Four Things I Learned at a Tarot Reading
Tarot card reader Haylin Belay fanning out a deck of Tarot cards. I I Photo credit to Elizabeth Winn
The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.
In New York City alone, there are over 50 shops associated with psychic and tarot practices. There are Tarot card readers and psychics in every one of the city’s boroughs, from Staten Island to Manhattan. Over the past five years the number of psychic and Tarot card businesses has steadily grown, increasing by an annualized 1.6 percent since 2013 according to an industry report by IBIS, an industry market research site.
If you’ve only ever seen the bright pink neon sign spelling out “psychic” or “tarot” glowing in shop windows but have never stopped to talk to a reader or psychic in person, you’re not alone. Before this year I hadn’t either.
All that changed on Tuesday, October 15 at 7:15 p.m.
It was dark outside when I first saw the neon sign glowing in a shop window on Flushing Ave. It read, “witch shop,” and above it hung a symbol that I hadn’t seen before — a hexagram.
I opened the door.
Catland was a long, thin shop, shelves with books, crystals, candles, and cards climbing it’s tall walls. Dried plants and old bones dangled from the ceiling’s rafters. On the far wall lay dozens of tarot cards on display, each shared the same name, but pictured different images depending on the deck.
Tarot is often a practice veiled in mystery. Many have heard of tarot before, but most haven’t sat down with a reader or asked a question of the cards.
The woman behind the shop’s counter caught my eyes searching the row of cards and asked, “Do you have a specific question to ask the cards?”
“Did I?” I thought for a moment. I nodded, “Yes.”
The woman behind the shop counter was Haylin Belay. Belay, a 26-year-old Tarot card reader, has been reading Tarot cards professionally for a year. In addition to her work as a sex health educator and yoga instructor, Belay does Tarot card readings over the phone, over skype, and in-person at Catland. Before she read Tarot cards professionally, she had been reading them for herself and friends for “four or five years.”
If you notice that psychic shops are popping up in your neighborhood or find yourself wondering what Tarot card readers do when you see their advertisements on your daily subway commute, here are four things you should know about the popular practice.
1) Tarot started out as a playing card game
Tarot cards originally began in Italy in the 15th century. At first, the tarot cards were just decorative playing cards, popular amongst noblemen’s parlors. Some nobles even commissioned artists to create a new card image for their family.
It wasn’t until the 16th and 17th centuries that the cards began taking on a life of their own. People began to assign meanings to tarot cards and began to ask questions of the cards and create spreads that provided potential answers to said questions.
Today, there are four suits and 78 tarot cards, 22 major arcana cards, and 56 minor arcana cards.
2) The cards can’t tell the future
The first thing Belay told me when we sat down with the cards was, “the cards can’t predict the future.”
Belay explained that, for her, Tarot is all about intuition and pulling the cards you need to see.
“I think there’s like a 95 percent explanation [for tarot] and it has to do with psychology and archetypes and how the human brain responds to certain types of stimulus,” Belay said. “Then I think there’s that 5 percent, or whatever percent, of magic, of chance, of pulling the particular card that you need to see.”
The Church warns against the practice of tarot because it is often considered a type of divination practice, but Belay believes that it isn’t. Tarot is actually a practice based in intuition, not revealing anything you don’t know already.
Rather, tarot readings only reveal what you know at a specific time and are subject to change if a major change in your life occurs.
Rebel Circus reported that the practice is meant to be “a presentation of possibilities, a guide if you will.”
The Rider-Waite Tarot card deck featuring classic Tarot illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith. I I Photo credit to Catland
3) Every reader reads differently
“There’s no one way to read tarot,” Belay said.
Every Tarot reader does readings differently. Some may shuffle the cards, cut the deck, and pick the cards for their clients themselves, laying them out in one of the several tarot spreads. Others may shuffle the cards, cut the deck, then direct the client to pick from one of the decks with a particular hand. Meanwhile, other readers may hand the client the cards, let them shuffle, cut, and lay out the cards.
When I went, Belay handed me the cards.
During readings, she doesn’t touch the cards. Instead, she says the cards need her clients’ energy and clients need to do what they feel led to do.
I held my hand over the cards, closed my eyes, and exhaled, imagining I was breathing my energy into the deck.
After 30 seconds, I opened my eyes, shuffled the deck and cut it in two.
Belay directed me to use my left hand to pick up one card at a time, five cards total, and pointed to where I should lay each one, face down.
4) Every Tarot reader’s price tag is different
A tarot card reading can range anywhere from $5 to $250, depending on the reader’s reputation, how much time of the reading takes, and how individual the experience is.
When I sat down to have my cards read I paid about $17 for a 30-minute one-on-one reading.
Although some people could care less about tarot practices, it is still steadily growing in popularity in New York City. You might find yourself encountering more and more tarot card shops. If you happen to find yourself in a Tarot card shop one day, you might just find the cards have more to say than you once thought. Or, maybe not.