Step 1. Assure the new client that the Death card does not mean literal death. The same for the Devil card, etc. You will probably have to repeat these comforting phrases many times, sometimes under difficult emotional circumstances.
Step 2. Tell the new client that you are not psychic, and that the cards cannot predict the future. They will probably ask then why they are paying you. You will clarify the situation: the two of you are simply sharing tea and some oatmeal cookies, gossiping about this and that, while laying out some cards with odd pictures on them. Perhaps the conversation will be useful, and perhaps it will not. The $15 fee simply covers the cost of the oatmeal cookies, not cosmic revelation.
Step 3. Do NOT tell clients that you first learned about tarot when you watched New Wave French films as a boy. Growing up in 1970’s Catholic Ireland, there were very few opportunities for a 12-year-old boy to see images of naked women. The one bright spot was during late nights on weekends when BBC Television broadcast auteur French cinema after your parents’ bedtime. These films had obscure plots and mostly featured various French people smoking in cafes arguing about art or philosophy, but inevitably there would be a brief bedroom scene where a woman disrobed while making a remark about Hegel. You stayed up very late on Saturday nights to ensure that you caught these key moments. It was during a non-bedroom scene in one of these films that the heroine visited a fortuneteller, and you saw a tarot deck for the first time. The heroine drew the Death card, of course. That night sleepless in bed your strongest memory was not the heroine’s nude breasts, but instead the medieval woodcut image on the card of a skeleton bearing a terrible scythe. The next morning you took the bus into town to visit a bookstore. You were still too young to smoke or drink or fuck like the characters in the French films, but you had enough money to buy a tarot deck.
Step 4. Show the clients your collection of various decks, to select the one they’d prefer to use in the reading, but gently steer them to one of the friendlier pastel decks. You should probably hide your batshit-crazy Mary-El version, the one that you used for a midlife self-reading last week and that caused you to sob in recognition of your existence-gone-awry.
Step 5. If the new client asks about the history of tarot divination, tell them the truth about all the scoundrels and rogues going back centuries who made up stories of its invention by Egyptian Pharoahs, and who fabricated links to Kabbalah and alchemy and the sinking of the Titanic. Tell them about mad, vicious Aleister Crowley. Tell them the truth: it’s just a set of cards with funny pictures on them. And then ask if they still want a reading.
They always say yes.
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