03.09.2026
The tarot
The office I rented when I was fourteen had a table and two chairs. People came up there.
One afternoon a woman of about forty came up. She’d come for the cards. She sat down, put her bag on the floor and didn’t let go of the strap for the whole hour. She asked whether her husband was coming back.
I dealt them. What came out was what always comes out: a card that can mean one thing and its opposite. I told her the separation wasn’t entirely closed, but that she had already started organising things on her own. She burst into tears. Not at the first part. At the second.
Now let me explain what happened there, because it’s more interesting than the card.
Tarot cards aren’t magic. They’re drawings. Very specific drawings, made on purpose so that each one can stand for several things at once: a trait, a fear, a situation, a way of being. That a card admits many readings isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.
So the person dealing your cards isn’t seeing anything in there. They’re interpreting. What ends up being said at the table is what that person believes the drawing means, said out loud in front of you.
And this is where it gets serious, because interpreting isn’t making things up.
Our perception goes well beyond what we consciously register. While you sit across from someone, without meaning to, you’re picking things up: how they dress, what shoes they wear, the colour of their face, the texture of their skin, their build. Whether something hurts. Subconsciously you know far more about that person than you could list if anyone asked you to.
The stock example is Sherlock Holmes. It looked like he was divining. He wasn’t divining anything: he was observing. A small stone lodged in a sole, and from there to the fact that you’ve been on one particular beach, because that stone is only found on that beach. Told afterwards, it’s obvious. Told beforehand, it looks like magic.
That’s what the person reading the cards is doing, even if they don’t know it and wouldn’t call it that. The drawings let them connect with their own subconscious. The card isn’t telling them anything. It’s giving them somewhere to rest what they had already picked up without noticing.
I saw nothing in that card. I saw a bag strap held for an hour. I saw that she had come alone, mid-afternoon, on a working day, and that this meant she hadn’t told anyone.
I saw her again some months later, in the street. She wasn’t living with him any more.
And what I learned wasn’t from the cards. It was from her. She hadn’t come up to be told her future. She had come up so that someone would say out loud what she already knew and didn’t dare say to herself.
What gets it right isn’t the card. It’s someone who has spent an hour looking at you and has seen more than you told them.