Thisbe Wu
When I ask the cashiers at Lambert Books—one of the oldest esoteric bookstores in London—if I might interview one of the store’s tarot readers, the reaction is not warm. The two girls look at me like I’m Death himself, or some British equivalent of the IRS. They hand me a glossy purple pamphlet with headshots and bios and size 7 font. Most psychics go for a head-tilt-and-inquisitive-squint look. But the Wednesday reader, at the top of the flip side, smiles. He looks to be in his seventies. He has tiny eyes and giant glasses and the generally innocent appearance of a cartoon bug. His name is Clark Corbin.
*
Lambert Books smells exactly like your grandmother’s couch. The carpet is a nauseating green, patterned with the Lambert logo: Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic, writing on a tablet with a stick. There are books on astrology, on secret societies, on the paranormal. There’s Carl Jung’s Collected Works and Aristotle’s Poetics and Vishen Lakhiani’s The Buddha and the Badass.
I am waiting to meet Clark and remembering our phone call. His British accent was hushed, as though he were afraid of waking some great beast. “Yes, yes, well I’d be perfectly happy to talk with you,” Clark told me, “and I won’t charge you just for speaking with me, of course.” He said I could come by the shop any Wednesday.
And here he is now; the front door chimes to welcome him. A crook cane hangs on his forearm. He wears a blue button-down and pleated pants. He greets the girls at the desk with a nod. I shake his hand. He has to go put something downstairs but will be right back. As he shuffles away, I inspect some volcanic rocks from Madagascar that promise to deflect negativity, enrich my life force, and replenish my sexual vitality.
Clark returns and invites me to sit in the cramped window nook. This is where the readings happen. There’s a circular table, two chairs, and a curtain (well, it’s more like a veil: see-through and insubstantial). From a black fanny pack, Clark withdraws a canvas pouch. His fingers pry open the pouch’s mouth. Cards are born. Their centers are colorful, their edges weathered.
“So remind me, what exactly is your assignment?” Clark asks, mindlessly shuffling his cards. I watch them dance between his hands as I explain my task: write about someone with an interesting job. He chuckles. I place a notepad in my lap.
“What was your first encounter with tarot?” I ask.
“I grew up in London in the 50s and 60s in what you might call an ‘alternative household,’ so I was aware of the Tarot through my parents but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t really get into it until 1969 or 1970, when an American opium dealer in a café in Istanbul showed me the cards and taught me to read the Tarot.”
So, a few thoughts pop up while Clark is talking:
- What a logline! I can see the scene so clearly: some fedora’d American peels off his sunglasses, takes a puff from his pipe, and begins to teach a scrawny young Clark (as Turkish plates clatter in the background) about the 22 named cards that make up the Major Arcana.
- Should I stop saying “tarot”? To those in the know, I’m picking up, it’s “the Tarot.”
- This nook is not private at all. There’s the veil, but Clark and I are fully audible to everyone in the shop. This must be deliberate. The bookstore wants potential customers to listen in.
“I’ve been reading the Tarot for over fifty years now,” Clark is saying, “and about twelve years ago I started doing the Wednesday readings here. The old owner was a friend of mine and came to me saying ‘I need your help! I’ve got all these unreliable psychics! They’re always saying something unforeseen has happened and they can’t come in to work!’ Ha ha ha!” (Clark is the only person I’ve met who laughs exactly like ha ha ha.)
I ask what he likes about doing readings. Clark grins. “You mean, apart from the money?”
I smile until I realize he isn’t joking. Clark shrugs, comes up with a better answer. “It fits my profile,” he says.
Before I can ask him to clarify, Clark, watching someone come through the door, suddenly says, slowly and deliberately: “Now I am going to charge you a small fee for talking with me.”
I study him. He studies me. Clark says a lot of things that sound like they might be jokes, but aren’t. I’m starting to think Clark Corbin does not like me.
“Here’s what you’re going to do, Cal. In a moment you are going to go out that door and take a diagonal down Cecil Court Road. You will turn a corner. There’s a Tesco. You are going to buy one liter of full-fat milk and bring it back here. We’ve run out downstairs. Surely a young university student like you can afford it.”
Our stare-off continues. I can tell that Clark is hazing me and enjoying it. I can tell that Clark can tell that I can tell that Clark is a performer and really does read the Tarot for the money. Milk is a small price to pay for a good story. “I think I can do that for you,” I say.
*
The Fool is the first card in the Major Arcana. In a classic 78-card Rider-Waite Tarot—by far the most popular deck worldwide—The Fool is a young man in jester’s garb. His face is turned to a yellow sky, his arms spread wide in a dance with the world. Icy mountains loom in the background. He is about to step off the edge of a cliff. When The Fool appears in a spread, the card symbolizes innocence; the confidence of youth; the blind leap of faith we must take before embarking on a journey.
I am The Fool. I walk to Tesco. I pay £1.30 for a septuagenarian’s liter of full-fat milk.
*
Clark is giving a reading to a girl in a red dress. Every tarot reading begins with a question. This girl wants to know about her romantic future.
In the next few months, Clark sees a strong possibility of a relationship. This boy she recently broke up with, is he less than fifty? What does he do? Something with his hands, by chance? (Clark is only checking because of the cards, of course.) Who broke up with whom?
Two cards are turned over: the girl can go here, or she can go here. A woman, Clark says, communicates with very subtle signals. Clark’s wife, an artist, often says to him, ‘How could you not see such-and-such!’ The girl must communicate with the boy on his level.
Now Clark is asking the girl in the red dress to stick out her tongue. “Eh, not bad,” Clark declares. Eating at regular times will stabilize the girl’s emotions. A tip from Clark’s other job, the holistic therapy practice he runs in Highgate: take a cup of water (hot water in cold weather, cold in hot weather) and mix in a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar. Drink and eat two almonds. Stress will be gone like that! (Clark snaps in the girl’s face for effect.) Clark’s wife was once thrashing about in the kitchen, and Clark gave her this magic concoction and she was cured of all ills.
One final card: The Knight of Discs. The girl must take charge. No point in sitting around. She doesn’t need to learn skills; she already has skills! She should get back into drawing. She should be carrying her sketchpad whenever possible so she can confidently call herself an Artist. She should come back for another reading in eight months.
A half-hour of this counsel costs £40.
*
“So what were you doing in Istanbul?” I ask Clark.
“Oh, I was young and stupid. Not unlike yourself.”
“You said this was 1970?”
“It must have been 1970, because in 1969 I was living on the streets and wouldn’t have had money for a café.”
“You were living on the streets here in London?”
“No, I was in Istanbul. Aren’t you paying attention!”
“How did you meet this American opium dealer?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was in that world.”
(I take this to mean: the opium world.)
*
The Three Qualities of a Good Reader of the Tarot, according to Clark Corbin: “First, you have to talk a good game, or ‘blag,’ as we say here in the U.K. Second, you have to know the cards. And third, you have to be able to put the cards and the person together. Get a sense for their attitude toward life.”
“Does a reader need any psychic powers?” I ask.
“Ha. No, it’s just about reading the cards. There’s something called ‘cold reading,’ where some mystics can read tiny physical microgestures. But see, I’m nearly blind as a bat!” Clark takes off his glasses; his eyes undergo a kaleidoscopic shift in shape and size. “So, I can’t read microgestures.”
*
Clark uses the Crowley-Thoth deck. The illustrations were drawn by one Lady Freida Harris according to instructions from Alestair Crowley. Legend has it that Crowley once cast a spell to make all the books in Lambert disappear. (He later, very kindly, made them reappear.)
“There are all kinds of decks these days,” Clark laments. “There’s Happy Children in the Garden Tarot, and there’s Vampires at Midnight Tarot, and all that nonsense.”
I ask Clark what good tarot decks have in common.
Clark’s reply: “How much do you know about Plato?”
“Not much,” I admit. “I know The Cave.”
“Eh, well, that’s not nothing, I guess.” Clark feigns displeasure, though he’s clearly happy to know more than me. “Do you know what an archetype is?”
I offer a literary definition: “An archetype is a recognizable stock character that repeats across various stories.”
“Nope. Sorry. Wrong! Fail!”
“What is an archetype, then?”
“Archetypes are patterns that come from the divine level,” Clark explains. He says something about every table on Earth being based on the divine concept of a table. He throws in the phrase “primordial constellation.” Good tarot cards recall archetypes. Bad tarot cards are just pictures.
*
“Tarot began in Northern Italy in the 1400s,” Clark claims. “I’ve found a serious pamphlet from 1480 that offers proof. Then the Church made the practice vanish for a hundred years.”
Clark thinks people often botch tarot history. “Some people say the Tarot began in Egypt, but that’s total crap from when Egypt was the hot mystical thing. It didn’t come from Egypt. And some people say that at the beginning the Tarot wasn’t used for divination—bullshit! Not used for divination, that’s complete nonsense.”
Clark leans forward.
“Humans will use anything for divination,” he says. “Cards, tea leaves, coffee grounds, entrails, the flight of birds—it doesn’t matter. Do you think we would have survived this long if we couldn’t sniff the wind, couldn’t see just a few steps ahead? We’ll use anything for divination.”
*
The card after The Fool is The Magician. The Rider-Waite deck shows a man in a red cape with an infinity symbol above his head. Clark’s Crowley deck shows a yellow entity floating in a prism of criss-crossing lines. In both, The Magician has his tools nearby: a sword, a cup, a disc thing with a star on it. When The Magician appears in a spread, it symbolizes the talents and resources at one’s disposal, urging one to tap into their fullest potential.
I’m thinking of designing my own tarot cards. The Fool will be a student with a notepad and bookbag, of course. The Magician will be an old man by a window, shuffling cards. I’ll include some reminder of the man’s long-gone homeless days—maybe a bindle in the bottom corner.
The Magician will be grinning like he’s getting away with a crime. There will be a glass of cold milk on his table.
For privacy, “Clark Corbin” and “Lambert Books” are pseudonyms.