Jane Stern - Confessions of a Tarot Reader: Practical Advice From This Realm and Beyond

Confessions

of a

Tarot Reader

Confessions

of a

Tarot Reader

PRACTICAL ADVICE FROM THIS REALM

AND BEYOND

JANE STERN

Guilford, Connecticut

An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

To the two queens,

Bunny and Joanne,

and my friend Diane

Welcome to Your Reading

You may be an old hand at knowing the ins and outs of the tarot deck or a frightened newbie curious but uncertain about what the cards will reveal. You may be a skeptic prepared to lie to me the entire hour to see if I can see through your bluff, or you may be at your wits end, looking for any shred of hope in a dismal situation.

Before I even shuffle the deck or hand it to you to shuffle to infuse it with your energy, here is what I already know about you. You wouldnt be here unless you were at a crossroads in your life and having a hard time finding the correct path. Something has come up that you need hard answers to. A real tarot card reading is intrusive, andas with psychotherapyfew people want their lives laid bare for fun. If you are looking for a party psychic or an old theatrical witch in a turban, you have come to the wrong place. I do not do parlor entertainment, nor do I want to scream to be heard over the band at your sons Bar Mitzvah. I will tell you what I see in the cards and I will not sugarcoat it, but neither will I be cruel. I am compassionate and know how hard it is to implement change, and how brave you are to let me into your life as a helpmate.

As far as tarot readers go, I am an odd duck. I do not sit at a booth on the boardwalk, nor will you find me behind a neon sign in a storefront. I have a masters degree from Yale University and a well-established career as a writer. Yes, I am that Jane Stern, the expert on American road food, the volunteer EMT whose career inspired Kathy Bates to direct and play me in a movie about my life.

Why tarot cards? you may be wondering. The fact is that I grew up reading cards. My great-grandmother read cards and was a hands-on healer in Russia, where she rode town-to-town on horseback to cure the sick. In my family reading tarot cards was the sole territory of women. My mother had three brothers (who all became prominent psychoanalysts) and they in turn had daughters, but I was the only one who was the daughter of a daughter of a daughter, so I was introduced to tarot cards and my cousins were not. My mother was far from a peasant; likewise with me. I grew up on Sutton Place in New York City, and my mother was a concert pianist trained at Juilliard. Reading cards was folded into the daily routine of life and seemed not at all strange to me. It was just something we did along with ballet lessons, visits to the Central Park Zoo, and hot chocolate at Rumpelmayers after ice-skating at Wollman Rink.

In my late teens I began reading cards for my friends. I used a deck of playing cards (old school) and did not switch to a tarot deck until I was in my twenties. I found reading cards easy as pie; I found telling my friends what I saw absolute hell. How do you tell a smitten girl that her boyfriend is cheating on her or that her sister will soon grow very ill? If you were me back then, you would lie... and soon learn the hard way that truth is the essential component to being a tarot card reader. It is fun to see the radiant smile on a friends face when you tell her how wonderful her boyfriend is, but it is awful when three weeks later she calls you in tears telling you that not only is he a bastard, but everything you said was wrong. If you are not ready to speak or hear the truth, dont have your cards read.

I always compare the way I read cards to a trip to the doctor (now, thats a fun prospect, isnt it?). But seriously, it is an apt analogy on many levels. Imagine if your cholesterol was through the roof, but the doctor did not want to upset you and ruin your day so he said it was fine. It wouldnt be very helpful in the long run. A good doctor wont scare you but will gently help you remedy what is wrong, which is the way I work.

Another way the medical model is useful is with new clients. They have obviously come to see me because something is troubling them. But in a test of my powers they will not tell me what is going on; they want me to psychically glean this information. Compare this with going to your doctor with a sore shoulder. You sit in his office, and he says, What brings you in today? You refuse to tell him. He spends the better part of an hour probing and poking as you sit smugly with your lips pursed, until eventually he touches your shoulder and you say, Ouch. Would it not be easier and more cost-effective to just say My shoulder hurts and let him proceed with a cure? Please do not test me by asking me where you were born (unless you truly do not know), what the last four digits on your drivers license are, or the names of your last three cats. I am not a mind reader, I am a tarot card reader, so please let me do what I am really good at. Sometimes during a reading that goes along the Prove it to me line (men seem to like to take this tactic), I have to suppress a laugh, because sitting across from me is an otherwise savvy captain of industry paying me a rather large amount of money to tell him things he already knows. Is it really worth an hour of his time for me to tell him his cats name is Miss Kitty?

At this point you may be wondering what the difference is between a psychic and a tarot card reader. I can only speak for myself, but from what I have seen over the years psychics claim they channel spiritsguides who make them talk in weird voices or go into trances. I am not taken over by another entity, I remain myself during a reading, and I let the tarot card layout explain to me why people are having their particular problems and what they should do about them. Maybe it is channeling the same energy but without the theatrics. Reading cards is like peeling an onion; I usually do seven or eight hands in a reading, and each hand reveals layers of information. I may be psychic or just wildly intuitive, but I seem to be able to pick up on details about my clients and the cast of characters in their lives (living and dead) easily.

One thing I am sure of is that tarot cards really work. They have been used as a method of personal discovery for centuries. They first appeared in the 1400s and were thought so potent they were immediately banned by the church. Some of the earliest decks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (like the Visconti Modrone deck) now are housed at Yales Beinecke Library. Sigmund Freuds colleague Carl Jung used the cards as symbols of what he called universal archetypes, believing they are the golden path into the psyche and blend common sense with mystical insights. I respect the power of the cards, and they have provided me with the rewards of insight.