2. Empress and High Priestess

What we tell and what we show.

This is the second of my Tarot experiments; taking abstract cards originally used in mystic divination to see if they can help the people I know better understand themselves. You can see the growing collection of experiments here.

We were sitting at Lucas’ kitchen table. It was past the witching hour, and the room was dimly uplit by lamps tucked in behind the cupboards. Outside, the Scandinavian sun hung limp behind the pines, where it would be for at least the next three weeks. I laid the cards out on the table, and Lucas began to pick them, one by one.

That was almost two months ago — between then and now this piece has gone unpublished. Lucas and I did the reading, I wrote it up, and we were almost good to go. Overnight, though (a strange concept in a country where the sun doesn’t set) he emailed me and asked that it remain anonymous. I replied on the spot, happy to oblige him; respectful of his desire for privacy. I reasoned that the reading would ‘speak for itself’ — that our journey, even in isolation, was a powerful example of the tarot process.

So I rewrote it, removing personal details, changing names and obscuring places. Paring it down to just the cards and the conversation, though, the irony became apparent. To ‘anonymise’ the story was to castrate it. In his reading Lucas had teased out personal, emotional details from the cards, and connected them to his life. I was now inverting this process; removing these unique details and their complex relationships. The second reading had been both a success and a failure: in asking me to make his story anonymous, Lucas validated just how far we’d been able to move beyond his public mask and comfort zone. The consequence, though, was that for him to be comfortable with me publishing it, I had to obliterate the evidence.

The tension this created between us was tangible; we haven’t spoken since we had that conversation, and I’ve vacillated between publishing it in its entirety, and scrapping the encounter in favour of another reading with another person. Something about the architecture of these experiments, though — thirteen cards each from thirteen individuals — wouldn’t let me discard my encounter with Lucas. The third reading could never replace the second, and tampering behind the scenes with my own results would be the worst kind of methodology for an experiment.

The reading

Since the first experiment —with Jean in Absinthe in San Francisco — I had made some decisions about the structure. Each person would choose 13 cards in total, and to reinforce the idea of choice and self-direction the deck would be divided into four piles. Each time the participant takes a card, they can choose it from whichever pile they want.
Knowing Lucas would be contrarian, I mentally calibrated my approach to this second experiment. Jean’s hustler nature had needed no prompt from me to get started, and he made his own path almost before I could tell him where to start. Lucas, though, is much more mindful that this is happening. I want to give him as little external influence as possible.

The first card is The Three of Swords; a triply impaled heart that Jean also drew during his reading. Looking at Lucas, I can see that this is not what he expected from the tarot cards. With no traditional mythology or symbolism in this card, he’s taking time to contextualize it in a different way. Where Jean was decisive in defining these cards as they related directly to him, Lucas springs into a detailed description of the image.
“It looks like a hip tattoo.” — “It’s artificially bright.” — “It’s too perfect, and ordered.”

I don’t say anything. I’m interested that Lucas’ approach to the cards is almost the polar opposite of Jean’s. I’m also tempted to tell him just to take another card and see if it resonates with him, but from this point onward it’s not really on me to tell him how to read them. He looks at me, and I point ambiguously in the direction of the upturned card and the four piles.

He turns over The Emperor — another card that Jean had drawn, and which he cast as a ‘father in law’ figure in his Jewish family comedy psychodrama. Lucas tells me “I see an authority figure — and he’s got a beard…” I wait. “There’s a lot of red. It’s kind of a bullshit authority. He’s got those pointy shoes, and the ram, lots of things that are supposed to show that he’s the authority.” Lucas’ voice — and his body language — tell me that he doesn’t like the card.

Authority is going to be a big part of this experiment, but unlike Jean it takes time for defined themes to form. The next card Lucas draws is The Four of Wands (Jean’s ‘wedding’ card), which he tells me in his crisp Scandinavian English “looks like a chill party”. Instead of seeing anything tangible — a couple in the background, or wedding guests — he tells me this represents people being subsumed into a bigger thing.

Next is The Magician, and when he draws it I start to become anxious. All the cards Lucas has drawn so far are cards that Jean drew, and though I know that both Lucas and I shuffled and divided the deck before we started, it feels like the fates are conspiring. I’m wondering whether there’s anything I can do to make sure he gets some new ones, and at the same time whether this is a good or a bad thing , when I realize he hasn’t said a word. Unlike Jean’s instantaneous free-association, he looks for cues from me at each point, to talk and to continue drawing cards.

“There’s a lot of yellow” he says, and he’s not wrong. “This is more feminine than The Emperor, and there’s something about music, and the infinity. There’s something about what he’s doing; the infinity sign is things just repeat over and over.”
I remember Jean pulling this card and smacking his finger on it with a declarative “That’s me”. He was drawn to the youth of The Magician, the upraised hand and the arcane symbols of power. But Lucas prefers the less masculine display of strength, and he seems interested by the idea that, if everything is cyclical and repeats, this demonstration of power has no meaning.

He draws The Hierophant (a Pope-like figure) and has a similar reaction as to The Emperor, “It’s all artificial, his authority is fake,” he tells me. He points at the two monks who bow down before him, “Who are these midget fuckers? Just people to endorse his power. They’re all idiots.”

It might just be that English is not Lucas’ first language, but he seems is aloof; I’m getting a lot of description, but not a lot of how they speak to him. I ask a leading question:

“What do these *mean* to you?”

He’s visibly riled, as though I’ve implied that he’s not doing it right, “Huh. It means I disregard authority. It means I’m interested in the sublimation of the individual…it means I have an ambivalence towards facial hair.” He’s nonplussed. Having volunteered for Tarot pop-psych 102, he’s now being asked to explain himself. “Ok,” I say, “draw another card.”

“What’s this? Four of swords?” It is. “I don’t like this one, they could have done a lot more with the stained glass window. Lame.” He’s describing what he sees again, rather than what it means to him. I move the card across the table, so that it’s in a row next to the others, and he immediately moves it back.

With Jean, the power relationship between storyteller and listener was passive and unspoken, but it weighed heavier on the reading the further we got.

This time, Lucas and I have become embroiled in a skirmish about how the cards are going to be placed and interpreted. I let him put it back, and fail to contain a smile as he rotates the card 90º — onto the horizontal — and leaves it there. He’s quiet for maybe three seconds, so I say, “What concrete things do they make you think of?”
“What do you mean concrete?” He starts to be sarcastic, “Err, well, this card” he points “…my relationship with my parents.” He turns over The Five of Swords (another of Jean’s cards!)

“Someone fucking with swords,” he pauses for effect, and looks at me, “It’s nothing…it doesn’t mean anything.” I don’t say anything, and he softens a little bit, “Ok, ok.” He goes to turn over the 8th card, and looks visibly surprised. “It’s Lisa”. The sarcastic tone goes, and with The Empress he’s made the first connection between one of the cards and someone in his life — his girlfriend. “She’s calm. It’s fertile, lots of nature, and everything’s positive. Good card.”

He compares it with The Emperor, in which tells me he sees sharp angles, superficial power. I think about Lucas, and how he’s been drawn to the more traditionally feminine aspects of the cards. Is he telling me that male authority is posturing, that it’s weak and shallow compared to fertility and growth? Maybe because we’re nestled in this Nordic woodland — his home country — I’m projecting. “That heart there,” he says, pointing at the heart-shaped rock beneath her, which I hadn’t noticed. “It’s a shame it’s on the card.”

For Lucas, it seems, explicit symbols cheapen the meaning. We don’t spend much time on The Six of Cups (“The fish head guy? I fucking hate it”), but Lucas likes The Two of Wands and The Three of Wands, which he pulls from different piles. “These are more positive again,” is all he says for the moment.

There are two cards left. The first is The High Priestess, who is seated between two pillars, on a kind of chessboard floor. “She’s the intimidating one. Look, all the points and angles, the blue.”

I ask him directly, “If that was someone in your life who would it be? “Lisa,” he says again, and I’m so surprised (because he’s described this card as the polar opposite of The Empress) that I don’t say anything at all. The last card is The Page of Wands — a young man smiling as he stares at the rod in front of him, fairly innocuously. But it’s struck a chord, and Lucas explodes, “He’s taking the wrong things seriously. He’s got the wrong kind of…” and I can see him searching around for the right English word, “…flippancy, no?

“He looks like he’ll take all the things seriously, but they’ll be the wrong things, the frills.” What he’s talking about — we tease out — are those well-heeled, well-spoken and well-educated men who make a show of caring, or being serious, but only because they’ve been brought up to do that. People who don’t open up about how they really feel, and just play pretend about what they think other people think they should care about.

Like me, Lucas went to one of the old, privileged universities, and I’m wondering if any of the hundreds of wealthy, entitled private school kids we met there have anything to do with this reading. As with Jean, it’s amazing to see one abstract image have such a profound and instantaneous effect on a brain.

Dénouement

Something unexpected happens. Up until now I’ve tacitly prompted Lucas when he’s been silent — with nods or points or words — to move on with the reading. Now, though, he takes the 13 cards and starts re-ordering them on the table. He takes out The 6 of Cups (“I don’t identify it”) removes The Page of Wands, and places the ‘two stoic men’, as he calls The 2 and 3 of Wands, alongside The Empress and The High Priestess, like they’re on some kind of symbolic double-date. Thinking about it, and re-ordering all the cards into groups, he brings back The Page of Wands, and says “So shall I make the story?” I nod.

I realize that — unlike Jean, who with supreme self-confidence and self-possession took the first thoughts that the cards sparked and spun them into a story — what Lucas has just gone through is a process of understanding, so that he can order them and play them with foreknowledge — unknowingly just like the storytellers from Calvino’s book.

“That’s my father”, he says, pointing at The Emperor. “Emotional. Flawed. We didn’t communicate.” He points at The Three of Swords and says “Shit happens to everyone” — incredible because Jean’s response to this abstract card (a heart impaled by three blades, with rain in the background) was almost identical, but the absolute inverse. Jean had described it as, “What other people get themselves into”, and my mind is boggled by the fact that two people, with no knowledge of each other, from nations at other ends of the world, have extracted the same concept from an abstract image, and applied it to their worlds in opposite ways.

He talks again about The Page of Wands, and we get closer to this idea of artifice, and superficial authority. “I have a dislike of people who pretend to take things seriously. Who wear that practiced seriousness. People who don’t realize that really everything is absurd.” At his core, looking at The Hierophant, The Emperor and these authority figures, Lucas is deeply upset by the hubris with which they assume power. He’s upset at their denial of any weakness and artifice in their character; the fact that in assuming power we have take up arbitrary symbols of power to convince other people that we are more than human.

Lucas moves onto the two couples he has made (The Empress with The Three of Wands and The High Priestess with The Two of Wands) and I think I can see what’s coming. He tells me these pairs are the two ways in which he and Lisa behave and interact. The Empress is the positive side of their relationship, whereas The High Priestess represents the analytical, the emotionless and logical scrutiny of life. That time during an argument where one person turns emotionless and cold; shuts down the possibility of reconciliation.

He pauses, and I ask him if we’re done. “No.” is all he says at first.

He tells me that The Empress opens up a “warmer intelligence”, one which has emotional insight, whereas The High Priestess is a negative downward spiral. He tells me, pointing at the card “I have to step into The Three of Wands for us to be in that situation. That’s where we work it out.” I don’t entirely know what he means.

I ask him, the last question “Are these 2 separate states of being?” His answer is suitably oblique, and again I can’t help but romanticise him as I think about his Nordic roots:
“How can corn grow where it’s arid?”

Third time’s the charm?

As humans we’re drawn to dualism. We like to believe in good and evil, black and white, right and wrong, and these frameworks are what help us make decisions, and live our lives. And at the time — with Lucas— there was a pleasing dualism that he had crafted in reading the cards. Superficial symbols of authority were contrasted with the power that comes from unspoken, fertile imagery. Sharp edges were opposed to round ones, and a practiced semblance of order was contrasted with the knowledge that things are inherently absurd and unstable.

The picture Lucas painted of his relationship with Lisa — and the struggle a couple goes through to maintain equilibrium — seemed to have this same dualism, but beneath the surface what he conveyed was more nuanced. In The Empress and The High Priestess he saw two opposed forces, but for the male counterpart — himself — he picked two cards that were almost identical. He picked men in The 2 and 3 of Wands, both gazing stoically out over the landscape. What looked on the surface like a mutually positive and negative state was in fact described more as one man’s relationship with his partner’s positive and negative states. The stoic, calm man he chose for himself remained relatively unchanged, and the contrasting female figures were what encompassed the positive and negative.

My own reading here is vexed by dualism. It’s hard to see Lucas and Jean’s approaches to the cards as anything but contrasted against one another. Whilst Lucas wanted to deliberate and understand before constructing a story, Jean began the second he turned over the first card. Lucas’ interpretations were abstracted — based on cultural symbols of authority, and other people’s understanding of the world, whilst each card for Jean was something categorically about him. Jean required no prompting, whereas Lucas, at the end of the experiment, told me “You had the power”. At times Jean and Lucas teased almost identical concepts from the same card, and yet they were poles apart in terms of how they applied it to their worlds. This is why, although the process of publishing this story drove a wedge between Lucas and I, I knew it would be impossible to continue the experiments if I didn’t include it. The narrative of the readings themselves is intimately bound up with each person’s individual story.

Maybe we’re raised and conditioned to be drawn to dualism. Maybe — as much as we try — our baseline understanding of the world is one of black and white. And maybe (just maybe) this happened because this is the second time I’ve done it, and the only patterns I can see right now are the ones that opposed each other in the reading.

There’s only one way to find out, and that’s by seeing what happens next.

The experiment continues. Follow the collection here if you want to read more stories as I publish them, and if you’re interested in being part of a reading just tweet me @BANGwallace