Psychic Reader Mondez | The Tarot Myth
When I was in my early twenties, the feeling of getting a new tarot deck was right up there with going out to the bar with friends, drinking too much and purging my nights adventures in a swirl of blustering apologizes to some deity deafened to my cries of never doing it again. In other words: it was fun and exciting yet not without its own perils and later regrets. For me, the tarot deck was my entrance in the world of professional divination. But further more it was the esoteric knowledge of how to use these pictorial cards that made me feel special, privileged and somehow otherworldly. By being able to accurately spear-head these cards’ intended meaning toward a needy client’s problems whose goal was to understand her boyfriend or his financial situation, I was somehow able to heal people inwardly of psychic and psychological illnesses.
I am a normal tarot card reader by any standard, not a greatly advance one, or rather was as I do not use them in readings anymore. I never took the time to read word for word the companion Rider-Waite exploratory material that came along with my cards, nor did I spend countless hours with my head buried deep in a book of Tarot theoretical literature at my nearest library. Nor did I group myself with like minded readers with whom I could talk endlessly about the attributes of the Magician card or the nuanced minutia of a lesser arcana arrangement. In fact, as tarot readers go I would say I was just barely par but not much more. I knew what the basic prevailing thoughts behind each major arcana card was though I never allowed that to anchor what I felt from the card. I understood the four suits of the minor arcana and what they supposedly represented. I knew a few spreads and I understood the basic concepts of how to read using a Rider-Waite deck. I never used anything other than the Rider-Waite deck. I started using it when I was still in high school, charging a buck for a quick spread at lunch.
It was fun for me and seemed to really get friends, family and clients into the reading more when I would pull out those over-sized cards and begin to shuffle. In a way, they helped me with my confidence to read professionally as they were akin to training wheels, allowing me to bear my weight down on their thin frames of paper and ink. But in time, as with many readers who read daily, I began to realize that the cards themselves brought nothing mystical or magical to the reading, but it was all me. I began to see that the cards were in the truest sense like that of a key to help me unlock my own intuitive skills of divination and understanding. I began to see how relying on the cards after gaining a certain amount of proficiency worked only to hinder my progress and not further it because I deferred too much to the cards’ pictorial explanations of what I was seeing in my mind and feeling in my being.
In time, readings with the cards actually became problematic as what I was seeing and feeling would some times conflict with what the cards drawn were suppose to mean, and it didn’t take long for me to see that in almost every case it was my instinct that was right about what to do next for the problems at hand. I began to understand that I was merely stretching words and logical counter-factual circumstances together to get the cards to correspond to what I was seeing and feeling inside myself, even if they truly didn’t. This brought forward a sense of feeling lost in me. It worried me that maybe all the faith I had put in the cards for years was somehow misplaced and that they weren’t these magical mystical tools I had been led to believe. They weren’t, in fact, something that can be used by anyone to see all he needed to see about the world, but talent and intuition still held powerful sway over whether a reading would be good or not. It was clear that I had falling into the trap of equating using Tarot cards exclusively in readings with being psychic.
In time, I lost my cards. I think that was a divine gesture to force me to stop using them and I began to use simply my own intuition and clairvoyant talents in readings where I actually began to see more without the cards, pick up names and see person’s in my head, dates and figures in business readings. My theory that the cards kept me from relying totally on myself and my natural talents and therefore held me back bore out as a truth to my perceptions of what happened after losing the cards. It was scary, reading without the cards for the first first times. I remember the first professional client I read solo was a regular of mine, Victoria, a wealthy socialite whose husband is one of the premier lawyers in Atlanta. She was referred to me by another client I had while still in college, a TA in my practical statistic class. She was a great lady, plump and rosy cheeked, overly dramatic and prone to making large gestures with her hands. She sat in the parlor of my house sipping gingerly on sweetened mint ice tea I had freshly brewed for the days’ clients. I brought over my quartz crystal and some sage incense to help cleanse the energy around us as I did before every reading. She was chatting along to no one in particular as she often does: simply talking to the air for comfort, sending out her thoughts and concerns with her words in hopes of getting a response. I agreed to something I didn’t really hear and nervously fluttered around the room like a stabled horse with a need to run, grabbing up supplies I needed for a focused energy session I would do with her toward the end of the regular session. I hadn’t told her I was going sans cards that day and didn’t know how she or any of my clients would take it as some of them truly seemed to enjoy the participation cards allowed by their need to shuffle and then point out certain cards for more specific information.
My son was 13 at the time and she wanted to know all about what he was doing in school and how he was. She adored him but I wagered she adored my old familiar tarot deck more. She was a lovely older woman, a southern belle from the old world, having been part of the 50′s society cotillion dances and coming out balls of her day. She was of old money and was very impressed with my being a professional reader who owned a home in a nicer neighborhood. She would joke, “I pay you too much if you can live this close to me.” But she and I were from two different worlds, not merely physically where I lived in greater Dunwoody and she in John’s creek the most affluent neighborhood in Dunwoody or Georgia for that matter, but our differences expended to how we are seen by the greater community where I am seen as a con man but was merely a struggling professional trying to be seen as equally legitimate in my craft as my lawyer and doctor counterparts while she was able to contentedly gorge on all the legitimacy she could want from being married to a prominent southern lawyer. But she was such a sweet lady that her silly jokes never phased me.
I sat down, facing her, nervously drinking from my glass and then spitting out lemon seeds in my napkin. I had squeezed half of a fresh lemon in her and my glasses. Its carcass, lifeless and distorted, was discarded in the small trash receptacle I kept at the heel of the table for wrappers of Little Debbie snacks I keep on hand for clients as a snack. “Sorry,” I apologized, hoping I didn’t offend her delicate sensibilities with my nervous fits of releasing quick blitzes of lemon-seed spatter in my napkin covered palm.
If anyone would have an issue with a change in my reading style it would be Victoria. She was a creature of habit, always coming to see me on the same day of the week, during the same time of month, with the same cadre of issues. She presented me with the same affable personality each time she came, never varying her attitude nor her smiling ruby colored lips. Her glowing eyes always seemed to wink at me in the corners. She seemed to have the knowing glance of contentment attained by a person who had a well lived life. Even her eye makeup was applied the same way, in the same shades, each time I saw her. She had a critical eye for change. When I saw any differences in the energies around her marriage or her husband’s business endeavors, she would question my words incredulously though never rudely. She didn’t like change. She was the best person on which to test my new style of reading. With her reaction, I could gauge how other, less picky established clients would possibly react. I had an hour after her before another client was coming. I had already decided, if she reacted badly to the change, I would run out and drive to the nearest book store where I knew the Rider-Waite deck was sold and rush back to work with my dignity hopefully still in tact.
“Okay, “ I said. There was a small card table between us and I reached my hand out for her to place hers in my palm. “May I see the hand you write with.” She simply looked on at first, not shocked or surprised but simply unaware of what was happening. Clearly she was not used to this procedure after a year and a half of coming to see me. “Where are your cards, Mondez?”
“I lost them.” I gestured with my hand, a sort of extra extension, for her to place her hands in mine.
“Oh, “ she said. “That’s not good. A psychic who loses things.” She made a self congratulatory chuckle and said: “You can read me without them though or should we go get some cards?”
“No, I can read without them.”
“Oh, okay.” She quickly plopped her right hand in my palm. And that was it. All my fears bottled up, the nervousness, all my second guessing was for not. She didn’t even seem to care. She trusted me and that was enough. I closed my eyes and began to clear my mind, without focusing on cards or patterns or shuffles, but just allowing my mind to clear.
When I lost my cards earlier that week, I read for my brother’s wife without them as a practice run, and I discovered I could see visions more vividly than when I relied heavily on the pictures of the cards to tell me where to move next in the reading.
In my mind’s eye, I saw Victoria and her husband together at the High Museum of Art during some event. It was as clear as a picture on television. I could see she wore a light pink colored evening dress made out of a flowing material like silk, and he a blueish suit worn with a deep crimson tie. There was an insignia pin festooned on his breast pocket. These sorts of details I would never have seen had I spent my energy focusing on pictures drawn on cards. Details of things she had told me about months ago began to flood my mind, but now I could see answers where before there was only the Devil’s card or see a way around a coming failure where before there would only be the Hanged Man. Afterward, Victoria gave me an extra 35 dollars as a tip I suppose and said, “don’t use the cards anymore when you read me, Mondez, please. Do you realize you described Harold to me today and that’s the first time ever you’ve done that? I never told you how he looked besides he was getting too old for jogging but you described him. I mean not just his curly black hair, which you saw was graying, but down to the club pin he wore at the charity event where we argued the other night. You even got the scar on his chest right. That is from his second tour in Vietnam. A grenade went off by mistake. He and three other guys got hurt. I never told you that. That’s impressive. I knew you could feel his thoughts and things before but you saw things today, Mondez. Whatever you need those cards for I would prefer you no longer use them with me. The reading today was the best one we’ve ever had.” I agreed to her request.
She walked out, taking along with her the fears and sense of loss I had when losing my cards. The act of closing the door behind her sealed out my need to ever use tarot cards again. I have since not used any divination tool to help in my readings though I do not at all look down on readers who do as my personal experiences are just that. I know from years of working in private practice and the festival circuit that many clients want a reader who uses cards and I’ve even been tempted a few times while working festivals to buy a deck and pull them out at the booth where I’m working mostly as props than anything else, but I never do. I don’t want to misrepresent myself. I simply keep a few quartz crystals around my booth as I actually use them and benefit from their presence but I often see customers look at my nearly empty booth, compare that view with another reader who has cards and runes and charts on her booth and walk off headlong to the other reader’s more entertaining booth regardless how good or not she may be at her job. It would surely be more entertaining, I assume they think.
When I work festivals or fairs, I look at the other readers there, as there is always one or two more readers there, and I see them handling their oversize, almost “cartoonish”, cards with their happy, smiling, entertained customers shuffling and pointing at pictures for more detail, and I wonder if those readers really need the cards, or have they in time simply become a prop. I guess it’s not important, really, as long as the job gets done. But for me, getting it done has become a lot more clear without the crutch of the cards; without the leash on my talents and with full appreciation now for what I can do all on my own.
by the acclaimed Clairvoyant, Psychic Reader, Business psychic, and Tarot expert Mondez Durden.
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