So, is the Tarot cool? Alex*, age 34, is a former occultist who has become a fervent Catholic, in part because of what he experienced as a reader of the Tarot. Today, he is a husband and father keenly interested in the Faith. But that was not always the case. REGINA sat down with Alex recently to listen to his incredible story.
REGINA: Who introduced you to reading the Tarot?
ALEX: Nobody needed to introduce me; the culture did that. Big box bookstores make it a point to sell occult books and other related paraphernalia. Introducing myself to the occult, to tarot cards, was as simple as buying a deck. I think the cost was about fifteen or twenty dollars. And that's all that it took.
REGINA: How old were you?
ALEX: I bought my first deck when I was sixteen, the Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg. It wasn't a good choice for a beginner, but I began to learn. I did readings for my friends by flipping through the bundled set of instructions.
REGINA: Why were you interested in the Tarot?
ALEX: I believe it was the film, Live and Let Die which I saw at eight years old, which prominently featured a tarot reader. I remember wanting to see the pictures on the cards, and to understand their meaning. That was all it took; I saw something mysterious and I wanted to have a better understanding of it.
REGINA: You say you felt somewhat conflicted at times.
ALEX: I began to feel conflicted almost immediately. I can maybe best describe it as an inconsistent feeling of wrongness.
REGINA: Morally wrong?
ALEX: It isn't so much that it's morally wrong, though it is; it's that people put an astonishing level of trust a series of cardboard rectangles with pictures on them.
One of the things that eventually scared me straight was when an old woman asked me for extensive financial advice. It wasn't long after the 2008 financial crisis, and she wanted to know what to do with her investments.
And here she was putting her financial well-being into the hands of cardboard rectangles with exceptionally vague pictures on them.
At the time, I thought that this was about the craziest thing I'd ever seen. Here was someone asking me to do something I more or less considered wildly irresponsible. I ended by badly muddling the reading without giving much of an answer, because this was a responsibility I knew I did not want. It's one thing to blame her for mistrusting hedge-fund managers, and mutual-fund administrators, yet here I was doing these readings.
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