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feitclub · 4 years

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In The Cards

It all started with James Bond, the arbiter of worldliness and all things cool when I was just a kid stuck in suburbia. The movies were frequently shown on TV and I made it a point to watch them all over and over again. One of my early favorites was Live and Let Die: the theme song kicked ass, it was Roger Moore's first film so he would never look more handsome, and the movie was full of straight-up magic. The bad guys have a fortune teller on their side, and she can seemingly see everything James Bond will do, even from a great distance. The key to her abilities, aside from her being a virgin (which Bond *ahem* takes care of) was her use of tarot cards. Drawing randomly from this special deck of cards, she could literally see the past, the present, and the future.

I had never heard of tarot cards before but I knew I wanted them. I could not have been older than 12.

When I got my hands on a deck, likely from a book store at the mall, there was an instant level of disappointment. The tarot cards in the Live and Let Die had a very specific look to them, and I had presumed that was just how all tarot cards would look. The deck which I bought (received? I don't remember if my parents were in on this) looked different. All the cards were there, but the art I had expected was not. The biggest difference that stood out to me was the "Death" card: in Live and Let Die that card has a super badass drawing of Death-incarnate wearing a suit of armor while riding a Pale Horse as all manner of human beings knelt or simply fell before him. In my deck, Death looked like a cartoon skeleton without clothes or a horse as he literally reaped the grass with a scythe. I am not here to judge aesthetics, but if you see something in a movie and you end up buying something else, especially as a kid, that's not going to sit right.

(I have tried to use modern search engine tools to discover what kind of deck I had: it was easy to figure out that Live and Let Die used a kind of Rider-Waite-Smith deck, but I think I might have ended up with a variant on a Marseilles deck - exactly which variant, I could not say)

Artistically it was a let down but the appeal of the tarot cards only increased as I learned more about them. First, I discovered that the deck was huge with 78 different cards: the big-picture cards that were featured in the film with names like "The Lovers" and "The Fool" were part of the Major Arcana, but there was also a full set of Minor Arcana which resembled playing cards: four suits, lots of numbers, and several face cards. Secondly, every card had two different "readings," depending on which direction the card faced when drawn.

78 cards, all with two different meanings, meant memorization. As a kid, I was all about memorization. In elementary school my friend Sasha and I tried to memorize the Periodic Table and I think we made it to the lanthanides. When I discovered the joy of watching professional sports, I made a point of memorizing all the teams - by division - in all four major sports leagues. Then I started memorizing the championship winners (and the runners-up) of each major sports league for the last ten years...then the last 20. These tarot cards were going to be my new thing, I could feel it.

I started carrying the cards with me wherever I went. As a kid in school this was easy since I always had a backpack on so the size of the cards meant nothing. Sasha and I (we had watched Live and Let Die together, so this became a team obsession) each had our own deck and we both would take turns drawing cards and looking them up in the little booklet that came in the box. I can remember taking them with us on a school trip to Boston and when we weren't in awe of the historical sights (do I need to tell you we were both nerds?) we kept up our tarot studies while walking around town. On one occasion, just as we drew a card and the booklet said it meant "danger," a car honked its horn at us. We were walking in the middle of the street! Clearly, the magic was real.

The tiny booklet also included a recommended layout when "reading" the cards. The lady in the movie just turned them over one at a time and everything made sense to her, but instead these instructions had us laying out ten different cards in a pattern where each card has a different relationship to the reader. Today I can tell you this pattern is called a "celtic cross" and it is only one of many, many shapes and patterns that can be used, but preteen me did not have that information. I had clear directions: to read the cards I had to flip over ten of them and explain them all.

Before I knew it, before either of us were really ready to be doing anything like this, I remember both of us became tarot card readers at our synagogue for a Purim festival. At the time I didn't think anything was weird, but in hindsight I am impressed that no one raised an objection to kids bringing such a thing into the synagogue so we could be fortune tellers. I should say that we were members of a Reform Temple and I cannot recall ever hearing words like "blasphemy" or "occult" used by our rabbi or anyone else in authority; it stood in contrast to all those self-described Christians I would see on TV who were mad about evolution being taught in schools, talking animals existing as characters in children's books, or anything else we might read in a Chick Tract (which come to think of it, we also discovered around this time while riding Metro-North trains into New York City).

My tarot reading habit did not last; Sasha and I had a falling out of sorts and other things just became more important than these strange cards. My deck sat on a shelf in my room for years until I moved out of my childhood home. I cannot say for certain but it more than likely did not leave with me. But my curiosity surrounding the tarot would linger in my mind and resurface soon enough just as my next big obsession would come along and reveal itself to be tarot-adjacent: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

When I discovered JoJo via a fan-subtitled bootleg VHS in the late 1990s, I had no idea the six episodes of anime I just saw covered only one small part of an ongoing (to this day!) manga. The story, as presented on the tape, started in the middle of the action. A lot of it did not make sense, but I latched onto one element right away: every character had superpowers which were embodied - literally - in a spiritual version of themselves on screen and all these alter-egos had tarot-related names: Star Platinum. Hierophant Green. THE WORLD. There wasn't much connection between the card names and the powers they possessed, but it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. If I had still owned a deck I might have started imagining other powers for the other cards not shown on screen (not knowing that they were all represented in some fashion in the original manga).

Leap forward another - gosh, twenty years? - and my tarot fascination never really went away. When I see a Kickstarter or an Etsy page for a new take on tarot cards, I often take a peek at what ideas are on display. A lot of them are just...porn-y. Some are cute. But I'm old(er) now, I don't have the raw enthusiasm I did when I was in 7th grade and the prospect of magic playing cards just made perfect sense. I see daily horoscopes on Japanese TV which I recognize aren't "real," how could I scoff at one kind of fortune telling and then pick up a deck of tarot cards?

Except...who cares if it's "real." What does it matter if these cards are, ultimately, a random assortment of quality art? It's been three entire decades since I first saw them and I'm still deeply intrigued. Part of being old(er) is coming to terms with your own tastes and biases; I no longer need to apologize or feel shame for liking old pop songs or macho action movies and if I've always had a feeling that tarot cards are cool, that feeling is correct.

There's also the feeling that I know so little about tarot cards that I cannot possibly pass judgement on people who use them. I recently started testing a Body Positivity mobile app that uses tarot cards as a means to spark self-reflection and, well, body positivity. The tarot cards in the app are not "real," they're not even physical. They're just drawings on a screen. But the drawings are nice, and if flipping a virtual card over can have a real impact on my own mind, who's to say what flipping real cards over could do?

Even though I felt a need to write all this down, I'm not actually seeking permission here. I already made up my mind and bought a brand-new deck of tarot cards. It's here, next to me. I’ve opened them. I try to draw a few cards whenever I have a chance, but I don't know where this reignited interest will take me. Will I start memorizing them all, again? Will I have another car-honking-its-horn-at-me moment? Maybe I'll just enjoy them aesthetically (they are very nice-looking if I may say so). I don't know what will come next any more than these cards do, but I know I like having them here and I want to know more. At the very least, tarot cards have already taught me an important lesson: I know better than to try and read them while walking in the middle of the road.

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#writing #tarot cards #1980s #jojo's bizarre adventure #memories

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