NEWS FEATURE: School Teaches the Arcane Discipline of Tarot Card Reading

c. 2003 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ Class begins in a dark conference room with a meditation on the sound of a bell. The degree requirements include seminars in contemplation or visualization. Homework assignments often involve the difficult task of transforming your life. But students who complete the yearlong course at New York City’s […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Class begins in a dark conference room with a meditation on the sound of a bell. The degree requirements include seminars in contemplation or visualization. Homework assignments often involve the difficult task of transforming your life.

But students who complete the yearlong course at New York City’s Tarot School say it’s well worth the effort. Some have even attended the program three times, and claim their understanding of the 78 cards of the tarot deck deepens with each lesson.


The instructors, Wald and Ruth Ann Amberstone, frequently warn students that the esoteric material they’re absorbing can be intense.

“Be aware that as a magical creature, you will be required to wake up. And you will have to go through the fires of hell to give up what you had in your former life,” Wald Amberstone tells nine women, several of whom are already professional tarot card readers, during one of his Monday night classes.

Peering at his students from the end of a long conference table, his cerulean eyes flashing out from under a shock of white hair, Amberstone rarely consults his notes as he conducts the evening’s lecture on the card symbolizing judgment.

“This is one of those obscure cards that has a lot in it that’s not visible,” Amberstone says, eyeing a student who arrived late before singling her out. “What does this card mean, Evelyn?”

Startled, the student explains that the card illustrates what Christians believe is the last judgment, when human beings have to stand up before a heavenly judge and answer for themselves.

Amberstone’s face suggests he is not quite satisfied as he goes on to explain the card’s latent meaning. The images of naked bodies rising from coffins before an angel blowing a trumpet symbolizes transformation, he says. And the angel of the last judgment is not really Gabriel, as one of his students suggested; it’s Michael, the angel of solar fire, according to occult tradition.

“You will always be given a chance to transform; the door will never be closed to you,” he says. “From a strictly religious standpoint, the process of transformation is available to you personally.”


As Amberstone speaks, pens fly across notepads as heads nod vigorously. These dense philosophical ruminations are the reason people attend his classes. They come to learn something they can’t get from an average tarot book _ the hidden meaning of the illustrated cards, which draw their symbols from a variety of spiritual systems, including the Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, alchemy and ancient Greek and Egyptian religions.

“For the most part, you can’t find it in books,” he said of the course material. “It’s hard to unearth.”

Since the Tarot School opened in New York City in 1995, more than 1,000 students have attended its live divination and magic classes, and hundreds more from around the country have participated in tarot teleconference and correspondence courses. The school offers four different degrees, each of which requires a year of study.

Graduates go on to be professional readers at metaphysical stores and for “900” phone lines, write books, and offer informal classes of their own. Others keep their day jobs but draw on tarot as a source of professional inspiration.

Elinor Greenberg, a practicing psychologist who keeps her degrees from the Tarot School on the walls of her office next to her academic diplomas, said she began studying tarot on her own seven years ago and found she was unable to penetrate the cards’ deeper meanings.

Now in her third year at the Tarot School, Greenberg uses tarot as a therapeutic tool with some of her patients. The Tarot School has helped her understand the cards as more than tools of foretelling events.


“Most of the people enter tarot through divination, but if you go far enough, you come face to face with God, at least as it’s taught at the Tarot School,” she said. “If you’re not on a spiritual journey to begin with, by the time you’ve finished with tarot, you will be.”

Not everyone agrees that tarot leads a practitioner to God, however.

Despite tarot’s use of Christian symbolism and theology, conservative Christian critics say it’s the devil’s tool.

Since the first tarot decks appeared in 13th century Europe, they have been condemned as divination, a practice the Old Testament prophets Moses and Ezekiel warned against, said Chad Brand, assistant professor of theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

“If tarot reading really does grasp a separate reality, either that reality is God, it’s psychological, or it’s demonic,” he said. “At the worst, I would say it could be demonic.”

But others say tarot and other occult practices have their origins in a mystical Christian theology.

“The preferred way of using tarot was opening up one’s consciousness, and the use of tarot for divination was sort of the crasser one,” said Danny Jorgensen, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida and author of “The Esoteric Scene, Cult Milieu, and Occult Tarot.”


Today, most people are attracted to tarot as a divinatory tool, he said, adding that the esoteric knowledge system that accompanies the cards has largely been abandoned.

Wald Amberstone began studying tarot in 1959, a few years before a resurgent interest in tarot and other occult practices took root in America.

“When I was first starting, there was hardly a book to be found, not even a deck to be found, certainly no teachers to be found,” he said. “You had to figure it out for yourself.”

Amberstone had an advantage, however. As the son of a game maker, he saw tarot as a symbolic game similar to those he had worked on with his father.

Along with his intuitive grasp of symbolism, he drew on his knowledge of Kabbalah and eventually picked up an understanding of the cards’ meanings by being around other tarot enthusiasts. And much of his explanation of tarot is the product of his own invention, he admitted.

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As the practice of tarot becomes more mainstream and less arcane, the Tarot School stands alone as a formal program of instruction in the cards’ spiritual symbolism, said Mark McElroy, an advisory board member of the American Tarot Association.


Besides Tarot University, a teleconference course run by Christine Tayne-Powler, the Amberstones face little competition. “The Tarot School has two advantages: It helps immunize you to quackery, and it helps people understand where the cards came from and how to apply them in a practical way,” McElroy said.

McElroy, who has attended the Amberstone’s Tarot Readers’ Studio, an annual conference for more experienced tarot readers, said certification programs for card readers are still hard to come by, even as the popularization of tarot has made books and decks widely available.

“My guess is that very few people study a specific tarot system today or use it in a very rigorous way,” Jorgensen said. “Most people aren’t willing to spend years of study learning these ornate, esoteric systems.”

Clearly, Wald and Ruth Ann Amberstone are not most people. They got married at the 2002 International Tarot Symposium decked out in full magician regalia, and they represent a minority of “esoteric purists” among a growing number of pop psychologists in the tarot community.

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Shunning politically charged, goddess-themed decks and the like, they base their program of study on the classic Arthur Edward Waite tarot deck created by a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the 19th century British occult society. The Waite deck is the forebear of 80 percent of the decks available today, Amberstone said, and gives students the broadest and most accurate understanding of esoteric symbolism.

Students who have mastered the symbolic system should be able to give a complete reading with a single card rather than an entire spread, Amberstone said.


“You don’t need a lot of cards to get a lot of information,” he said. “Since every card in the tarot deck is just a perspective on a situation, no matter what card you ask, you can’t really go wrong.”

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