Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Wheel of Fortune
Before it became a showcase for the talent of Vanna White, the Wheel of Fortune was a tarot card symbolizing change, luck, the whimsy of fate. Great card if it’s dealt in the standard position (as shown), the pits if reversed (upside down). That’s Fate for you — a strict 50-50, like the coin flip of Batman’s nemesis, Harvey Dent. Heads, you win the lottery. Tails, you’re blindsided by a trucker asleep at the wheel of his semi.
I bought my first tarot deck, one of the classic Rider-Waite decks, my first quarter at Berkeley. Old-timers here at Balls and Walnuts will remember that I had a spooky period — read lots of Castaneda, futzed with my dreams, wandered the Berkeley streets at night like I was on some kind of vision quest. Tarot was part of it.
How does a chemistry major reconcile something as obviously bogus as fortune telling? My theory of tarot, circa 1984, posited that folks reveal far more in their body language than they do with their words. I might not understand what their body language had to say, but my subconscious did. Using the tarot as a sort of Universal Translator, I could free-associate my way through a reading, blathering on and on, wandering from one card to the next and then back again, generating hypotheses, testing for internal consistency, and ultimately arriving at a coherent story.
I’ll bet you’re thinking, “Yah, that’s how all the charlatans work. They throw out a million darts, hoping one or two will be bullseyes.” The trouble with that theory is, I never asked the recipient of the reading for verbal feedback. If he even spoke, I’d interrupt: “Don’t feed the reader. I don’t want you to say a word.” I was reading their body language, you see, and the cards merely catalyzed the process.
My girlfriend back home had a problem with this. She wanted me to throw the deck away, and she wouldn’t let me do a reading for her. I never did throw that deck away (I gave it away, but that’s another story), and when we broke up a year later, I began doing readings in earnest. Always great for a party gag — “Hey, Floppy! Bring your deck!”
Floppy, by the way, refers to my double-jointedness, so don’t get any ideas.
It tickled me to give readings to science majors. My readings dealt with the present more than anything else — I wasn’t interested in divination — and I daresay my accuracy ran at 70 to 80 percent. The scientists had trouble with this, and we had more than a few “WTF?” moments. These guys and gals couldn’t bring themselves to believe in cartomancy. After letting them flail a bit, I’d trot out my theory of tarot and they would nod sagely, safe again in their empirical worlds.
I suppose I should mention that while most of the cards have their good and bad aspects, some, like the Ace of Cups, are unequivocally good, while others, like The Tower, are unequivocally bad. Death, despite what you might think, is not necessarily a bad card. It indicates transformation, a passage from one phase of life to another. You know the only movie to ever get that right? Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. Watch it (the relevant scene comes at the beginning) and you’ll have a good sense of how I conducted my readings.
Flash forward a couple years. On one of my courting treks to Karen’s apartment, I brought along my deck to entertain her and her two roommates. Karen the Vulcan, Empress of Logic, would be great for this. I looked forward to seeing her get all flustered as I read her life back to her.
If you’ve never had a reading, here’s how it goes. You have to handle the cards yourself — shuffle, mess ’em up, cut the deck until you’re satisfied. I take no part in this, except to remove one card from the deck which signifies YOU. After shuffling, you hand me back the deck, and then I lay the spread, a Celtic Cross.
This covers you.
This crosses you.
This is beneath you.
This is behind you.
This crowns you.
This is before you.
And so forth. To my horror, I saw nearly every possible bad card show up in Karen’s spread, including The Tower,
and the Ten of Swords.
“This is bullshit,” I said, and rapidly scrambled all the cards. I threw the rest of the deck into the pile and messed them up, and then I gave it back to Karen so that she could do the same.
There are 78 cards in a tarot deck, ten cards (not counting the signifier) in a Celtic Cross. In Karen’s second spread, at least six of the cards were identical to the first, including The Tower and the Ten of Swords.
At that point, I put the deck away. This wasn’t fun anymore. I didn’t need to go through the motions on this; no matter how I handled it, the reading would be the same. Crash and burn.
Karen developed multiple sclerosis about a year later. No need to belabor the point; the next few years were harrowing for both of us.
But we made it through, and we’re both still here to laugh about it. Karen will sometimes say, “Remember those two tarot readings? Pretty weird.”
Yup. Pretty weird.
D.
In one year (a bad year!) I had two tarot reading and my palm read (all by different people) one was wishy-washy but the other two said virtually the same things – spooked me! (But they were wrong with the number of children they said I’d have, maybe I’ve been trying to make a point ;o))
My father has read Tarot cards for forty years. He says they are to help you think through all aspects of whatever problem/issue/etc. you ask. He makes a point of emphasizing that he doesn’t “tell fortunes.” I don’t know what to think about Tarot, honestly. The last reading he did for me was eerie.
Tarot and Ouija boards always make me think of the ineffable strangeness of the universe, and the quote “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.
I’d love to dismiss Tarot and Ouija out of hand, but I’ve heard too many stories like this one — including one that happened to a close friend that I trust implicitly — to do so. Ah well. I guess we’ll all find out one day, when we enter the clearing at the end of the path. Or something.
PS:
If my university nickname was Floppy, I don’t think I’d have the courage to mention it in a blog as widely read as yours…
So, after that experience, do you still think it’s all subconscious reading of body language?
I don’t know what I think. I’m just askin’.
I consider myself a sceptic and yet I prefer non-traditional medicine over traditional and like to dabble with Tarot.
Everyone’s entitled to their flights of fancy.
A friend of mine gives amazing tarot readings.
I had a bad experience with a ouija board as a kid. It really spooked me. (Threatening messages, aimed a me. Creepy.)
Doug, is there any chance you can change the script of this blog? It’s almost unreadable, and I’m tired to copy paste stuff into my word program and change the script before I can read it. 🙂
I agree, Gabriele. This font is the pits. I finally figured out what I was doing wrong with the templates, so I should be able to switch templates tonight.
I bought a set of Tarot cards a few months ago. They were half price, so I figured, what the heck, right? I haven’t been able to bring myself to try them, though. And not for the reason you might think.
They’re Lord of the Rings cards.
The pictures are really pretty, but they have parts of the story written on them, and it distracts me. Plus the fact that they’re LOTR makes me giggle every time I look at them. I may get another deck sometime down the road, but if I do, I think I’ll stick to Rider-Waite [or at least something without Hobbits on ’em].
Get the Rider-Waite deck, Shelbi. I also like the Aquarian Tarot for the artwork (The Tower & Ten of Swords, above, are from my Aquarian deck). The symbolism inherent in the imagery is important, I think.
Selah, I don’t know what to think either. I did very few tarot readings after that one, though.
Thanks for your comments, folks 😉
Ah, that’s much better 😀
I picked up a Rider-Waite deck about 6 months ago because I was interested in the symbology represented on the cards – I wanted to read Tarot Revelations by Joseph Campbell and Richard Roberts as I went through the deck, but found Roberts’ writing style so frustratingly confusing that I gave up the project and consequently still haven’t been through the whole deck. What I did read about the various symbols was fascinating to me – the origins and children of the various pictures are very rich and detailed and have a story of their own to tell.
Anyway, I’ve never come to any definitive decisions on what fortune telling does or doesn’t do for you. I have a friend who wasn’t allowed to learn how to swim as a child because her mother was told by a fortune teller that this friend would die by drowning. Of course, not knowing how to swim would seem to increase your odds of having trouble in the water should you ever be in a precarious situation, which had all of us talking about whether such revelations really help you. I mean, it would all depend on how you interpret the message given by the teller, wouldn’t it? Which makes it all seem somewhat like the Oracle at Delphi where the Oracle was always right, but the people tended to interpret the message wrong (but it was never possible to know until after the fact whether the correct interpretation was chosen). In which case, for me, I’d prefer to not have not that kind of information to obsess over in the first place
There are undoubtedly better (less confusing) books out there. Even that website I linked to in this post has some neat information, stuff I hadn’t heard before.
Karen’s experience notwithstanding, I’d rather not think of it as divination.
I don’t believe in any of that. But I have a deck of tarot cards, and sometimes I do readings for fun.
I hate it when the tower pops up though.
I’ve read Tarot for about 30 years now and had something similar happen in a set of readings for one person, my best friend & collaborator.
Jan ’96, the Tower came up in the distant future. The rest of the spread indicated good things, except for that one.
June ’96, the Tower came up in the near future. The cards for past & present were good, the card for the distant future were also good. I’d just moved in, FWIW.
Sept 28, ’96, we had a kitchenfire. Between the fire damage, the smoke & soot damage and the fire-fighter damage (water & hacked up walls), we lost 98% of everything we owned.
That night, as we sat in a hotel room with, literally, only our clothes on our backs, I did another reading for her (I carried the deck in my purse). The Tower came up in the immediate past, the present came out difficult (the 5 of Swords) but all future cards were extremely good.
That’s how it turned out, FWIW. She had great insurance on the house, got a new roof, furnace, up-to-code everything, windows, her kitchen professionally redesigned, etc. Basically, she got a new house out of it at virtually no cost to herself.
Whatever makes Tarot work, sometimes it’s really interesting, ain’t it?
Moi, you’ve outdone me! That’s a great tarot story. I’m glad it all worked out for your roomie in the end.
Great Tarot story, Doug! I went for several years during which every reading I had or did for myself included “The Empress” card. Odd, (but relevant). I used to so the party trick thing, too. During my “learning curve” period, (twenty-something years ago), I actually preferred reading strangers. I was sort of hyper aware of the impossibility to be objective with people I know or myself.
Your body language theory is a good one, as far as it goes. I thought much the same thing back then,(It’s hell on a witch being a rational thinker! LOL). It took me some years to realize that I was just afraid to tap into my inner psychic. These days, I can do readings online, over the phone; whatever. Although I occasionally paint my story in broad strokes, there have been too many times that I’m smack on to not wonder that there are indeed “More things in heaven and earth…”
[…] And now: Wheel of Fortune, originally posted here, in case you want to read the comment thread. It was a good one. […]