was in whether I could know the answers without asking questions regarding my own insecurities. Instead of conducting some basic relationship emotional hygiene—Is this working for you? Is this working for me?—I went to the cards and returned with a mind full of fictions. If I had good news from the cards, it made me lazy; bad news, and I couldn’t sleep.
And this, of course, is why you should never read for yourself. You can’t give yourself the impersonal reading you need. It’s much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction—to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see. I think few of us know enough about our lives to know our place in them—we can’t see ourselves as we might a character in a novel, with the same level of detachment and appraisal. We can’t, in other words, see ourselves as I wanted to that day when I entered the store and bought my cards. We think this means this, and that means that, and in the meantime the true meaning is somewhere else, and the omen lies on the ground, face-down, as good as mute. And the reader is sitting there looking at the cards in front of him, trying to read for himself as his life moves on in ways he can’t see.
If I could, I’d go back in time and tell myself: This is how it turns out. You, sitting here, paralyzed by fear, alone in your apartment, reading cards.
WHEN I DECIDED TO write this essay, my editor suggested I get a Tarot reading. I was in Spain at the time, on vacation, and pondered the difficulties of locating one of the famous Galician witches, but Galicia was too far away, and few things are as intimidating in Spain as witches that Spaniards all swear by.
I wrote to my friend Rachel Pollack instead. Rachel is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Tarot, the author of seventeen books on the subject, including authoritative texts for the Salvador Dalí and Haindl Tarot decks, and she is the creator of a deck of her own, The Shining Tribe. She’s also a superb fiction writer. Her novel Unquenchable Fire is one I admire a great deal, a satire of magic and suburban America, like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom but with spells for green lawns. I met her as a colleague when I taught at Goddard College’s low-residency MFA program for a year, where we spent weeklong residencies each semester with our students, doing the in-person part of the semester’s work during the day and hunkering down in the Vermont woods together for cafeteria lunches. At those lunches, Rachel spoke elegantly to me about the Tarot as a tool for creative writing—using the Celtic Cross, for example, as a way to think about fictional characters. The questions of the reading—what is leaving the querent’s life, what is about to enter, what is the root of the situation, what is the crown, how do people perceive them, what do they hope and fear?—these are all good things to ask yourself about any character you are writing about. But when she drew cards to help shape a graduation speech she gave, I understood just how differently, how powerfully, she used the Tarot. The speech used the cards as leaping-off points for different thoughts, which she then wove into a sense of the present moment, not the future. She gave the graduating class a collective Tarot reading, essentially. And they gave her a standing ovation.
What I understood, listening to her, is that the mirror I wanted, back when I wished to see around corners into the future, was never possible. The only mirror to be found in the cards was something that could show me the possibilities of the present, not the certainties of the future. The level of mastery Rachel had of Tarot was of another order entirely. She was an artist and I was a drunk. She could stand and speak through the cards’ symbols in ways that reached past them, bringing out soulful depths and insights into the self and the world, while I had been addicted to the idea I might glimpse the lower truth, a literal one, about what happens next.
After returning from our second residency together, and finding myself in a particularly long episode of trying to second-guess another of the men at the edge of my life, and whether or not I should move to California, I got rid of my cards and made the decision to move without a reading. I told myself I couldn’t have cards again until I could read in the same spirit as Rachel. If I was going to get a reading for this essay, I wanted Rachel. So I wrote and asked her if she was game for an experiment, and she said yes.
I PROPOSED TO RACHEL that she read my cards before I finish the essay. She asked if I wanted to draw my own cards or if she should draw them, and I decided I would draw them and send them to her.
I have a deck again, a gift from a friend, given to me honestly. She and I had gone with a group of friends to a restaurant where the backs of the menus were adorned with various Tarot cards. During dinner, I did a short reading based on the menu card each of us were handed. She was sufficiently impressed with what I managed to tell her that she bought me a deck.
The deck is the Blake Tarot, illustrated with William Blake’s artwork and redefined by his philosophies. I shuffled and drew three cards, a very simple reading layout sometimes called The Three Fates, with cards for Past, Present, and Future.
First card: Ten of Science—also known, in a more common deck, as Ten of Swords. Second card: Error, or The Devil. Third card: Stars, or The Star.
It was a “good” reading for a querent to get, I noted as I looked them over, with the querent rising out of his utter defeat, an ascension. It was also, I noticed, like the conventional narrative of most personal essays: an author struggles with his bondage to something he came to as a result of a defeat in his past, and emerges with a better sense of his present place in the universe. I didn’t let myself think of it as my future, not in any way I could rely on. I thought of it as something to aspire to.
I sent these results to Rachel. I told her what I asked, for a picture of my relationship to the Tarot, and she wrote back after a few days with this reading:
Reading for Alexander Chee: His evolving relationship to Tarot
10 of Science (Defeat)
15, Error
17, Stars
Alex drew these cards as a group rather than with specific questions in mind. And yet, it’s hard not to see them as a progression, with Defeat and Error representing a kind of dead end, or at least a limited direction, and Stars as a kind of spiritual and metaphysical breakthrough that opens up Alex’s perspective to Tarot and maybe larger issues.
10 of Science
These cards are from the William Blake Tarot, and Blake saw science as the outgrowth of a mechanistic worldview that he believed was not only wrong but led to misery and oppression. Thus the final numbered card of the suit shows a scene reminiscent of Laocoön and his sons being strangled by serpents for having offended the gods. In an overly dramatic way the card suggests Alex has tried to analyze the Tarot, or study it in a detached way, which can only lead to “Defeat.”
15, Error
In most decks this card is called The Devil, and in fact we see a Lucifer-like figure seemingly wrapping up souls in a kind of gluey web. This reinforces the limitations suggested in the first card. The error is somehow in the approach to Tarot, and the attempts perhaps to use it for information or analysis rather than a spiritual guide. The previous card suggests the error is primarily one of thinking, so Alex might ask himself just how he has looked at Tarot in his mind. Remember, however, that “Lucifer” means “Light-Bringer” and he is connected with the Morning Star, Venus, symbol of hope, and suggested in the next card. Card 15 is the light of love trapped in darkness, but with the energy of its own liberation held within it like a seed.
17, Stars
The central figure here emerges from darkness into light and a wider vision of the wondrous magical world. With an image as dramatic as the first two cards (this reading, and the Blake Tarot in general, are not trying to be subtle!) the card shows a great breakthrough for Alex in his understanding of the Tarot. The figures trapped in Error might be seen as released into the sky in Stars. Or, Alex’s way of looking at people through the Tarot becomes transformed. The large open book on the table might be the Tarot, its mysteries now open to Alex’s greater consciousness. The original name for card 17, The Star, probably referred to the Morning Star, Venus’s light of love released from the Error of the previous approach.
Rachel’s reading felt true to me, and as for the third card, that felt true to what I already hoped for.
THERE ARE TWO KINDS of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I’ve never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I’m prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.
In 2006, I had a lesson in knowing the future. My father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Bill, was visiting from Seoul and staying in New York’s Koreatown at the small but decent hotel where he always stayed in New York. I went that night to come out to him and give him my first book. Before this, I had acted as if the entire world could know I was gay except for him, but this meant my career was hidden from him also. I wanted him to know I had succeeded, as a writer and as an openly gay man. I didn’t want him to think I was a failure, and I wanted him to know me as I really was. And as I’d been doing Korean-language publicity in South Korea and America, there was now a remote chance that he might read an article about me. I didn’t want this to be the way he learned about me.
The conversation went well, given that, historically, Koreans deny that gay people exist. But my uncle was a law professor who’d dedicated his career to international boundary, was a man of the world, the first one I knew who could wear tasseled loafers and look elegant, not silly. And so there we were, in his room, seated on the hotel’s green club chairs, close to saying good night. It was after dinner, I’d given him the book, and we were now discussing the possibilities of my having a family as a gay man.
“Don’t you want one of these?” he asked, pointing with energy at the photos of my siblings’ kids that I’d passed along to him.
I explained to him that I could still have a family with another man, could still have a family if I was gay. As if to answer that, Uncle Bill told me this story:
Before he left for graduate school in the United States, he visited a fortune-teller in Korea. She told him that his younger brother would die young, and he would take his brother’s children as his own, as he would father no children himself. He would either not marry or not stay married, the fortune-teller added.
Here Uncle Bill paused and looked at me. In his expression was someone braced against his life, betting his whole life against this fortune coming true. I saw him take the call with news of my father’s car accident decades ago, saw him marrying late in life, in his forties, then divorcing.
After my father’s foretold death twenty-seven years before this night, Uncle Bill, of my father’s entire family, had stayed in touch with us the most, and though it was not frequent—cards at the holidays, a visit every three years—it had meant a great deal to us. What would it be like to look at the phone and think of calling us all those years, afraid even of this, taking his brother’s children as his own, coming true?
As I hugged him good night, I wanted to stay, to somehow walk him back through the days of his life and remove the fortune’s long shadow, to return him to who he was in the moment before he heard his future, or, to fulfill it all, at the very least to make true that he had become my second father. Of all the things that hadn’t happened, this was maybe the most bitter to consider as I said goodbye. And yet I understood. Here, at least, was a choice to make. A way to feel free, even if that was all you felt.
ON THE SUBWAY HOME, I remembered the story of my own trip to a fortune-teller as an infant in Seoul. All she would say, apparently, was “This one, he has much to do.” If she said anything else, no one remembers. I think sometimes of asking, but it seems to me now, after my uncle’s story, that you only think you want to know the future, until you do. It would be like waiting for a bullet to pace its way to your side across the years, watching as it approached, knowing when it would hit, and not being able to move away.
Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is not to know it. Now, when I think of not knowing the future, I think of when, in a yoga class, my teacher had us begin our practice by doing sun salutations with our eyes closed, for as long as we could stand it. “What can you trust of what you can’t see?” he would ask as we moved slowly and then faster, trying not to fall.
What can you trust of what you can’t see?