Tarot Cards, Updated
The scene from the movies is a familiar one: there is a shadowy set of characters who aren’t exactly the bad guys but aren’t exactly the good guys either.
They instead circulate around the main plot – let us say it has to do with an ancient artifact that is rumored to lay a curse upon anyone who dislodges it from its resting place in the center of a pyramid or jungle temple – and provide exotic background and an air of ominous anticipation.
It may be a family or simply a group of like-minded nuts who have embraced the occult or at the least are making a living out of it. They tell fortunes, commune with nature, see signs from the other world in the carpeted floor of the forest, and generally give the air of people who know that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreampt of in your philosophy, if, that is, your name happens to be Horatio.
Nice! Perfectly nice! We all have our hobbies. I won’t hear a thing against these fine people, though it must be said that you want to know what you’re getting into when you marry one of them. It cannot be easy when one of these gals eyes you narrowly as you go out the door, turns out she’s mad about something you’re going to say next Tuesday.
A common occupation of the members of this crew is to get the hero – or sometimes the villain – seated with them at a small table, cleared of other objects, and deal out a set of brightly colored cards, the Tarot.
These cards are said to come down to us from ancient times, and each pictures such archetypes as The High Priestess, The Empress, The Magician, The Hermit, The Hanged Man, and so on.
These too, these characters on the cards, seem like perfectly nice people! Again, I say nothing against them.
Though I do say again have a realistic feel for what you’re getting into before you marry one of them as well.
In any event, the course the action takes is that this mysterious woman – almost always a woman, at least in the movies – deals out these cards in some traditional pattern, some of them face down, some of them face up, mostly arranged in a curved arc in front of the dealer, though a select few are put higher up on the table. It’s a bit like Texas Hold ‘Em if you ever played that game.
It is customary in these cases that as the dealer turns over the last card and sees it herself for the first time, she gasps and somewhat clutches at her upper chest as if trying to contain her panic. She looks fearfully at her customer as if afraid that his evident bad luck will rub off on her, and then quickly scoops up all the cards and says that the reading is over.
The message is clear: there is no good news in the cards for this guy! Everything points to his eventual doom, and if he is a good guy he gives the impression of a stalwart fellow who must soldier on regardless, and if he is a bad guy he scoffs and stalks off in a whirl of charisma and fate-defiance.
There is likely a movie to be made – it hasn’t been made yet – in which someone somewhere goes to one of these readings and the dealer looks up meaningfully after the cards have been dealt and says, “it looks like the same old, same old; just keep plugging away is what I would do, that’ll be twenty dollars.” Or offers advice more practical than you usually get: “I know the owner’s manual says with these newer motor oils to change it out every three thousand miles, but I’m always a lot more comfortable sticking with the old every two thousand miles, and I think you should too. That’ll be twenty dollars.”
None of these scenes do I have the least problem with, bless them all, but it seems worth just the most glancing mention that these characters on these cards, The Magician and The High Priestess and what not seem a bit like yesterday’s news, do they not?
I concede that through the ages they have conveyed an impression of potential menace and spooky sightedness into the future, but we all have to keep up with the times.
Much more alarming would be to see the visages of other, more modern menaces.
The man who sees the next card turned up – let us call it The Daughter’s New Boyfriend – now he is the one clutching at his upper chest.
This guy pictured on the card has a stocking cap and grins wildly at his own antics on the skateboard he seems to be holding in one hand. He is bearded and is listening to headphones conveying music that you are certain you never want to hear. He looks to be about fifty-seven years old, and can safely be said to be a person who has not really settled into a career other than to star in cell phone commercials now and again. He and your daughter want to move to a farm with other like-minded people, not a cult, heaven’s no, even if the papers do call it that, more like a demented commune. Good God.
Beware! The dealer shakes her head. Beware, my friend!
You got that right, fortuneteller lady.
It is important to switch types in the Tarot game from card to card, but we can go one better: let us switch species.
The Mole is not a spy planted in your country’s intelligence community nor a man with close-set eyes and a long nose. He’s a mole. I mean, the small mammal or rodent or whatever he is. Life has not offered The Mole a lot of pleasures, but the one he has pleases him no end. He likes to dig up yards. He is passionate about this. I cannot say if it is more of a profession or a hobby or an avocation, but he pursues it with maniacal conviction. Your yard from above looks like an aerial shot of trench warfare. No one has ever explained to you adequately why it is that digging underground should wreck your aboveground so thoroughly, but there the evidence is, growing day by day. Schools organize field trips to come look at your yard. “Children, see? This is what the surface of the moon looks like. Bleak, isn’t it?”
The fortuneteller cannot meet your eyes ant time she turns over The Mole.
As it turns out, you have another daughter, and she has a new boyfriend too. The Other Daughter’s Boyfriend, as far as you can tell, is a Bad Criminal. By this you don’t reflect on his moral character, though you certainly do that, the point that you’d really like to get across is that not only has he chosen a shameful line of work, he is really no good at it. He claims to be a pool hustler, and lets you in on the insider knowledge that a good hustler lets the mark win the first few games, at which point he is a sitting duck for a sophisticated criminal like The Other Daughter’s Boyfriend. This guy hasn’t won a pool game in a decade, so he must be pulling an incredibly complex scam. You beat him at pool, which is saying something. But still he slouches and grins and offers wisecracks as though he possesses a secret only he knows. He intends to marry your daughter, barefoot on a beach, in a state with no outstanding warrants for his arrest on him.
The fortuneteller shakes her head.
Who’s shaggy head is this, smiling ruefully, smoking a pipe? It’s The Anthropologist! Everything about human beings gives him this head-shaking ruefulness. You don’t really have these fine characteristics that you think you do, he patiently explains. You’re not kind or compassionate, these are simply deceptive mechanisms you present to the world the better to climb atop the hierarchical pyramid of your fellow ape men. You’re not nice, in other words, you just have laid off ritual cannibalism for the time being to take a few inches off your waist. All of your instincts are either self-serving, or violent, and are all just remnants of your prehistoric heritage. Best of all you remain completely unaware of your actual inner drives as opposed to the feeble lies you tell yourself. Don’t worry though. The Anthropologist is here to explain it to you. Smiling ruefully.
The fortuneteller doesn’t much like this guy either, you can tell by the way she slaps down the card.
The Utter Rationalist often turns up randomly in the deal. His look is generally one of complete puzzlement and it is directed solely at you. He has asked you, it seems, what it was you majored in in college and when you tell him what it was he takes a second to clear his head and then says, “but what in the world did you think that was going to do for you?” Though you aren’t sure yourself what your thinking was at the time, you don’t like his attitude so you tell him that a lot of people would be proud to be where you are today and again he shakes his head and looks at you all confused, “but why would that be?” It seems to baffle him that you exist at all. He shakes his head some more.
This is a dangerous card to turn over, for who can withstand that kind of scrutiny?
And so it goes, through The Madman Boss, The Demonic Auto Repairmen (they always are drawn in pairs, one of them to give you the estimate, the other to catch you as you fall.) The Hapless Money Manager is pointing to his chart showing downward plunging arrows on a graph and shrugging elaborately, The Bad Tax Guy with a halo of questions marks circling his head while he looks at the Federal Tax Code clearly saying to himself, ‘now what’s this big book all about?’, to The Sentence Completer – I mean you can’t get a syllable out with him concluding your sentence, it drives you crazy! – to The Scam Roofing Contractor, to The League of Rogue Appliances.
They are all here, waiting individually and as a group, or Sinister Cabal of Menace, as you might say, to put obstacles in your path, bankruptcy in your future, and a jail cell on the horizon.
The fortuneteller grows more and more ominous with each card she turns over – The Performance Artist, The Food Scold – ‘I hope you know that there are six thousand calories in that ‘dab’ of mustard you just put on your burger, which itself is going to kill you!’ The Unhinged Neighborhood Barbecue Champion — ‘where to start, my friend, where to start? The errors in your rub are so numerous and profound as to nudge up against pure evil! Pure evil, I say!’
At some point the fortuneteller stops. This line of work, so coolly distant ordinarily, has made her compassionate, this whole business of turning over card after card that seem to conspire to bring Suburban Man down.
It makes ancient temples and poisoned blow darts from the enraged natives and pits fully-furnished with matching upwards-facing bamboo spears, sharp as #2 pencils in the hands of an overachiever waltzing into the SATs, look positively cozy.
