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Interview with Lidia Garrow Psychic and Tarot Reader
Key West, May 29, 2000
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I
stopped in at a small shop advertising psychic and tarot readings on
Duval Street in Key West, and asked the price of a tarot
reading.
“Ten dollars for a short
reading, twenty dollars for a long one,” a very slender young woman
with dark features replied.
“I’ll have a short reading,”
I told her. She beckoned me inside, and I sat down before a
round table with a diameter barely larger than a stool. The
young woman, whose name the placard outside the shop advertised as
Lidia, shuffled a worn deck, asked me to cut twice, and then pick one
of the four resulting piles. She then laid down five cards
in a cross, with a single card at the center and the rest to the right,
left, near, and far positions. The center card was one of
the most apparently sinister of the major arcana—The Devil.
“The Devil card in the center
position,” she began, “is telling you to rely upon your field of
expertise, your future-seeking ability. The key to
fulfillment with the Devil card is not to get trapped in a particular
work environment for which you’re not suited. I see more
than one change of vocation for you in the next three
years. There will be new avenues for you to produce income,
new intellectual pursuits. If you have a business plan
already, you need to stick with it. If you don’t have one,
you need to sit down and draw one up.”
I was nodding my head as she
spoke. She was definitely touching on some issues that had
been uppermost in my mind lately.
“This card,” she said,
pointing to the one farthest from me, “is called Strife. It
has some bearing on your health situation, in both a positive and
negative way. You need to avoid stress, but you also can use
more physical exercise. You’re traveling around a lot at the
moment. That’s good, because it’s
stimulating. It’s keeping you active. But you
have to be careful not to overdo it and stress yourself
out. Swimming is good exercise for you. Do you
like swimming?”
“Yes, very much.”
“Do you have any questions?” she asked at the end of the reading.
“I’m in a transition to a new
line of work right now. My financial situation is very dicey
right now. I don’t know how I’m going to come up with the
money to pursue this new direction.”
“You’re very good at
negotiation,” she replied. I might be able to negotiate a
loan or a grant. I would throw your self into this new
direction, especially for the next three months. This could
be a period critical to your ultimate success. If you don’t
concentrate on it now, you might lose the opportunity.”
I thanked her for the reading
and asked if she would consent to an interview.
“I’ll be here two days from
now,” she replied. “You can stop in after three o’clock.”
I told her I’d be
there. When I returned two days later, I mentioned that I
had received a reading from another psychic not long ago.
“Her method was very
different from yours,” I told Lidia. She didn’t use tarot
cards. She had me stand up, looked intently into my eyes,
and asked me to extend both my hands, which she both felt and visually
examined. She wanted to see both hands, not just the right
or the left, which I thought was a little strange.”
“That’s a very interesting
type of reading,” Lidia replied. “I think that maybe someday
I might be able to do that type of a psychic reading, but right now one
reason I don’t even practice it is because using tarot cards gives me a
certain distance from the client. It gives me more of an
opportunity to tactfully reveal what I see, or to choose not to reveal
what I see.”
I was getting a feeling of
what she meant. Putting myself imaginatively into the
position of these psychics, I sensed that the more direct method would
entail a greater risk of becoming too attached to whatever one
saw. The cards could be used as an intermediary or buffer
between the psychic and the client.
“I think I grasp what you
mean,” I said. “I got a feeling from this other psychic that
wasn’t as comfortable as the one I got during your
reading. I felt that she was a little too attached to her
own reading or interpretation. I’m always very skeptical of
people, whether they’re psychic or not, that they’ve had some type of
inner experience that involves and then they tell you about it as if
it’s supposed to have the same meaning for you that it has for them.”
“Yes, I can understand that
this psychic may have been putting some of her personal beliefs into
her reading.”
“When it comes to psychic
energy,” Lidia agreed, “there’s a real fine line of
interpretation. Psychics are still people, but they can’t be
expected to be one hundred per cent accurate.”
I brought the conversation
back to the reading Lidia had done for me two days
before. “I should have paid attention to the cards,” I told
her, “but I didn’t. “I remember The Devil was in the center,
however, and I remember that your interpretation was not even close to
what I might have associated with a card like that. Is that
just because I don’t know what is actually associated with that card,
or were you really going out on a tangent in your interpretation?”
“Right. That has a
lot to do with different readers’ methods. But,
nevertheless, all the different cards have specific meanings that have
been attributed to them. There’s a fine line between a tarot
reading and a psychic reading. Sometimes I just use the
cards as a tool to give me a direction for what I’m going to say, and I
don’t always stick with their ‘true’ meaning. I go with my
feelings at the time.”
“So your feeling about a card could be very different from one time to another?”
“That’s true. For
one client, the meaning of a card is something, and for another client,
the meaning could be entirely different.”
“I remember that with my
reading, there were a lot of the so-called major arcana, or trump cards
showing. Does that have any significance?”
“I think it does have some
significance. In my opinion, if a client has a higher card,
one of the major arcana, in the central position, it’s favorable,
because it gives them a strong identity. As they face the
future, if there are going to be problems or difficulties, they’re more
capable of handling them. There are perhaps a few
exceptions—high cards that specifically represent instability, or
negative scenarios.”
“So the Devil card, which was
in the center in my reading, is not necessarily a negative card,
despite its appearance.”
“It has a lot to do with the
person’s point of view, and the other circumstances that I’m seeing in
the reading. There are certain aspects of The Devil that are
very favorable, and if the person is connecting with those, then their
outlook can be much more positive. But there are definitely
aspects of that card that can be unfavorable.”
“The card has to do with mastery of life, and also with trying to control situations?”
“I think that’s a very good
interpretation. One of the images of the card shows a wand,
and it’s the wand of the adept. So I always read that as
mastery. When the person obtains that wand, they feel a
sense of accomplishment for having become the master of
something. Or sometimes, for me, it represents a potential
future scenario in which they’re being recognized or sought out for
that field of expertise that they’ve obtained. But the other
aspect you mentioned—that of control—is also a way of interpreting that
card.”
“I once looked at that card,
and it seemed to me that it had a lot to do with attachment, or the
need to have control. But that might have been just one way
of looking at it.”
“Yup.”
I was interested in how she had learned to interpret the
tarot. “Did you learn a particular method? Did
you learn from a particular book?” I asked
her.
“Yes. I treated it pretty much the way I would have studied
a subject in school. I got a tarot pack and a notebook that
I dedicated to the study of that tarot. I had two or three
books about tarot that I cross-referenced. I took a lot of
notes. I did a lot of memorization of interpretations for
cards. And for the first year that I was doing tarot
readings, I was basically just giving people someone else’s
interpretation that I had memorized for each card.”
“So you started out reading for people on that basis, and you found
that it worked on that basis alone.”
“Yup, exactly. I found on that basis it worked, at least
most of the time.”
“But in that case, you were really relying on the cards entirely,
rather than your psychic abilities.”
“Yes. I was relying on the science behind the tarot, which I
feel can be taught to anyone.”
“But if you call it a science, how do you explain in scientific terms
how it works? How do the cards work, by
themselves?”
I was surprised at this point to find Lidia struggling to come up with
an explanation. “OK. I see what you’re saying,”
she said after a while. “How does that explain how it
works?” She took another tack, but didn’t have any more
luck. Finally, she gave up the attempt.
I offered my own explanation. “I have an idea, but I’m not
sure how to express it, I said. “The tarot is like a book,
except the pages can be rearranged in any order, you might say.”
“Right.”
And clearly, there is a cosmology behind it. The symbols
used have some correspondence to some way in which reality can be
categorized, you might say. But there’s still something
lacking in terms of an explanation. I was thinking in terms
of anyone who has a position of any type of authority, whether it’s
legal, governmental, religious, in the health sciences, or
education—any kind of professional, in other
words. Authority is conferred upon them in a legal sense,
but it seems to me that they are invested with a kind of spiritual
authority, as well. What I mean is that perhaps the tarot,
whether just via tradition and common use or a more formal authority,
has gotten some kind of cosmic certification as a system of divination.”
“As a pictorial map of the universe?”
“Not only as a map with the correct symbols, but certified to be put
into use or energized with a certain function. In other
words, it’s not just a series of pictures, but there’s a kind of engine
or motor that’s running it.”
“Yes. I understand that. I think that’s a good
way of looking at it. I also feel that certain tarot decks
are more conducive to a good interpretation than others
are. Tarot also has a lot to do with the
individual. Although I may obtain my information from a
subconscious or super-conscious state of mind, it’s my ego that conveys
it. It you’re having a reading from me, you’re having a
reading from a twenty-seven year-old girl. The way I
perceive of the cards and the universe is the way that my ego perceives
them. If you have a reading by someone else and the same
five cards are laid down, you may get a completely different reading,
because that person’s perception of the universe is different from
mine. I think that we should approach tarot the way we
approach our lives—as an experiment. And sometimes I think
it’s fun and enlightening to have readings by different readers so that
you can compare their interpretations. If you’re a serious
student of tarot, I would recommend that you do what I did, which was
to cross-reference the writings of several different tarot masters, and
ultimately develop your own interpretations.
“One problem that I’ve encountered is that there’s a difference between
tarot readings, psychic readings, and marriage
counseling. Because of the mass media’s depiction of the
1-800 psychic hotlines, a lot of people come to my store expecting me
to give them a guidance or marriage counseling type of reading, and I’m
not qualified for marriage counseling. I’m a psychic
reader. I do entertainment type readings. I hope
people don’t base their lives on what I say.”
“But it’s more than entertainment, isn’t it?”
“It does give you insight about things that are going to occur and the
probability of what might occur in the future, but I think it’s
important for people to further investigate the things that I have
said, and not just believe in them outright. I don’t think a
psychic reader is the one to consult about serious questions and issues
that you have in your life. There are certain professional
people—lawyers, doctors, counselors, psychologists—who have been
trained in those fields who are going to be able to give you better
advice.”
“But I’ve
gotten better advice from psychics than I have from professional people
in certain areas. I’m embarking on a whole career path at
the moment, which was basically the result of advice I received from a
psychic about a year ago.”
“But you wouldn’t have embarked on that path if it didn’t agree with
some things that you were feeling already.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
“It also has to do with experience. At any age, a person who
is truly psychic will be able to give you a reading. But I
could see that at age fifty, I would have a much stronger capacity to
do a guidance type of reading than I do now. You could have
a psychic reading by a sixteen-year-old, who might very well be able to
tell you some very accurate things about yourself or about the future,
but if I were you, I wouldn’t trust that person to guide me, by virtue
of their lack of life experience.”
 “I
have to disagree with you slightly,” I replied. “Sometimes I
find that younger people are wiser than older people. I tend
to trust youth in some areas. Older people tend to get set
in their ways. You have to watch out for older people,
believe me,” I said self-deprecatingly, and as a compliment to Lidia,
whom I perceived to be wise beyond her years.
“That’s a very interesting viewpoint,” she replied.
We wound up our conversation,
and I stepped out into the thick pedestrian traffic on Duval
Street. The air was thick with the mingled scents of the
past, the present, and the future. |
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Date Submitted:
7/17/01 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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