How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Page 3

  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, s
hall 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.