A friendly man with a trimmed beard and an unruly British accent, Anton Stewart murmurs a quick prayer before we begin.
“My first three cards in a typical reading is like a snapshot of the here and now,” says Stewart, after sitting down and getting me to hustle the cards about in my hands. This is to make them soak up my energy. When Stewart takes the deck back, he separates it into three stacks, placing them between us, face down on the patterned cloth-draped table. Here in the cool, purple painted private room lit with warm orange lights, he instructs me to select a card from each, any which way.
I take the first card from the top of the deck, it looks like a simple motorcyclist’s tattoo. A red heart like a pincushion stabbed through by three swords. Rain falls from the clouds behind the heart. The second card I tease out of the middle of the next stack. It features a stiff backed Queen, arms open under a blue sky, a sword in her right hand, the left open in a warding off gesture. There are clouds on her robe. The third card I filch out from the bottom of the deck. Since you can’t cheat fate it hardly matters. No clouds in this one, it’s the picture of six golden jiggers full to their brims and foaming with leafy white daffodils. A sort of square tower stands off to one side of the frame, ominous in spite of the sunny weather.
Apologies here on in for making eye contact with the reader, but keeping myself out of this story is impossible.
“Because you cannot not be here,” Anton explains to me. “What’s actually coming through here is more so how you feel about the question. You cannot not be part of this. You can’t detach yourself.”
And that may be so, but I’m just the courier in this story, carrying water for another so to speak. A philosophically-minded friend of mine and I, we stayed up late one night in his backyard, lit a fire and worked out a host of questions ahead of time, then narrowed them down.
Whether you toss coins or tally the hexagrams, whether you scatter the yarrow stalks, whether you sing a will–she-or-won’t-she song and stare into the tea, it’s all just an attempt to get a look behind fate’s skirts.
Tellingly, fortune telling remains illegal in New York State. If money changes hands. Looking into the future is verboten, as is influencing evil spirits, curse removal, exorcisms, using divining tools, speaking with the dead. All are class B misdemeanors. To get around the prohibition all you need to do is not take it seriously. Deny all knowledge that it’s not just for entertainment purposes.
But Anton and his wife, Lisa, it’s her purple painted room in her purple painted shop we’re sitting in, they dance between the raindrops of justice because they are spiritual counselors. They are clergy of New York’s first federally recognized Celtic Wiccan Fellowship, which got started in 2008.
Anyone ordained from a church in good standing, in the course of dancing with the spirits or summoning the future, can be presumed to be increasing their wealth for higher purposes. So then that which was a misdemeanor is now fine with the state of New York.
But to the question for the cards to weigh in, the question the cards must weigh in on, the question of whether we are in fact in late stage capitalism just before the collapse. Or not.
The scene repeats. Three more cards. Six of wands. Now the King of swords. Now the Lovers.
“As we work down, we’re seeing almost like this progression here there’s a theme. It’s starting to develop as we go.”
Then comes the Fool.
“He’s not just stopped to smell the roses,” says Stewart. “He’s picked one. The rose is gonna die anyway. Why not enjoy it?”
The ten of cups follows after. Then the King of Pentacles, draped there in opulent wealth and climbing grape vines, his boot rested negligently on a pig. Stewart points this out as the spiritual health of the village.
“Capitalism basically has become an outmoded way of living,” the cards tell Stewart. “Because, it puts the value of money above the value of people and the value of lives. They know the worth of everything, but the value of nothing. Where we just see a forest, how many board feet of lumber can we get out of that, I don’t want to live like that… a forest is something precious in and of itself in its own right.”
Whether the cards said that because they believed that, or because the cards were eavesdropping on either one of us, it’s a level of sensitivity too occult to be parsed.
The Awareness shop has been headquarters for the spiritual dream first dreamt by Lisa Stewart here on Main Street in New Paltz for going on 31 years.
“We’re old occultists,” sighs Lisa. “We’re doing spiritual counseling. We do astrology, numerology, rune reading, chakra crystal energy therapy, Reiki…”
The trick with prophecy, for the soothsayer, is in leaving the string unplucked, so says Lisa.
“There’s a responsibility of speaking something into being,” Lisa says. “If I tell you something, and you believe it, it will probably happen. So I have to be prepared not to speak something into being that could be detrimental.”
Given the date, the willingness of Anton to seek answers from the tarot with a question wrapped in the plastic of philosophical futurism was fortunate. With Easter just a day away, energy was picking up, sincere purpose rising like a sun. While America’s fascination with crucifixion and resurrection reeks of the Zoroastrian, Lisa asserts Easter has all to do with the celebration of Ostara, named for the pagan Germanic goddess Eostre.
“It’s the spring equinox,” says Lisa. “We’ve been starving all winter and now the birds know it’s time to lay eggs because the sun is rising higher in the sky, which is where the egg hunt comes from in the first place.”
Rabbits too, the primary ingredient of rabbit stew, will also begin to proliferate. Life, with death in hand, becomes more inviting.
“To this day, Easter is calculated on a pagan holiday,” she says. “It’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox. It has to do with the sun rising in the east on the first day of Aries, which people look at that symbol as the sign of the ram, but it’s actually something else altogether.”
Look thou with modern eyes upon the generative astrological symbol of Aries, dispense with the horns and see the reproductive system abbreviated there. Oestre. Gen.
Tarot cards are made up of what is known as the major and minor arcana. According to the Stewarts, the major arcana, which is the 21 face cards, seven by seven by seven, describe the path of the sun in the sky.
“Seven is a really special number,” she says. “It has to do with the planets that are visible to the naked eye. And it also has to do with the chakras.”
She points up to the daylight sky but she means the stars. “So microcosm. Macrocosm”
As it is above, so it is below. So the suspicion persists. But fixing oneself correctly in place and time will only take you so far. The question of which future is coming remains of immediate concern and the Stewarts aren’t the only one with cards.
Attempts to get a reading with well-known corporate advisor, relationship consultant, 5th generation master medium and clairvoyant doing business in Woodstock, first name Rose, shop called Reading by Rose, came to nothing. Savvy to the ways of newspaper reporters in that way that only clairvoyants can be, after a brief conversation on the phone Rose declared herself unavailable, and pushed me off by a month or so, encouraging me to check back in.
Not everyone knows that there’s a giant vibrating crystal buried in the earth underneath Woodstock, irradiating the locals as they roam around throughout their daily lives like defective amplifiers. After decades feeding on the emanations of the vibrating crystal, the people have grown sclerotic. The culture moribund. Even Clairvoyants must succumb to this sub terra tuning fork. So it’s probably for the best. New Paltz, by contrast, refreshes itself seasonally and retops the wells of its own kinky spiritual energy. It certainly makes a lot more noise.
In the tarot deck of Ulster County municipalities, in all deference to a matriarchal symbolist system, Woodstock would be the Crone, New Paltz the Maiden, Saugerties the mother drinking breakfast gin out of a coffee mug and Kingston, the thirty-something stripper, proud of her body still, yet resentful of all the out-of-towners on the make crammed into the club to ogle her.
Down in Marlborough off 9W there was also hope for a “clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient, psychic medium and natural empathic” to confirm or deny the demise of capitalism. In her shop, Luna Enchanted, Luna Hacker peers behind the veil of all that might be holy. But not today. She’s off for the weekend.
Watching the traffic whoosh by, dumb intuition says that the tarot deck is just an organized system of possibilities, shuffled, offered, and then chosen at random. The symbols have been around long enough so that meaning has been attached to them, like words generate pictures.
The trick is to identify the archetypes. Let the subconscious lead. I’ve got an off-brand tarot deck in my glovebox. I break them out and sit in the passenger seat, shuffling them, mingling the energy from the sun and the desperation of 9W as it heads south into Orange County, and then spreading the cards along the dashboard in my own parking lot ritual. The two headed dog. The drowning sailor. The lost love. The singing wino. The bad friend. They all meant something, of that I’m sure.
A Welsh saying. Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon. A nation without a language is a nation without a heart. How about a heart without a nation, with three swords stuck in? It’s like trying to read the future with a blank deck of cards, coming up empty again and again.
A sign hung before a storefront on North Front Street in Kingston. Clairvoyant Psychic, it announced, Reuniting Lovers. Inside, intense, dark-haired Jade Moon agreed to let her cards weigh in on the demise of capitalism, provided I didn’t record anything.
Something about the frequencies produced by a cell phone recording would have interfered with her psychic abilities. We compromised. I could take notes in my barbaric shorthand. Afterwards, she would have me read them back. Moon lays the cards down quickly, there was no need for my energy here. She gets right to business, pointing out that things have already fallen around the world.
“It has to fall, for things to get better,” she says. “The blood. The death. The darkness is where we are. But unity will be the result of the pain.”
Moon also identifies a blockage of the throat chakra nationally.
“Everyone is being afraid of what they want to say, afraid to be free to say what they feel.”
Besides tarot reading, Moon also practices a variety of other mystical disciplines. Tea cup reading. Palm reading. She contacts “passed on people.” That is, she practices necromancy.
“My specialty is in reuniting lovers and opening chakras,” declares Moon.
She grants me two more questions and lays out another nine cards and waits.
This time the cards are asked whether AI spells the end for humanity.
“Yes,” she answers quickly.
The cards communicate that the existential threat lies in a feature, not a bug, of that technology’s rise.
“There’s no choice,” Moon remarks. “The technology is capturing our children. And TikTok.”
The energy told her to include TikTok, she says.
Moon allows for the final question, lays out the cards and waits again. This time the cards are asked whether the way the city of Kingston does business has grown too dependent on public grant money for its revenue source as opposed to a return to manufacturing.
Moon says the cards say Kingston has got to work with the people who give the city strength. She points to the Devil card.
“You’re wasting your time working with the negative.”
With the collapse of capitalism now assured by two separate decks of cards, a mention at least should be made of the artist who illustrated the pictures on the cards themselves.
The deck most recognized in every country of the world, by novices, masters and rank tourists of esoterica alike, the Rider-Waite Deck.
The result of a sort of Tarot deck arms race between Alleister Crowley and competitor Arthur Edward Waite, whatever the spiritual inclinations motivating the two men, the commercialization of the divinization tool into a recognizable brand was first and foremost a business proposition no different than selling deep fried chicken. Both men raced to become the respective Colonel Sanders in their field and Waite won. Crowley put out his own, less accessible deck.
Behind Waite’s victory, an artist, painter, illustrator going by the name of Pixie, one Pamela Colman Smith, was the one who designed the internationally recognized pictures on the cards.
Born in London, the niece of the painter Samuel Colman, Smith appeared in Brooklyn when she was 15 years old, attending the Pratt institute in Fort Greene. This was in 1893, six years after the arts university opened its doors. Before graduating, Colman went on to find work as a talented illustrator. Among other adventures consummated, she worked in theater design, traveling with a troupe that included Scottish author Bram Stoker. She was on familiar terms with William Butler Yeats and illustrated one of his books.
Colman Smith was a suffragette who held bohemian salons with eclectic guest lists. She started magazines and a printing press, dedicated it is said, to women writers and wrote her own books as well.
Her illustrations for what should properly be called the Rider-Waite-Colman deck, is the brilliant and inspired work of a reported synesthesiac, which none of the clairvoyants in this article have so far claimed to be.
Affecting, dreamy and permanently connected with the mainstream perception of the occult, much to the satisfaction of dreamers, much to the nervous discomfort of spiritual prudes, the popularity of Coleman’s artwork refreshes itself, discovered by subsequent generations looking to cheat blind faith.
Colman Smith died in debt. After she died, creditors auctioned her possessions off. Buried in an unmarked grave, gone but not forgotten, if only someone could ask the Pratt Institute dropout what she thinks of her enduring accomplishment.
Join the family! 
