Tarot Life Lessons: Living Wisdom from the Major Arcana

But First . . .

AN INTRODUCTION

To open this book is to enter my private journals as a professional tarot card reader. Are you ready? Warning: it might get personal. Personal to me. Personal to you. Another warning: it might affect how you live from this day on. Tarot is like that. Some of these are real-life stories that I recorded on a tired, bleary-eyed night at the end of a long amalgamation of readings given to party guests. Other chapters are the struggles of regular clients that have troubled me awake in the smallest hours of the night or lessons I have learned with strangers as we laughed over coffee and cards one afternoon. Sometimes the card I am writing about was part of a client’s reading, and sometimes the stories reflect the themes represented in the card. Because the tarot has built-in symbolism, I have matched each of my stories here to a card, starting with card number zero, the Fool, the place where we begin. I am not a guru, and I am not a counselor, but after forty years of reading the cards, I have learned a thing or two about people, where they come from, what and why they do what they do, and where their energy is headed. I have learned that no story is unique. These are human stories. My story is your story, just with some different details.

Perhaps you do not yet even know what the tarot is. Maybe you presume I’m a conjurer of spirits or channeling something supernatural. Maybe you think I’m a mentalist with a talent for observation and guessing correctly. You might have seen a deck of tarot cards in movies and books, often in the hands of a traveling fortune teller or mystical old woman. I hopefully don’t fit those depictions of a decrepit crone quite yet, nor do I want to come across as the trickster. Let me first say that it would be hard to conjure spirits doing a session at a noisy party, a crowded Starbucks, or over the phone, which are my main venues. I don’t use ghost hunting equipment as we see on too many television shows. It is not uncommon for people to meet me for the first time and exclaim, Oh! You look like a normal person! I am a normal person, just more sensitive to others’ energies than most, and with an unusual occupation.

Here’s a quick history lesson. Tarot was first conceived in fourteenth-century Italy as a game for royalty and the wealthy with loads of leisure time, probably a minute percentage of the population. This was during the Crusades; lore tells that, under the guise of play, the cards’ symbols, pictures, and numbers worked as a code to keep secrets related to magic, astrology, alchemy, numerology, and even dangerous political ideas off the radar of the repressive church government of the time. In the following stories, you will see how these cards remain timelessly valid for people today. Whether or not the romantic legend of vagabond travelers smuggling mysticism underground throughout Europe by tarot is true, the cards today are used chiefly for divination, the practice of seeking knowledge of the future, and especially for personal growth.

I love my work, even if others dismiss me as a joke and corporate friends think I can’t sustain a real job. Oh, I’ve had more than a few of those jobs, and I spent many hours of my younger years chasing down the dollars in an office cube. I can do that work, but it is not the truth of me and not the best use of my talents. Being a tarot card reader is less about being clairvoyant or a fortune teller and more about understanding the abundant symbolism and spiritual exposition revolving around and within the cards, and how one might take the cards’ advice to better one’s life. When my younger son still lived at home, he would occasionally eavesdrop on bits of my sessions over speakerphone. One day he proclaimed, You are kind of a counselor, Mom. That is true. Others might call me a life coach. Call me a spiritual GPS, or even mom, if you want. Call me whatever you like.

Let’s begin with the ordering of the tarot. The first twenty-two cards, called the Major Arcana, represent the key players and milestones in life, the sacred adventure from birth to death. Those are my primary focus in this book. The remaining fifty-six Minor Arcana cards explain the mundane, day-to-day stuff, and you will see how these contribute to the bigger picture. Altogether, these seventy-eight cards tell the human story. Much of the tarot is logical and psychological. I often compare it to dream analysis, revealing subconscious beliefs and motivations in many colors, numbers, symbols, and pictures. If you’ve ever read anything about archetypes or the initiate’s journey by mythologist Joseph Campbell or psychologist Carl Jung, you’ll recognize some of those themes in the tarot.

You have probably seen some of the more famous Major Arcana cards in popular culture: the wise old Hermit, who graces the inside cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, the Fool, with his standard playing card equivalent of the Joker, as well as the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Death card, which are just some of the Major Arcana images to appear in James Bond movies, video games, pop songs, novels, television, and more. The remaining fifty-six cards, the Minor Arcana, are in suits, like modern playing cards. Instead of Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades, however, the tarot has Cups (for matters of love and emotion), Wands (for energy and creativity), Pentacles (for money and career), and Swords (for ideas and action).

So how does tarot work? The combination of pictures, numbers, symbols, and signs on tarot cards, interpreted by the tarot card reader, reflect the subconscious and explain our experiences, in the same way dreams express what’s going on inside and outside of us. You trust that the right cards will come up for you—or you don’t, and you learn that they will come up anyway. That’s the beauty of it: you don’t have to believe, and it will still work for you. You don’t have to be all that knowledgeable or wise to experience transformation with tarot.

It only takes a certain amount of familiarity to decipher a world full of meaning in the cards. I maintain that anyone can read tarot cards with time, a little bit of guidance, and the drive to evolve and live more deeply. As you read on, you will see in this book that I am not the only one reading the cards; my clients often help me by applying what I glean from these symbols and pictures to their situations. You will also notice that I, too, learn and grow with each client’s experience. I trust that the right clients come to me, without exception, that they are there both to receive help and, sometimes, to help me as well.

I’ve been a writer and a reader for a lifetime, so it makes sense that I would love the tarot. Within each card is a little story. You will soon see how the cards are imbued with mythology, Biblical parables, archetypes, and spiritual advice. These cards work together to illustrate the human experience. Some people use the tarot only for fortune telling, only asking what will happen, and I think that’s a waste of its power. The tarot is a tool to awaken and tame the subconscious, to help us grow our strengths and make changes when we identify our weaknesses. It’s a way to conquer problems and move on from painful situations and the baggage we carry through life. Each tarot card has different meanings, whether they fall right side up or upside down. Upside down is called a reversed position. The person’s question and the layout, or spread, I use also help determine the card’s meaning. There are no duplicate cards. The miracle of tarot is how the right cards show up, time and time again, to provide guidance or to illustrate someone’s story. People marvel all the time, telling me that I explained something "exactly as it occurred, or that He would have said those very same words, or ask, How could you have known that?" Let it be known that I don’t research my clients. I don’t ask for pictures, birthdates, or even last names. I don’t fish for information, and when I’m doing phone readings or email, I cannot be tipped off by hints from facial expression. The truth is that I don’t know anything about what I see. I’m just the messenger, reporting back from Elsewhere.

The sessions you’re about to read about may be sad, or joyful, or shocking . . . and everything in between. I write from my perspective, but I do not judge. We are all human and capable of so much, good and evil. I strive to pull away the dark curtain and expose the Great and Powerful Oz of the supernatural not as a giant godhead to be feared but rather as the Source, of which we are all equally a part. My own stories are interwoven with those of my clients, as our experiences together have often been powerful and even life-changing. Being a professional tarot card reader has been an adventure, to be sure, and the first story we begin with is my own. I like to think that as a tarot card reader I play a very small part in working to heal the world. With any luck, maybe one or some of these stories will contribute to that work within your life. Or maybe you’ll just have a good time reading them.

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Names and identifying facts have been changed to protect client privacy.

0

THE FOOL

I grew up with the Bohemian surname of Svolba. However my childhood did not resemble the itinerant traveler pictured on the Fool tarot card, with his traveler’s satchel and a little white dog at his heels. No, even with my central European roots reaching back to those mystic drifters, tinkers, and tramps, becoming a professional tarot card reader had never been a part of my life plan. Maybe Fate decides these things for us. Whatever the reason, somehow, this oddball career of mine evolved, possibly due to spiritual energy, God, or karmic debt.

The Fool card begins with the number zero, representing nothingness and an absolute beginning. The Fool has no value and represents both the outsider and the Everyman (or woman or person). He is at a starting point. I started when I picked up my first tarot deck at age sixteen. I was a hippie kid in the 1970s, not a true hippie of the ’60s, but a copycat, preferring Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin when disco was the rage. A ragamuffin, as my British Nana referred to me, my looks being part of my adolescent rebellion. So there I was, a longhaired stoner who had blindly wandered into a magic shop, looking for nothing in particular, wasting time one hot Maryland summer afternoon in an air-conditioned mall. This was not a New Age shop—those places weren’t around in the 1970s. No, this store was a Houdini-type place with tables full of gags and tricks and novelty items. And there, in the glass case beside all of the fake wands, sponge balls, and flies in plastic ice cubes, was the first tarot deck I would ever see.

As the Fool makes his route west through the snow-covered Alps, his head, like mine was then, is happily in the clouds. His card embodies air, that number zero, and also the Cosmic Egg, which birthed what scientists today call the Big Bang. He is the first breath of life and the last dying breath. In some illustrations, the Fool follows a butterfly, another creature of air and wind. Like the teenage me, the Fool has no plan or destination as he steps forward. His feet are on the ground for now. He does not see that he is about to step off a cliff. No one knows if this is just a small step or a drop that will swallow him up forever . . . the way that tarot swallowed me.

Do you want to take a closer look? the saleswoman asked me. I say woman here, but she was maybe twenty years old, tops. Still a girl, but grown-up to me back then. Until that time, my concept of a fortune teller was strictly from the movies: the haggard old sorceress in a caravan casting a long, bony finger over her oracular crystal ball. Yet here was a lovely, hip mentor, with her shoulder-length golden hair, her bangs in a trendy feathered cut, brushed away from almond-shaped eyes, and a gauzy Indian blouse as loose and flowery as the Fool’s garb. The young woman seemed to be serene, or whatever I might have conceived serenity to be at that age, and she appeared to have all the knowledge of the universe within that finger-smudged plexiglass counter.

I suddenly became aware of my drab, straight hair, parted in the middle and brown as dirt. Anyone could see that I clearly lacked mysticism, wearing an orange t-shirt with a Paul McCartney and Wings decal, an iron-on from a family trip to the Ocean City boardwalk. I wondered if I was fit to own tarot cards. What does someone who buys tarot cards look like? Do they carry a magic wand? Wear a flowing gown? A crown of stars? Did other tarot card owners look as average as me?

She had asked if I wanted to hold them. Had I heard her correctly? After a long pause, I said, Sure. I hardly believed that I would be allowed to touch something so fantastic.

My shopgirl mentor slid the cards out of the box and thumbed through them, and she told me that the tarot is used not only to read people’s fortunes but also as a way to understand ourselves. She said that, unlike all the rest of the merchandise in the store, tarot is not a trick. Tarot is a kind of magic that is real.

Real magic? Sign me up! I bought them on the spot, maxing out my paltry babysitter’s budget. Following the young woman’s directions, I wrapped my deck in a silk cloth, which the store also conveniently happened to sell, as magicians go through loads of scarves. She recommended that I store them in a wooden box, and I knew just the one—an old container my mother once used for flour in our kitchen. I had swiped it years earlier as a coffer for things precious to me: newspaper clippings soaked in tears over the Beatles breaking up, hard candies, favorite jewelry, and a postcard of Big Ben from Nana in Great Britain. I knew on a deep level that this particular box was infused with my personality, although I would never have used such words back then. Operating from sheer instinct and practically no history of my own yet, I knew that this box fit the precise requirements of Real Magic.

The Fool has no knowledge or experience. Everything is play. That’s where I was when I had to figure out how I was supposed to use these things. The lexicon of tarot readers made it all the more confusing. What was divination? How did one get direction and insight? I started with the little white paper instruction booklet that came in the package. We call these LWBs in tarot circles, and there is respect for them as each deck has its own. Looking back, I think that learning by the LWB was a great way to start. It was not laden with description or intimidating to read, and it gave my intuition space to grow.

You’re very good at this, my friends told me. I soon became everyone’s favorite party guest.

The Fool embodies the child within us all and symbolizes that we are all born pure as we begin our journey in life. The tarot was structured on something called Qabalah’s Tree of Life. On that tree, the Fool connects the point of Wisdom to God. But Wisdom on the Tree of Life refers to the wisdom of the world, which God considers foolishness.*

Even my mother will tell you that I was a pretty mystical kid. At around eight years old, I hummed self-composed magic songs and created secret rituals where I threw chestnuts wrapped in my handwritten stories and poems into our family’s burning fireplace in winter. I’d wrap them all in my father’s carbon paper sheets from his 1970s-era office supply cupboard for extra power. I had a passion for carbon paper as it doubled and tripled my words. I knew that the smoke would lift and carry my words off somewhere else, somewhere greater. Maybe the smoke and flames from the crackling wood would deliver them to my dead grandfather, whom we called Pampa. A black-and-white photograph with Pampa sat on our mantel above the fireplace, him holding me as a baby on his lap in the center, the two of us flanked by my mother and Nana. He had gone on to become an angel, I decided. Or maybe my words would travel on the air across neighborhoods to a boy I loved but dared not speak to. I regularly pocketed what I deemed magical stones and herbs, creating my own spells. I made everything mean something—how could it not?

Or maybe my mysticism began when I was twelve, lying on my back in the summer grass, instinctively learning to meditate alone in the dark, to find that halfway place between awake and asleep. There, it was only me and a canopy of stars. Sometimes, just like in the picture of the Fool, I had the company of a little white dog, Muffin, who watched me curiously.

I would say: Look, Muffin, there is Mars, rising near the moon . . . or That bright star is Jupiter, my November planet. . . . Muffin would lift a white floppy ear and cock her terrier-mongrel head, confused. The white dog on the Fool card represents our innocent, animal nature before we left the primeval Garden of Eden.

In my teens I read books on astrology. The sky spelled alphabets, revealed pictures in constellations and meteor showers, and diagrammed the way things would be and the reasons. It was like learning to read. I got the gist and major points by immersion into a new language in which I was not yet fluent.

I wasn’t entirely pagan, though; I was active in our Episcopal church, which had its share of charismatic Christians, including those who spoke in tongues. They had me spellbound, and a couple of words even came to me, although I never felt consumed and taken over by the Holy Spirit in the manner that those people did. Our church group elders were in their thirties, played guitar, and knew how to speak to the teenagers on the fringe like me. Under their tutelage, I read and studied the entire Bible, and it was on a church retreat where I learned automatic writing, going off alone to allow God to speak through the pen. Of course! The pen would be my way into the spirit! After all, In the beginning was The Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, says the Book of Genesis. God was words! Of course, of course. Here was a God that made sense.

I read books on dreams, graphology, mythology, numerology, and Jungian psychology throughout those teen years. I learned about different religions and how alike they all are at the core, rivalrous siblings descended from the same lineage but with differing dogmas. It fed my spirituality as I came to see the interconnectedness of everything.

Looking for signs and symbols in my suburban 1970s world became an everyday, natural experience. My tarot cards became a life decoder and a compass to navigate and reduce the chance of bad luck. Ideas and actions became airy Swords. The world was made of earthly Pentacles, of which I never had enough. My wet, watery, adolescent emotions were Cups, and my wild and enthusiastic Sagittarian energy could only be expressed through the suit of Wands. My ideas and action were Swords. Everything in life was contained within those pictures, and although the card characters’ fashion was medieval, the people, faces, and expressions are eternal and universal. There are always youths and wise old men. There will always be mothers, fathers, lovers, and warriors. Animals. Work. Sickness and death, parties and birth. The Wheel of Life turns for us all. I saw parents and teachers I knew in the faces and characteristics of the Kings, Queens, and Emperors of my deck. My friends and I were all mere Pages, just children, with dreams of becoming Knights, finding our fortunes, and riding out victoriously on horses or in chariots, preferably with radial tires, good gas mileage, air conditioning, and a stereo, into lives of our own.

I mastered the meaning of numbers: the solitary rank of the ones, the partnership of twos, the creativity of threes, and so on. I began to understand that everything was charged with sacred meaning if I wanted to believe it, and this meaning, for me, was lifesaving as my personal world often seemed too terrible. Back then, I used the same coping mechanisms as many teenagers who are highly sensitive and don’t have the emotional tools to manage: drugs, alcohol, sex, and other methods of self-destruction. Or maybe I just did the seventies. Later, when I was in my twenties, my now-ex-husband joked, You have personally experienced every topic on the talk shows, except not knowing your sexual orientation. He was right. And I had friends who went through that one, so close enough. The Fool tries everything and commits to nothing. The Fool hangs out on the cusp of living and dying. In time, I learned that all of my vices and personal problems had been gifts, and they helped me connect to, understand, and sometimes help others in similar places without judgment, condemnation, or pity. All of my struggles made me stronger, but I would not realize this until later in life as a professional tarot card reader.

Around the age of sixteen, I began to have premonitions. They were mostly very random and seemed to have no real importance. I had just acquired my driver’s license and drove my little sister to the mall in my