a conversation with james wells

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ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: How did it all begin?

JAMES WELLS: Part of me wants to say that it all began when a hot and dense universe suddenly expanded.  Another part of me wants to say that it all began when my mother and father got twinkles in their eyes.  However, I’ll assume that you mean how did my involvement with the tarot begin.  My interest in what potentially makes people and life in general tick began as a child.  Old Testament stories of parting waters to free people, Greek stories of gods and goddesses who have troubles and triumphs, Canadian First Nations ways of being in harmony with the natural world, and a fascination with spirits, magick, and things beyond everyday knowing were on my mind.  In some of my books, I came across references to tarot cards.  When I was 12 years old, one book in particular — Let ESP Work for You by Patsy Ruth Welding — devoted a few pages to the tarot.  Welding’s short foray into the cards was so delicious that something stirred in me.  So I set aside some money from lawn-cutting and paper delivery and took the bus to a games store where I had seen tarot decks.  The only pack they had was the 1JJ Swiss Tarot, so I bought it.  I winged it for a few years during my teens, just letting the pictures, lines, and designs bring things to mind.  Looking back, I think I wanted to be psychic, special, cool, noticed for being different at that time.  I practised on myself, a few friends, and some schoolteachers after school hours.  Any time I found a book about tarot, it would be filled with such arcane references that I just put it down and didn’t bother with it.  When I bought Gail Fairfield’s first book,Choice Centered Tarot, in my late teens, it was a revelation to me.  The whole notion of fate, predicting exact events, and trying to amaze people fell away and was replaced by living by choice, finding potentials in the moment, and being helpful rather than trying to wow people.  It was a gateway into exploring tarot as a tool for personal insight, creativity, taking more responsibility for one’s life, and being one’s own best teacher.  Through personal experimentation, taking workshops, and reading well thought-out texts, I continued (and still continue) the tarot path.  Living with the tarot all these years has opened up other fields of interest in my life: circle process, goddess spirituality, dreamwork, archetypal psychology, various modes of healing, journal writing, and so much more.  What I notice now is that the tarot is simply a tool; the processes with which I partner the cards are what count.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: These days I have been enjoying some of Jerome Rothenberg’s essays on the figure of the ‘trickster’ as a bridge between the shaman and the poet. Reading about the shaman’s duty of sabotaging reality by using as his main tools ritual, trance and language hits it very close to home in regards of the reasons why I do what I do. Reading about the role of the shaman as the gatekeeper of wonder I confirm once again how these traditional practices found their direct translation into our Western culture in the Art of the 20th century: Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Performance Art, Happenings, Conceptualism… From Contemporary Art as a system of superstitions based in the rules of sympathetic magic, the world (and work) of magic evolved into the grimoires of advertising, the rituals of fashion and the oracles of Wall Street. We live in a world full of magic:  we get our charms from the fashion designer, our dreams from hollywood, our symbols from artists and poets, our spells from the advertising agencies, our forecasts from the weatherman or the stock-broker, and our miracles from science. We tell our dreams to a therapist and get comic relief from our stand-up comedians. I can’t help but wonder: did we miss the boat? Is our personal predilection for more traditional routes to wonder, such as the tarot, a liability when it comes to asses the role of what we do in the contemporary world? Have the traditional forms of magic become fringe simply because there are other, more elegant, forms of magic that are preferred by the mainstream?

JAMES WELLS: The second sentence you said reminds my of Abraham Heschel’s definition of a prophet as I heard it via radical theologian Matthew Fox.  He said that a prophet is someone who interferes in history or who interferes with whatever interrupts authentic life.  It’s not about someone’s random predictions regarding things that haven’t happened yet, it’s about being so present with what IS that one can notice the options in what is.  The prophet or shaman or trickster pays attention to what’s working and what’s not working, what needs to remain and what needs to change.  Then she or he communicates that observation to those who need to hear it.  It’s contemplation translated into action.  In this sense, eco-activists are trickster-prophets, tarot consultants are trickster-prophets, poets are trickster-prophets, visual artists are trickster-prophets, stand-up comedians are trickster-prophets.  Last Sunday, Kathy Griffin performed here in Toronto.  Some may dismiss her work as potty-mouthed fluff, but she has a real sense of what’s going on in our culture that’s not humane.  Her comedy points out what’s ridiculous and often wrong.  We laugh at her pronouncements as we realise, “She’s spot on!  That particular politician has no right to declare that people’s ethnic origin or sexual orientation make them less than human.”  Addressing your question about tarot in the contemporary world, I feel that tarot as a route to wonder, insight, and awakening is not a liablity in these times, but an asset.  In many cultures, the shaman lives just outside the village, not quite among the people, not quite all the way in the wild.  He or she dwells in the liminality between civilisation and wildness, the mandorla, the place of both-and.  At the April, 2011 Readers Studio in New York, Caitlín Matthews said something that unexpectedly brought me to tears.  She told us that those of us on the edge or fringe of society — tarot practitioners, shamans, undertakers, garbage collectors, agents of social change — are where we are so that when those who are in the middle of mainstream culture experience something that sends them running, they’ll have somone on the edge waiting for them.  Her words pierced me like lightning.  It was a moment of prophecy.  I heard her say that we who work, live, and play with tarot are on the fringe so as not to be as alloyed by the dominant culture’s tendencies, so that when people come to us they really sense the tending, the holding of space in a different way, the possibility that what’s in salons, malls, television shows, political rhetoric, and video games isn’t all there is.  Those who dwell on the perimeter offer alternatives, show another way of being that is more in harmony with what is life-sustaining.  With or without tarot cards, that way of being is an act of interfering with what interrupts authentic life.  For many, this is hopeful.  It might not be glitzy or slick, but it’s hopeful.  Tarot, for me, *is* elegant, not in the fashion magazine sense, but rather in the way my Grade 10 mathematics teacher meant it when he referred to the elegant solution: simple and graceful.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: “Interference” is a very useful word. The tarot seems to be a very apt tool to have life becoming it’s own détournement. It offers a possibility to interfere with the patterns of what we call “reasonable”, once reason has run out of batteries. I am borrowing the word “détournement” from the situationists because their “interferences” with reality had a political purpose. To what extent do you see these “interferences” we do as political gestures?

JAMES WELLS: This question excites me, Enrique!  I love to demystify the tarot in the sense that I like to dissolve the superstitons that have grown up around it.  *And* I love to think of tarot consultations, tarot rituals, tarot contemplation, tarot journalling, tarot poetry, tarot decks, and any form of tarot interaction as countercultural, a swim against the current of the stream in which we live.  To interfere with the dominant mindset as absorbed by ourselves and by the folks around us is no small feat.  To really start dissolving the dominant paradigm, it helps to use images because they speak to the Deep Self, the unconscious, the True Self.  Tarot images convey messages to us deeply.  They’re a fabulous antidote to the advertising industry’s predatorial pictures.  One of the ideas with which I’m currently living is that of primarily using tarot decks for myself and my clients that depict a countercultural way of being.  For example, theGaian Tarot and Medicine Woman Tarot show us humans and more-than-humans living in harmony.  Their artwork and the philosophies in which they’re rooted teach us how to exist sustainably and successfully.  The images of the Motherpeace andDaughters of the Moondecks invite us to to honour feminine, relational ways of living.  The Tarot de Marseille, in its various forms, calls us to tried-and-true virtues that help us retain our equilibrium.  Even without doing readings/consultations, the tarot could inform us.  Spending luxurious, contemplative time with the symbols and characters of the tarot would be enough to change us from the inside out.  That, to my mind, is a simple and strong political gesture, subtle activism as some of my friends call it.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: The other question that comes from these musings would be: where is the trickster in the tarot world? Isn’t the figure of the trickster missing from the ‘new-age shaman’? Aren’t we too positive and ‘reassuring’ for our own good? Have we given up the potential for mischief as a restorative derailment shamans used to have?

JAMES WELLS: I agree that there can be a fluffy-bunny aspect to tarot, indeed to any tool or process in self-help, human potential, or whatever you want to call it.  There’s a small handful of tarot practitioners, four or five, that I would trust with my desire to explore something because they work on a profound level and know how to take me out of my habitual patterns.  They work *with* me rather than talk at me.  On the whole, I don’t get other people to read the tarot for me.  If I hear, “Take up yoga” or “Just pray to such-and-such archangel” one more time, I’ll shriek.  Yoga and I don’t get along and while I don’t mind spiritual support, I’m not putting an entire situation into the hands of a being who may or may not exist without doing something proactive on my end.  So, where is the trickster-shaman in the tarot world?  The tarot itself is a great trickster.  A counsellor in the form of a deck of cards?  Ha!  A map to self-realisation in a game?  Silly!  But true, at least for me.  I’m amazed that this thing we call the tarot has endured for several centuries in various guises and for various purposes.  It should take on Aleister Crowley’s magickal name, Perdurabo, because it has endured and will continue to do so.  Its capacity to adapt is fascinating.  If someone wants it to reflect Qabalah, it does.  If another person feels that the tarot goes nicely with Celtic mythology, it does.  Someone who identifies with post-modernism finds it in the cards.  Perhaps this ability to shapeshift is one way in which the tarot is a trickster.  It puts on a new costume and gets a new hairdo, yet its structure and essential concepts remain.  Trump XV, the Devil card, is a lovely representation of the trickster.  In certain circles, it is said that the Devil is merely the Divine as seen by the unwise.  What I hear in that statement is that adversity contains wisdom if we really choose to look at it, that observation of an event brought before the imagination can open up our options.  Awareness of our options can lead us to make choices.  It’s up to us whether these choices will be life-denying or life-affirming.  Trump XV tricks us into liberation by binding us so we get to a point when we can no longer stand it and burst our bonds with the lightning bolt of the Tower.  The Devil is a card that sticks out its tongue, blows us a raspberry, and taunts us with, “Victimhood is a state of mind.  I’m really your own mind.”  I adore your phrase “mischief as a restorative derailment”!  When I work with the tarot, my own piece of mischief is to ask open-ended questions about observations made about a card.  It doesn’t matter if I’m exploring something in myself or with a client, the act of derailing someone’s usual thought patterns by asking them to describe what they perceive in a tarot card then asking them a question based on their observation is a simple piece of play that opens up awareness.  If someone pulls Trump XXI, the World, and says, “There’s a person performing a striptease in the middle of a bunch of animals.  She’s naked before every species on the planet”, I might ask the client, “In what way do you need to strip down naked before your fellow inhabitants of Earth?”  This is certainly not something one is asked every day and it invites a more extraordinary response, perhaps a more primal and authentic response.  Moments like that allow the trickster-shaman to shine.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Can you elaborate on the idea of asking “random” questions about what is seen in the cards as a way to interfere with… What? 

JAMES WELLS: Most often, a person and I work out a clear intention and a layout containing questions rooted in that intention.  I rarely use a pre-fabricated spread, but prefer to explore a person’s requirements with something custom-made, whether that person is a client or myself.  The questions I ask from observations about a card are contextual.  If our topic is a person’s personal growth, I try to frame my questions around that.  If the subject under exploration is right livelihood, I keep my questions in that context.  That said, a question that’s a bit of a curveball can really get the creative juices flowing.  What we’re called to interfere with here is our habitual thoughts and well-worn strategies.  I recall a client who drew a card to represent her next step in the process of creating her international business.  She pulled the Hanged One, so I asked her, “How would you feel about doing sweet bugger-all?”  The woman just about had a fit.  She was so accustomed to doing, moving, and shaking things up that the Hanged One’s question/message really challenged her.  As we spoke, however, the client realised that at that point she had acted in every possible way and that the rest of the process was in the hands of those she had approached.  To relax for a couple of weeks or so would be beneficial for her sleep life and her social life.  She received a valuable teaching, for her, that non-action can be the right action.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Do you think often about your own mortality? If so, does this inform your tarot readings?

JAMES WELLS: The simple responses to these are rarely and rarely.  The more convoluted response is that I’m sure that life goes on after the change we call death, whether living on after death means my soul retaining a personality, my life-force being absorbed into the cosmos, or my body feeding the plants; however, as one octogenarian friend says, “I want to live until I die.”  I prefer to think of myself as a biophiliac rather than a necrophiliac.  There’s enough unnatural death-dealing in our culture without me contributing to it.  If that viewpoint contributes anything to my tarot consultations (I almost never use the term “readings”), it’s that I want the tarot and our interactions with it to be agents of sustaining life, both individual and planetary.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Last week a client of mine mentioned that I dress like a clown. I thanked her for noticing it. I derive lots of visual inspiration from clowns. I don’t mean party clowns but people like Ricardo Bell or the Fratellini brothers, who had a very stylish sense of wonder. Nowadays the word clown is covered by a patina of shame. Same thing happens with words like ‘magician’ or ‘Fortuneteller’. A prolongated exposure to all kinds of formal and conceptual stultice had made very difficult for someone to stand by any of these words. The reason why I bring this up has to do with your choice of the word “consultation” over “reading”. I do the same thing. I do my best at referring to the trumps as “images” -or even trumps- not as “cards”, and I usually talk about “looking at the tarot”. Instead of “getting a reading” a client would be invited to come “look at the tarot with me”, or I will “look at the tarot for her”. Back to the begining of our conversation, if there is something we have learned from the “bards” of marketing is to re-word things to make them new. I would like to know: what do you accomplish by using the word “consultation”? Do you feel this word brings the tarot closer to the therapy-model? If so, on which way do you feel this is beneficial?   

JAMES WELLS: Your sense of style, clown-like or otherwise, is appreciated.  “Looking at the tarot with me” is a helpful way to put it, Enrique.  It can dispel so many expecations, as can the term “consultation”.  Going back to the party clown image for a moment, there was a time when I would do tarot readings at people’s parties — wedding showers, birthdays, TV show launches — in addition to doing the longer, in-depth private consultations.  It felt like there was a split in me.  One day, I asked myself, “Am I the tarot equivalent of a balloon-twisting clown or a counsellor?  Am I the tarot equivalent of a D-list lounge singer or am I a someone who invites self-awareness through these splendid images?”  The answer was simple, and I stopped doing parties.  Addressing your question, I feel that by using terms such as tarot consultation, tarot experience, tarot conversation, tarot session, a look at the tarot cards with me, and so forth, we dispel the idea that the client/querent/seeker/friend/readee will be read to, or rather read at.  We bring in the idea of with.  It’s a co-created and interactive experience.  The participants are me, the other person, the tarot, the place, a topic, a series of questions rooted in that topic, curiosity, imagination, observation, and whatever someone believes their WisdomSource to be.  For me, this does bring the tarot closer to the therapy or counselling model.  I’ve just finished offering a four-week online course called Tarot Counselling for Self and Others, in which the cards were our chosen tool.  It was the process that mattered in this class.  We practised noticing what’s happening in the moment, attentive listening, the art of asking open-ended questions based on what we notice, entering and exiting the session consciously, summarising what’s been said, and helping the client (whether self or other) to come up with concrete, doable actions in the world based on whatever card strikes them as a visual representation of a way they’d like to be.  Not a trace of, “This card means you’ll have a good relationship and bad luck with money.”  Our focus was, and is, self-awareness and inviting constructive change.  One benefit of working in this way is that the client generates his or her own primary insights and takes more responsibility for what’s going on.  This feels really good for the person, gives her or him a sense that s/he is wiser than s/he originally believed.  This also benefits the practitioner in that s/he doesn’t have to be “right”, just a helpful guide.  There’s a heck of a lot of work going on inside the tarot consultant: really noticing what’s going on in the client’s interaction with the cards, listening, formulating questions that create the potential for discovery.  But the practitioner doesn’t have to come up with all the answers.  What a relief!  There’s nothing wrong, however, with a bit of commentary on the consultant’s part.  Sometimes things get stuck and a bit of tarot knowledge can get the session moving again: “For me, Cups can be about feelings, close relating, and emotional expression.  And Threes can be about clarifying, defining, and getting ready for something.  This makes me wonder what feelings you might need to clarify out loud with yourself or another.”  In other words, traditional information about the tarot doesn’t necessarily conflict with tarot counselling, it can enhance it when employed judiciously.  And if anyone uses tarot in a more psychic way, they can use that psychic sense in a tarot counselling session by sensing which questions might be more beneficial to ask the client.  By the way, the verb “to counsel” comes from an old word that means “to consult”, so if anyone is getting squeamish over the use of the term tarot counselling, it actually just means tarot consulting.  To sum up, I feel that consulting instead of reading is empowering and far more interesting than us blathering on at someone for 60 or 90 minutes.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: How do you think all will end?

JAMES WELLS:  If by “all” you mean the cosmos, I haven’t a clue.  My understanding is that creation is still happening.  It didn’t end when some folks decided to write a so-called holy book about how they thought the world was made, but rather life is still creating itself.  The universe is still unfolding and humanity, a very young but bold species on this planet, is still figuring out what the heck it might become.  I suppose it will all end when the organic process of everything’s life is complete, when the universe (multiverse?) can expand and develop no more.  How?  Maybe the consciousness behind it all will finally take a nap.  I’m shuffling my Camoin-Jodoroswky Tarot de Marseille and asking, “How will it all end?”  Ha!  The response is Trump XX, Le Jugement.  This suggests to me that it will all end through someone’s/something’s final decision that all is ready to move into the next phase.  It will occur via a great blast of celestial music and nakedly honest prayer.  In a way, it contradicts my own thought about the universal consciousness taking a nap; this card suggests that it will all end by the universal consciousnessness finally waking up!  However it ends, it’ll be joyful.

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