I was probably the best paid tarot reader on the planet. My name wasn’t famous. No infomercials, websites, books, or sycophantic followers. My clients kept my name and contact information in strict confidence. There would be a month’s worth of tabloid caterwauling if the paparazzi knew what I knew about each of my clients. A Hollywood or Washington D.C. psychotherapist had less career-killing information than I had. I was the uneasy carrier of secrets, and I performed the deeds that secrets are made of. I was the ultimate professional kochleffl, a mixing spoon, the meddler who fixed people’s lives for a fee.
To protect myself as much as my clients, I kept no notes. No little black book. No diary for my tell-all memoir. I had a plain off-white business card with my work-dedicated cell number printed under my professional name, Devorah Rosten. My social friends believed my money came from a little light card reading and a giant trust fund. I figured “family money” would be generic enough to avoid scrutiny of Dev, the social animal. If, in the upscale clubs and cocktail parties I frequented, I crossed paths with one of my clients, I wrung my hands for a few minutes. But then I remembered that my clients thought I knew their dirty secrets. No client would dare break my cover. I knew too much.
I crept out of my fortified psychic compound to tell this story. I was obliged to go against all my personal and professional ethics to record one client’s tale. She deserved to have the dangerous truth recorded somewhere, by another person, to keep her safe. I couldn’t refuse Laura Bishop.
Chapter Two
When I was thirteen, my aunt Ruthie gave me a pack of tarot cards for my bat mitzvah. For a few minutes, the gift pleased me because it was edgy, Aunt Ruthie’s best quality. But I noticed our synagogue’s cantor-with-the-stick-up-her-tuchas grimacing at the decidedly inappropriate gift for a devout young Jewish woman. A few days later, I nervously nudged the deck away into a bat mitzvah mementos box and forgot about it. For years.
I never was a mystic seeker or believer in the arcane. Quite the opposite, in fact. My mother raised me conventionally Jewish in a conservative synagogue in Boston. My sharp-tongued father, whose parents barely survived Auschwitz, was tepid about anything Jewish and refused to attend temple with my mother and me. He seemed to live on the edge of a precipice of doom, and, for him, public displays of Judaism were the prod that would topple him over the edge. On the other hand, he was fluent in Yiddish, as was my mother. Consequently, I grew up steeped in two languages.
Father died slowly, with ferocious, protesting fanfare, from cancer when I was twelve years old. He made clear in his final wishes that there were to be no Jewish or goyish rituals to mark his passage. My mother obeyed his last request probably to forestall any possibility that his ghost would return to kvetch at her one more time. Then she became doubly active in our synagogue community where, for the first time in years, she acquired comfort and friendship.
My spiritual search consisted of questioning whether “going kosher” would hamper my dating life. I decided it would make things more problematic with the shiksa girlfriends, so kosher was ruled out. I did, however, require a low wheat and dairy diet to help manage my chronic allergies.
I was a timorous hedonist looking for the next sensual experience while making sure I wasn’t in danger or exposed to some errant noxious germ. The crystal visionaries of new-age doctrine bewildered me, and I often found opportunities to mock them and their followers. Then I had a simple dream.
I was sitting on a bale of hay at some sort of outdoor festival. A spread of tarot cards lay on the bale in front of me. I was bending intently over the cards, so much so that my usual tangle of black curls obscured a few of the cards. I saw my hand impatiently pull and hold the locks behind my neck. I could feel the prickling of straw through my lightweight cotton pants. I shifted to ease the tickling. On the other side of the card spread sat a rapt listener. Her mouth shaped in an astounded O, she believed every word I said. I looked at the cards and uttered to myself, “But I’ve never seen tarot cards before. In fact, I’ve never even seen a bale of hay before.”
When I woke up, every second of that dream vignette was permanently scored in my brain. So I grabbed a chair, climbed into the rarely visited, spidery attic, and found the bat mitzvah memento box from twelve years earlier. Pushing aside mazel tov cards, petrified cake, and deflated balloons, I landed upon the still-shiny box of tarot cards. The box’s plastic wrapper was never opened. I could feel Aunt Ruthie smiling all the way from Florida.
I was captured by the cards. They fascinated me and held me in a grip difficult to describe. But it was unbreakable. The symbols, each with several possible meanings, fanned before me were the book of life, the keys to knowledge beyond science.
I didn’t have much money at the time, but what little I made teaching third grade at the Jewish day school, I spent on material about tarot. All kinds of books, pamphlets, software, anything pertaining to the cards, and I continued to collect for years.
*
My mother cheerfully enjoyed widowhood and devoted her free time to cajoling me into finding “a good Jewish girl with a respectable job.” She would phone my hovel of a Seattle apartment from Boston and tell me where to find a proper girlfriend and a better-paying job she could be proud of. She didn’t know I had found a Jewish love. Much of tarot cosmology is based on ancient Jewish Kabbalah.
“Mama, your kibitzing isn’t helping. All good things happen in their time.”
“Your aunt Ruthie calls every week and asks after you. What am I to tell her? She worries.”
“Somehow, I think you’re the worrier and Aunt Ruthie is just making polite conversation. If you want to worry about something, worry about this spot of eczema I’m growing below my left ear. It bothers me, and I wonder if it could develop into something worse.”
“Dev-uh-lah, a little dry skin patch by your ear is not a sign of eczema or, God forbid, cancer. I don’t know where you get this tendency to make every bodily tic into some horrible disease. You need a nice attentive girlfriend to take your mind off yourself. You two could find a good Jewish boy to donate his help and give me a few grandchildren and—”
“Enough, Mama, enough. I’ll let you know when I fall in love, okay? Right now I’m sure this dry skin is eczema or maybe psoriasis. How do you tell the difference?”
I really didn’t care about getting a girlfriend while I researched tarot. Oh, I dated, had sex, sent flowers, and batted my eyes with the best of them. I was complacent and smug that women found my yoga-sculpted physique irresistible. But a steady girlfriend would have distracted me from my real mission: to understand the cards. So I remained distractedly single, defying my mother’s obsessive dreams of grandchildren and nursing my phobic obsession with physical symptoms.
For three years, I studied cards while sitting at my wobbly, chrome and Formica table in my cramped kitchen. It was the ancient symbols, their multiple meanings and their connection to something beyond me, beyond this physical realm that enthralled me. I came to understand metaphor and how each spread is a metaphor for the question at hand. And the metaphor came from somewhere else, an ethereal hand, writing a message in a universal language of symbols. Each card, its picture, number, or place in the spread held information.
I reasoned that tarot was a method to communicate with “the other side.” A technology, if you will, but not a technology they study at MIT, as my mother would have reminded me had she known what I was doing. This was a technology made of seventy-eight cards, and these cards were phone lines to the keepers of infinite knowledge. By sitting with the images, information came to me, larger truths about life, about the connectedness of everything in the universe. I was on the edge of knowing all, each card a key to wisdom.
I felt wired into something far larger than the mundane world around me. Some days, I’d reach such a deep, stimulating connection with universal truths that I’d have to run the few miles to my yoga instructor’s studio, take a couple of grueling classes back-to-back, and run home, just to be a
ble to function in the mundane world of grocery shopping and classroom lesson plans.
For months, I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I was embarrassed about taking up something so meshugana, crazy, as card reading. Eventually, though, I couldn’t not talk about it. The cards, their stories, were becoming a part of me, defining my experience. It was as if I’d learned another language and was translating all my experiences into my new symbolic vocabulary. My knowledge of Hebrew helped, along with my comfort with Jewish symbols. And I’m certain that during that time of personal awakening, my dairy allergy was a little better.
Eventually, an astonishing thing happened: when I talked about tarot to my friends, they wanted me to do a reading for them. Very few looked at me like I’d gone over sanity’s precipice. More often, they looked at me like I’d know too much about them, but they couldn’t resist asking for what I could find out from the cards. Reluctantly at first, I became a professional reader, but then I morphed into a darn good one after a few years. I made some money and decided to substitute teach instead of hold a full-time job. I finally stopped teaching altogether and moved into a bigger apartment.
After a few years of being an excellent, but normal, tarot reader, I had the experience with the female client, the boy, and the suicide. Consequently, I started helping clients redirect their trajectories, and I got rich doing so. I was discovered by the rich and famous, so my practice flourished with glitterati seeking my advice and interventions. It was also during that period that Laura Bishop came to see me that first time, and I started following her career.
Except for some chronic acid reflux, life was working out perfectly. Then things took a turn.
*
I was reading for a client who planned to extort money out of her famous and wealthy stepfather. He had molested her when she was a girl. She wanted to make him pay for years of trauma. She sought guidance from the cards. It was one of the disquieting occasions when I felt tremendous empathy for a client and would feel guilty if I didn’t help her somehow. I laid a standard Celtic Cross spread. It’s a spread used to help clients know their current barriers, the past experiences that contribute to the present, and the future outlook if things don’t change. The significator, the card that represents the client, turned up the High Priestess. But in this case, the austere card seemed all wrong for the complicated woman across from me. My deep instinct knew that card, the severe High Priestess, was for me.
I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the frozen face on that card. Then my body was viciously suctioned through a funnel. There was a violent constriction around my head, a sensation as if my brains would spurt out my ears. The pain immediately disappeared and I found myself standing behind a small dais. I was facing the back of an elaborately crowned woman seated on a simple throne. She was looking at what resembled a giant green screen used for movie special effects. To my right towered a white marble pillar, and a black pillar stood to my left.
“Ah, finally, a human. It’s been a while,” said a dry, papery voice. The woman in front of me was speaking. “No, this doesn’t mean your client is going to become a queen, so you won’t get richer from her. Quit the panic breathing and come around to face me, dunce. Then you’ll know where you are and how unlucky you are.”
Frightened and mystified by her awareness of me, I stepped off the dais and moved in front of the woman. My stomach bobbled its breakfast when I saw her. I covered my eyes and fought the nausea. Sinking to my knees, I whimpered, unwilling to dare another look. I was certain any shred of sanity I once blithely possessed had been abandoned to psychotic hallucinations. I worried if I’d finally reached my lifetime ceiling of Benadryl.
“Oh, gather yourself, pathetic child. You haven’t taken leave of your senses. You won’t come to harm here. As for your fate in your…realm, I can’t be so optimistic. Now look at me and tell me what you see. Your well-being depends upon you accepting what is happening. Don’t grovel. Just look.”
Every molecule within me knew that if I looked, my life would alter forever. And it was such a nice little life too. On my knees, my eyes covered, I tried to weigh the ramifications. Unable to muster anything resembling lucidity, I looked.
Before me, on a stone throne, sat an elongated, chisel-featured woman wearing an absurd crown made of two half-moons with an orb between them. Her blue cape covered most of the red dress that was decorated by a simple wooden crucifix hanging from a chain that encircled her neck. In her lap, she loosely held a worn, leather-bound Torah. One foot reached from beneath her robes and idly rocked a crescent moon back and forth. It was the only movement she made. The moon squeaked like the lid of a Styrofoam cooler as it rocked against the floor.
But what got me were her eyes. They were like marbles, unnatural as the glass eyes one sees in taxidermy. They didn’t move to track me, but I knew she saw me. It was as if whoever inhabited that form was hiding inside it, using it as a costume, using those eyes as peepholes to spy on me.
Visions of the future were one thing; this was a whole other psychic experience I’d never heard of.
“Oh, shit.”
“An intellectual, I see. Formidable command of the language.” The High Priestess of Tarot, in the flesh, sort of, was looking at me like I was something stuck under a lunch counter. “Well, tell me where you are,” she demanded.
“I…I’m with you.”
“They’ve sent me a brilliant one. Who am I? Say it.”
“The Priestess…the High Priestess.” The words stuck to my tongue. Denial riding me fast and hard.
“Thank you for not using that dreadful moniker, ‘the Papess.’ So seventeenth century, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe more twenty-first century gynecologic.” A sandpaper chuckle.
“Sure. It…ah…it, the Papess, doesn’t cover who you are, in my opinion.”
“Or what I am, for that matter. But all that is for a later discussion, if I’m in the mood. You’re here for your purpose…your destiny, if you want to get mawkish and dramatic about it.”
“This is real? Not a hallucination, opium dream, Benadryl overdose?”
“Ah, a jester too. More fitting. If you want this to be any of those things, I can help.”
Her faced morphed into a pea-green, red-eyed horse head and then morphed back to her face.
“Don’t do that!” I covered my eyes again.
She laughed a bristly, grating wheeze. No smile. “You’d be fun to toy with if you weren’t needed, dolt. But it’s fallen upon me to educate you and make you ready for the Malignity.”
“The Malignity?”
“Now I’m training a parrot. Is this the best we could get? They told me you had a prodigious mind.”
“Hey, I’m starting to resent the way you speak to me. How should I know why I’m here, or even how I got here? This isn’t my choice.” I stood now, halfheartedly ready to defend myself.
“Sorry, but you made this choice the day you dared dabble in the forces behind tarot or those other lamentable cosmologies. You know as well as I that you are playing with universal forces. Seeing the future, then working to change it. What did you think you were doing? You’ve manipulated us long enough. Now we will manipulate you.”
“Manipulate me how? And what’s this ‘Malignity’?” Nothing was sitting well on my anxious belly, especially words that reminded me of a dreaded disease.
“It’s no disease.” Great, she could read my thoughts. “You may view it as a pestilence in your part of the cosmos. A persistent force of energy readying itself to destroy your current world and realign the powers that control. Others call the Malignity necessary.”
“And I should care because…”
“Let me name a few times when the Malignity has strengthened. Shall I mention Pope Innocent III’s Crusade in France, or any of the other Crusades?”
“They killed blameless people?”
“Millions. I’ll name something more modern and delectable for the historically illiterate. Europe during the first half of the t
wentieth century and the mechanization of murder by the Nazis. Or let’s try a more localized current affair: North Korea.”
“Are you saying some sort of totalitarianism is coming? Where? How?” We Jews get jumpy at the thought of dictatorial political systems. By that point in our history, distrust of dictators was probably genetically encoded into my people.
I noticed she had barely moved during our entire encounter. In fact, just her mouth seemed to move, and the incessant foot that rocked the moon crest on the floor. All else was still and quiet. Her eyes caught the light like glass. Her skin resembled the fleshy tone common to store mannequins.
She noticed my noticing her lack of movement and flicked her wrist stiffly. A wave of revulsion hit when I saw she had no fingernails, just tapered ends, like new candle tips.
“The Malignity, it’s always here, kept at bay, but somtimes it grows until meddlers step in. You are a meddler, but a meddler with ambiguous intentions: either you want money or to assuage your guilt. Perfect. Or a possible problem. But this time, we chose you as our human champion. We’ve learned that using armies is counter-productive. Enjoyable to watch, but too much destruction, repair, and wasted time. One meddler can often quietly accomplish our goals without the bloody fanfare we loved in the past.”
I started glancing around for an escape. There was no door, no window, not even a skylight. “I don’t remember interviewing for the position of…of…whatever you’re looking for.” I wanted to look behind the tapestry framing her, the one covered with stylized pomegranates.
“You cannot leave without my permission. Cease searching for an exit.”
“What about my client? She’s waiting for me.”
The High Priestess’s unsettling hand moved stiffly again, lifting slightly as if to make grudging acknowledgment. “Her ridiculous situation is resolved in her favor. She thinks you are in a trance. When you ‘wake up,’ you can inform her.”
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