1. Her own system.
According to Elinor, the oracle best designed for that purpose is I Ching, the Book of Changes, which has been in use for thousands of years. She studied I Ching in College, which is how she got really interested in divination. She wrote several papers on it, I think. I am pretty sure at the time she didn’t see herself then making a living out of divination----that was later, when she realized that there wasn’t much of a market for former philosophy majors or indeed for actual philosophers.
She didn’t want to teach or write critical studies of what others had said; she wanted to write and talk about what she thought. Back in those days, she wanted to talk all the time about what was fundamental or ultimate (or fundamental and ultimate) , whereas the rest of us wanted to talk about what was immediate and personal. We thought she was very weird. I don’t know what she thought of us. I don’t think she thought about us at all much.
She switched from I Ching to a version---her own version---of the Tarot pretty late in the day. She said that the Tarot was more adaptable to her particular religious/philosophical stance. After spending a lot of time researching the Tarot, she pretty much designed her own deck and her own system, which according to her incorporates elements of gnostic Christianity. Her twin brother, an artist, did the actual execution. They’re larger than ordinary-sized cards and the designs are very elaborate, but she has never allowed me to handle them except during an actual reading, so I can’t tell you much about them.
She calls some of them by different names, too---for example, one of them that I know is different is the card that in most Tarot decks is called ‘The Moon.’ She calls it ‘The Ghosts.’ The card itself is quite terrifying. It shows a sort of wooded area on the edge of a field in the winter. The trees are all bare and covered with snow. It’s night time and there is a full moon with a ring around it. A person in a cloak and carrying a staff—you can’t tell if it’s a man or woman--- is hurrying along the edge of the field. The first time I saw it I didn’t take in why it made me so uneasy or what it had to do with the moon or with ghosts. The second time I saw that a couple of trees near the edge of the field had knots, whorls, and stumps on them, that looked like faces and branches that stuck out like arms. Further back in the woods is a white dog or dog-like creature peering out between the trees, also watching the person pass--you wouldn’t see it if you didn’t look for it. Maybe it was just intended for a dog, but there was something about the way its tail hung and the expression in its eyes that made it seem like something more---or less. The last thing I noticed were the footprints---very faint footprints, running alongside and slightly behind the deeper prints of the person who was walking in the field. I always wanted to ask Elinor how much of that picture was based on instructions she’d given Cam and how much on his interpretation, but she’s quite touchy about those cards and usually won’t answer questions about them.
I asked Elinor to explain that card, and she said it signified someone in a state of anxiety and distraction caused by ‘unfinished business’ with other people and harboring unacknowledged or unarticulated fears---“stalked by dread.” When ‘The Ghost’ turned up in my reading the first time a few years ago, she said that I was haunting myself. She told me I needed to come to terms with sadness and anger over the sudden death of someone close to me. She gave me a meditation to do, which didn’t help at all, and the phone number of a ‘bereavement counselor,’ which did.
2. A fairly lucrative occupation.
Elinor does business out of her house. It’s a house that belonged to her grandmother. It’s in what used to be in the wealthy and elegant part of her town, near what used to be the city center, but is now the place you go when you want to feel you’re getting out of the mainstream. Her part of town is now the colorful, unconventional, counterculture, indie part of town. It’s officially known as “The Historic District,” though as Elinor points out, nothing has ever actually happened there except for the passing of years.
Her house is on a street where most of the houses these days are used for strictly commercial purposes. It’s a huge, shambling, aubergine-painted Vicwardian structure. It stands out like a badly bruised thumb between a bookstore, painted an elegant cream color with the woodwork picked out in paintbox tints and a café, painted a muted silvery blue with lacy white iron grilles sticking out here and there. Elinor gets a commission from the bookstore for any client she sends their way to purchase from their stock of mystical and philosophical works; she has a similar arrangement with the gift shop across the street that sells gemstones, incense, and various aids to meditation. In her way, she’s a very good businesswoman. I imagine that it’s a fairly lucrative occupation. I don't know though, really---apparently her grandmother left behind a fair amount of money; I don't think she has to work at all.
Though she doesn’t just read for anyone at any time---she doesn’t take appointments. You normally have to have an appointment. When I called to set something up, she said immediately, “It’s too soon, not even three months.”
“Come on, I’ve really been feeling ill,” I said. “Something’s wrong with me. I feel sick all the time.”
“See a doctor,” she said sharply. “If you’re sick, the cards won’t tell which part of it is physical and which part is just down to all the stress you said you were having last time. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all one thing. If you’re sick, you need to find out as much as you can about why before you come here asking.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to ask about why; I just want to know what I can do about all the stress. Whether it’s physical or not, I need to figure out what to do about that. Come on, it’s almost three months. And you didn’t tell me then I’d feel this bad. ‘Some anxiety about the future,’ you said. “You didn’t tell me I’d actually end up getting sick from it.”
“Well, that was really up to you, wasn’t it?” she said. “You should know by now that you can’t just sit back and let stress ride you. It just confuses everything. See a doctor and then we’ll talk about where you go from there.” But then she relented. As I say, she’s a good woman of businesswoman. “You know if I see you today, I’ll have to charge you extra,” she said. “You ought to wait a week. $50 if you wait; $75 if you don’t. My advice would be to wait.”
She charges people more if they come to see her often. I guess she can afford to. The idea is that charging more discourages what she calls ‘frivolous consultations.’ She says some people would be at her door every other day if she didn’t. “You need to let yourself undergo it,” I heard her say to a client once on the phone. “You knew it would happen; and you explained to me exactly how you would handle it when it did. It’s too soon to be trying to look into the next stage. Give it a month to finish happening and we’ll talk then about what you need to do next.”
“I really think we should wait,” she said, when I said, trying very hard not to sound grudging or reluctant, that I’d pay the $75.
3. A priestess of sorts.
She met me at the door. She’s a very tall pale woman with very long blond hair, long enough for her to sit on if she felt so inclined. She says it doesn’t suit her at her age, but that it helps her look the part. On that day, she’d wrapped a bandanna around it and was wearing one of those outfits she buys from some store over the internet; she won’t tell me what it’s called. Her things are beautiful in their way, intricate but also rather odd, not quite costumes but close. The colors remind me of medieval tapestries: wine red, midnight blue, hunter’s green, old gold, brown, and grey with a very silvery sheen. They normally involve more embroidery, satin. velvet or crocheted lace insets, scalloped hemlines, or other embellishments than you usually see except at Renaissance fairs. Still, I wouldn’t mind dressing like that myself sometimes.
The room where she meets clients isn’t at all what you might expect. The walls are completely bare; there isn’t an ornament in sight. There’s a lavish but faded Oriental rug, a painted desk with an equally faded goldleaf design, an old gilt chair that has gone green over time, and a fairly comfortable armchair. The windows look out on the patchy lawn in back of the house. She asked me if I was sure I wanted to go forward, and when I said I was, she took the $75 off me immediately, as always, and put it in a little locked drawer in her desk.
Elinor began the reading by praying silently to herself. She always begins by praying. She doesn’t ask me or anyone else to join her. She calls herself a ‘ Gnostic Christian’ seer, though she was more or less asked to leave the last two churches she tried to attend. She was impervious to Biblical quotations intended to prove that divination or consulting signs is the Devil’s work. “I’m not a witch, I’m a priestess of sorts, and in any case Christ Himself was accused of sorcery,” she says. “People don’t understand what I do at all if they think I’m a witch of some sort. Anyway, witchcraft was an invention of the medieaval church to stamp out gnosticism in southern France,” she told me once.
She flipped through the desk till she found the Dagger Queen, ‘the widow’s card,’ which is the card she uses to signify me. After I remarried I asked her to change it, but she wouldn’t. “The Dagger Queen is a woman who has suffered a loss,” she said in her matter of fact way. “She’s someone with a specific sort of experience in her past. Getting remarried doesn’t change who you’ve become as a result of the things that have already happened.”
She slapped the card down on the table face-up. “Look into the candle flame. Meditate on your question,” she said in that same flat, matter of fact, mechanical tone, as if she were a nurse asking you to take off your clothes and put on the hospital gown. I know the drill by now, but she always instructs me regardless. “Be sure that you articulate your question as clearly as you can---try to . Mentally state the outcome that you want or fear and the result you are seeking. If you have a particular expectation, acknowledge it. Ask if events are currently pointing in that direction. Ask what you can do or change to bring it about. Pray that you’ll have the insight to see the response and the courage to face the truth. It’s important to do all of this before we start. If you’re vague about what you’re asking, you won’t understand the answer when you get it. Tell me when you’re ready to begin, but don’t tell me your question unless I ask.”
After about three minutes, during which I began to feel slightly cross-eyed from concentration, she says, “Are you ready?” When I said, “Yes,” she began to lay out the cards.
4. Nevertheless, it moves.
And even though there’s a part of me that doesn’t quite believe in what she says the cards have the ability to show me, my pulses as always pounded a little as I watch. She set them out in formation I think she devised for herself: ‘‘The Lathe,” I think she calls it, though I’m not sure. It involves 14 cards laid out in pairs, with one card crossing another. Each pairing represents a different aspect of the situation.
She studied them for a couple of minutes without saying anything. Then she said to me, “What have you been doing since I saw you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
She said, “You’d better believe it is. Look at these cards. Do something else.”
I said, “What do you mean? Come on, don’t be so oracular. Be specific.”
Elinor shook her head. “That’s the answer and it is very specific. You need to find something to do. You’re stuck. This is a big change from last time, when it looked as if you had too much going on. Now for some reason you’ve ground to a halt. No wonder you’re sick. Look at these cards. You’re standing in your own way at every turn. I’ve never seen such a set of metaphors for spiritual and mental constipation. Look here: here’s the Ghosts again, right here at the first turn at the basis of the entire problem. What’s that doing back in the picture? And you’ve got that influence crossing and countering the influence of the Staves Angel. No wonder you feel stressed. You can’t get started on anything new if you’re dealing with all of this unacknowledged bullshit. What in the world is going on here? Are you having a lot of panic attacks?”
She looked at me, but I didn’t answer. One of the rules she has for herself is that she can’t demand information during a reading. After a minute she said, “Okay, we’ll take the panic attacks as read. Look at the cards at the Third and Fourth turnings, Expectations and External factors. You’ve got the Seven Grails countering the Shining Child, so you’re so afraid there’s something wrong with your health that you probably can’t bring yourself to do anything about it.—you’re expecting the worst. Your external factors are the Winged Horse countered by the Eight Daggers. The problem’s not in the environment---there are plenty of indications that you could move forward and be productive if you wanted to, but you’re not. I wonder why.”
“What’s going to happen?” I asked her.
“Nothing!” she said emphatically. “At the Sixth and Seventh Turnings, the Trend and the Probable Outcome, you’re still in a holding pattern. Here at the 6th you’ve got the Lector countering the Three Staves, so that’s your creative drive being stifled by some sort of fear of censure or of authority; here at the Seventh, you’ve got the Magus and the Five Staves. Every single pair shows your energy being blocked and all of the blockages are coming from inside you, not outside you. And right here at the Fifth I can see from the pairing of the Dagger Guardian and the Staves Guardian what the cause is: anger and anxiety locked together. They’re change cards, both of them, but nothing’s going to change if the Guardians aren’t moving forward. You’ve got to prise them apart and put them back on the path. What are you so afraid of?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I always am nowadays. I feel like everything’s just out of control.”
She didn’t seem to be listening to me; she was looking at the cards again. “I’m seeing equal parts of anger and fear,” she said. “What’s that about? Never mind; don’t answer---I don’t need to know. The only thing I can really tell you right now is this: you’ve got to find some sort of way to unblock all that energy.” She opened the drawer of her desk. I’ll give you your money back; I haven’t really told you anything,” she said, “and I really don’t think I’m going to have any more to add. Till you're out of your holding pattern, nothing I say would be a bit of use. Anyway, I don't have even an inkling of what happens next. It looks like you're trying to make sure that nothing is going to."
“Can’t you tell me what to do?” I asked. “You say I need to do something---I don’t even understand what you mean. Such as what? For what purpose?”
Elinor shrugged. “I don’t know what and I don’t know if it matters,” she said, unlocking the drawer and taking out the money I’d given her. “Listen, if you feel you’re not in control of your life, you’re right. You can’t control it, but you can be in it, digging in your oar, and at least affecting the direction. You can’t control it, but you can affect it. If you do anything at all, that’s probably enough to get you moving forward again. Well, the alternative is for you to hold still and let yourself be moved along, and that would probably be okay too. The problem is that you’re trying not to move at all. That isn’t going to work, Damozel.” She gathered up her cards. “Stay for lunch,” she said. “Cam’s cooking. He’d like to see you. He said so before you got here.”
5. The Gospel of Thomas.
The cooking smells had been drifting into the ‘consultation room” ever since I’d arrived, so I knew it was going to be Cam’s vegetable soup. It’s amazing stuff---I mean, vegetables, yes, but with a very sharp, tangy flavor. Elinor told me that he puts half a lemon in, so that’s part of it. But I think there are other things, like cilantro and red pepper. Anyway, it’s the best vegetable soup I’ve ever had anywhere.
On that day, they had a loaf of homemade bread from the bakery down the street to eat with it. Cam said, “Hello, Duh-duh-duh,” then grinned, waved his arm, and gave up. When he was a kid, his mother refused to let him have speech therapy because she was afraid it would affect the part of his brain that the paintings come out of. I guess Cam must have believed this too, because he has never tried to do anything about the stutter. He’s a very good-looking man, in a way, though in the presence of outsiders such as myself he wears a fixed grin that makes him look slightly deranged---this is Elinor’s comment, not mine--- and his long ponytail, a mixture of grey and light brown, is more literally like a pony’s tail than you usually see. But though I know he’s shy and tends to steer clear of other people, he’s always been convivial enough when we’ve met. He doesn’t speak but he seems to listen more attentively than most people when I speak and he certainly laughs more at my jokes than most people.
The soup was as delicious as ever. Over lunch, we didn’t of course talk about my issues, but about the various things you talk about over lunch with friends----local events, mutual acquaintances and their doings, politics (though we just skimmed the surface), Elinor’s vacation in Clearwater, books we’d read, Cam’s paintings. I don’t think either of us said a word the whole time about my reading or about Elinor’s conclusions. And there were several thicknesses of old-fashioned solid oak door and of plaster wall between the consultation room and the kitchen, where Cam was working.
But at the end of the meal, when I was ready to go, he indicated to me by various signs that he wanted me to wait for a minute. While I watched, he grabbed a napkin and started scribbling on it with a pen. When he was done, and before I had a chance to read it, he gave me a friendly look, and another wave, and immediately plunged through the backdoor. I heard him a few seconds later going up the stairs to his studio.
I unfolded the napkin. Written in minute, beautiful uncial letters were some lines from the Gospel of Thomas that Elinor had once inscribed on a birthday card she’d sent to me. “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”
“Well, yes,” said Elinor, who’d stopped collecting the dishes to read over my shoulder. “Yes, that’s actually exactly what I was trying to say back there.”
I tried to give her back the money she’d returned to me. When she wouldn’t take it, I walked straight down to the Episcopal Church and put it in their mission box. Like Elinor was saying, any step in any direction gets you heading somewhere and to that extent is a step in the right direction.
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Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.
