I am a big fan of horror movies, especially the kind that delve into the realm of the supernatural. I believe in none of it, but for me, it’s just good fun.
I have always been drawn to movies where ouija boards and fortune tellers are a part of the plot. So when I was scrolling through my social media feed and saw a woman offering tarot card readings, I was instantly drawn to it.
I screenshot the post and over the weekend, I wasn’t too far from the shop where she set out her shingle, so I popped in and, being curious, I asked for a reading.
Lindsey does tarot card readings a couple Saturdays a month at Garden Thyme, a gallery and studio located in the historic Bishop Hill.
“We started doing it in October of last year and we did it almost every weekend, and it got a good reception and we’ve continued to do it,” said Lindsey, who prefers to keep a mystery about her by not revealing her last name.
Lindsey started reading tarot cards when she was about ten. She remembers buying a small set from Borders bookstore. The small set, which she could easily conceal, came with instructions on how to read the cards. She and her friends all learned how to interpret the cards.
“Anybody can do it,” she said. “But if you have a natural love for symbolism, you’re better at it.”
Despite what many people think about tarot card readings, there is nothing supernatural about the cards.
“There are some really crazy coincidences,” she said, “but I believe it’s more therapeutic.”
She’s right of course. Tarot cards began as a parlor game in France and Italy, not as a divinity tool or a way to tell someone’s future. It was only in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that the popularity of the idea of card divination began. And in the eighteenth century, people began to assign specific meanings to each card and offered suggestions on how they could be laid out for the purpose of peering into the future.
In 1781, a Freemason got into the act when a French Protestant minister named Antoine Court de Gebelin wrote a complex analysis of the Tarot and its symbolism.
Lindsey uses the symbolism on the cards to provide different themed readings.
“I’ve always loved symbols my whole life,” she said.
I was fortunate to meet up with Lindsey the day after the full moon. Lindsey was offering a three-card “knowing, growing, and throwing” reading. The reading, she told me, would cover the next 28-days, which would be a reflective time- a time for ideas of things I want to grow from and things I want to throw out.
That all sounded good to me, as long as I didn’t get the much-dreaded death card.
She shuffled the 78 cards and placed them in front of me so I could do the same, then she told me to cut the deck and she laid out three cards face down on the table.
The first card was the nine of chalices or nine cups. It’s a good card, she said, pointing to characters on the card having a picnic. What I needed to know is that there would be opportunity for gatherings and joyous occasions.
So far so good.
The next card was flipped- an illustration of a serene-looking half-man, half-goat, sitting in the sun, surrounded by roses. Lindsey pointed to the sun and the flowers in the illustration, saying it was a reminder to “let yourself be happy. Just sit and let the sun shine on you. Lift your face to the sun and remember to stop and smell the roses.” In other words, enjoy the fruits of your labor. Sage advice. This was going well.
The last card, she told me, was what I was going to throw away. I watched her flip it over feeling fairly confident that with 78 cards and only one death card, there was no way I was going to draw. . . .
She flipped over the card and then, to add insult to injury, she announced it, “The death card.”
Of course.
But the death card didn’t literally mean death, she said. Don’t believe everything you see in the movies. Instead Lindsey said that the card represented unhealthy attachments that I had been holding onto for far too long, things that keep me from enjoying my life to the fullest. I needed to throw those things away.
I admit that all that sounded so much better than the death card.
The cost of the five-to-10-minute therapy session/tarot card reading was a bargain at $5, but Lindsey does do longer readings using more cards and she is also available for parties and bridal showers. You can find her shingle outside Garden Thyme a couple times a month or contact her on Facebook at Tarot by Lindsey.
