Squeezing a lemon & the tarot.

[an ethnographic vignette on tarot reading]

Like all important people, the shaman is fashionably late, which is exactly what I need: some time alone under the blasting Houston noon sun to purify my chakras for an accurate reading. I wait on the pavement with a good attitude. My shaman’s cave is a normal-looking brick house except for a ceramic eye hanging at the door.

“Evil eye gate,” she texts me.

I found Miss D by scrolling through Google Maps. She is one of the most popular psychics in the city. Only a dozen customers accused her of pushing them to break-up or being unprofessional during the reading; the other 300 were happy. That’s a 4% chance of getting a negative experience.

I have met many psychics over the years before Miss D. Many of them came to my awareness by chance: through a friend, a wellness event, sharing a table at a crowded restaurant and so on. They stumbled on my path and shocked me. What many associate with psychic activity is fortune telling, but that has not been my experience. Most psychics I know don’t claim to see the future. They only work in tandem with the present - usually hidden materials - to help a person come to a state of clarity and empowerment. Sometimes their perceptiveness illuminated the hidden parts of my psyche that took me the next several years to process. What began as lucky encounters ignited my quest for understanding the occult that even myself was not aware of.

“Come on in doors open”, Miss D texts.

I open the white front door into a small room with 2 chairs on 2 sides of a table. She comes through the opposite door, chats some lines without eye contact and sits in a hurry while shuffling a deck of worn out gilded tarot cards.

"I will look into your past and present. Then we will do future." She says and asks me to say my name, birthday, sign, then shuffle.

“Sign… as in my horoscope?”

“Uh huh.”

“And with which hand?”

“Any is fine.”

I follow her request and shuffle. Miss D stares at my hand.

“The way you shuffle," she says, "you are still holding onto the past."

She places 5 cards down and begins the pronouncement of my past. She sees that I am a tomboy girly girl, soft-hearted and strong-minded. That my friends and insecurities used to be the biggest block to my path.

“Oh. No recording, honey,” she says.

She looks at my Apple Watch and points at the warped paper that says "No Camera, No Recording" on the desk that feels as if it just got whizzed out of thin air. I haven't had the chance to notice anything since I came in. I apologize and take out my notebook to write down her words frantically. My hand is shaky from the dizziness of the sun.

She talks about the guy that came to my life recently. My big relationship in the past. The strain I had with one parent. My current struggles with burnout and social bombardment. I must look amazed at the details that come up from the cards because she says, "I'm a card reader, not a mind reader" with a wink. She advises me that the person whom I am "lingering with is not worth the squeeze."

"You know, sometimes we squeeze the lemon but it’s just not worth it. He’s not your soulmate or anything. You are putting in more than what you get back.”

She says that we all use one another, which is a fact of life that I need to accept. Letting go of my current "partner" is her message. Our transaction is not equal thus disposable or not romantically-viable. Miss D has a big sister vibe, the frank one who’s in urgency to help.

When it comes to the tarot experience, the recipient of the "divine" message has the least agency. As a customer who pays to receive divine messages, I rely on the agency of tarot cards and the psychic’s ability to decipher their meanings. Perhaps I feel morally conflicted, perhaps I feel unaddressed, because when Miss D asks me to share my life stories, it feels like a timed oral exam.

“Uh huh. Uh huh. That’s why I always tell people …” she repeats this phrase readily in between my sharing. At this point, I notice that my head is aching. Thankfully her phone rings. It’s the painting guys and she needs to pay them. She tells me to think about my questions for the future then excuses herself to the door. I gladly sit back for the first time.

The room is cluttered. There are many little things that my brain is still too frayed to take in. I try to look at one thing at a time: the crystals on the table, a statue of Jesus, a photo frame of Virgin Mary. On the wall hangs an enormous metal artwork of the horoscopes. The massage table behind her seat has chakra lamps clamped on a rod, pointing down. Interesting. My eyes fix on a small souvenir nearby that says, “If you are looking for a sign, this is it!”

Contemporary Western occultism is a spiritual hodgepodge. A psychic I met at downtown Seattle said that it's muddy, there's no clear guidance like in the East where you have a master and go through systematic practices. Here in the US, people find what works for them through experimenting with a range of traditions. I recall the many American “gurus” whose spiritual resume is a collection of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Indian yoga, East Asian Mahayana Buddhism, shamanism, crystals, tarot and so on. Just like the rest of US history, spirituality practices here are young and curious. Would its youthfulness make the US more open to experimentation? Without the protection of tradition, would that make the psychics feel like an imposter?

Miss D comes back. I am a bit rueful to refocus my attention on the reading.

“What questions do you have for the future?”

I have none. I err and umm to think of something worthwhile.

“I don’t know what kind of things I can ask about. What’s the scope?” I ask but she just stares at me. Maybe I am overthinking. Am I wasting our time? So I go with whatever comes to mind: “Should I write fiction or nonfiction?”

For this question, she gives me her two-cents right away without using the cards. People wrongly assume that fiction doesn’t reflect reality, she says, but fiction draws from reality and shapes reality, too. She talks for a while. I appreciate her insightful love for fiction and wait for the part that relates to me specifically, but she is now moving on to revealing my cards for the future.

One card shows a man and a child opening a diploma together and another card a man opening a book, which means I am getting a diploma and writing a book soon. One is a reversed hermit. “Not a time for you to be one. Be out there with people. Show up”, she says. And the one on top is a queen. "Ooh, look at you, girl!" she exclaims.

“You will overcome struggles and lessons to become a queen.” A queen denotes someone who exudes love and compassion, who has many around to help her build an empire. “But right now, you are not one yet.”

Throughout human history, we looked for guidance from outside of ourselves and collected signs as a way of communing with the cosmos. There's a desire to externalize our process of empowerment. The materiality and certainty that comes with giving forms to the nonphysical. Cosmic communication becomes social and public with more than one audience, one witness. In the modern occult West, a spiritual experience is not an inward-looking experience but an outward, more logical and visible one. So tarot as a systematic representation of divine messages that can be decoded fits the demand of the Western spiritual consumer.

But I cannot part with the feeling of powerlessness as I listen to Miss D. It was as if my life is a dish that I’m cooking blindfolded, only fumbling with the ingredients and once in a while when I have the resources, listen to psychics to tell me what I’m cooking. For Miss D’s message to effectively “help” my life, I need to trust - either through her convincing me or through willpower and faith - in her insights and interpretations of the cards. I transfer my life decision power to her who is a complete stranger except for the few lines written on Google business info.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway advocates for a fluid vocabulary that transcends dual boundaries, such as male-female, human-animal, animal-machine, in order to nurture a society that’s based on affection instead of violence and discrimination. To understand the spiritual communication with tarot, we also need to allow this fluidity between spirits-human, divine-mundane, reader-receiver. The message delivered is a collaboration between the psychic and the receiver, where both are psychics and receivers, having the ability to communicate with the divine and being a student of the message. Empowerment is possible when the modern psychic acknowledges their limited worldview thus dependency on the reader to validate the interpretations. The moment the psychic or the receiver draws a dividing line between the two roles, they create a system of hierarchy that creates dependency, superiority-inferiority, and chronic helplessness.

After 45 minutes, our session comes to an end and Miss D gives me a discount in apology for the interruption with the painting guys. She says she enjoys reading for me and wants me to also enjoy it. She asks for a hug on my way out and we embrace tightly for a long while.

“It takes a queen to know one,” she says with a wink.

Miss D is a lovely and kind reader who genuinely wants to help. But tonight before I sleep, I will text her to clarify which boy did she mention I should leave. Is that the boy from January or from 1 month ago?