Skepticblog

A Piece of "Modern Art" at LACMA

It’s the best time of the year for ghosts to climb out of their coffins and here in Hollywood there’s no shortage of spooks and spook chasers. I smell the aroma of wax lips and the call of pumpkin fudge. The rain has started to fall and the haunted hayride folks are gassing up their chain saws to make sure everyone gets their money’s worth in scary thrills. The hills are alive with kids looking to get up to no good. My favorite time of year has arrived. How long will it take for the overly zealous religious among us to begin their own reign of anti-terror?  I’m watching the media for the annual real life witch hunts that have come to identify both revelers and their antagonists as individuals who take great pride in letting everyone know they are all dressing up and acting exactly how they want the rest of the world to know they truly are. Silly isn’t it?

Not really. It’s a well-known fact here in La La Land that Halloween is the one day when people tend to spend the most money getting ready for than any other. It even beats out Christmas in sales for the biggest single holiday of the year. Why do you suppose that’s true?  Despite personally wanting to think that perhaps Americans have a deep dark streak of ghoulishness in their nature, Halloween probably just marks the beginning of the holiday season. If people have money to spend, they have to start somewhere. We look for any excuse to put on the most outrageous costumes. What will be the critic’s choice winner this year? Something in our American subconscious certainly lets its scapegoats, villains and true heroes be known on Halloween. Will it be an Obama, Bernie Madoff or a Dick Chaney mask this for your kid this year? Or will we see a second year record breaker with the return of Heath Ledger’s smear-faced Joker? Or maybe a combination of the above  mixed and matched to remind us all of the true horrors we are living through. I wonder if there’s  a Sylvia Browne mask out there somewhere?

My favorite shop on Melrose: Necromance

Ths local shops here in Hollywood are set to sell only the finest in bats, skulls and shrunken heads. I’m looking forward to bargain hunting for stuff like that that’s hard to find any other time of year.  I’m talking about REAL bats, skulls and shrunken heads my friends. We have those too on the far flung outskirts of Melrose Avenue. It’s a buyer’s market these days.

Forgive me if I descend to my roots for a few paragraphs and bear in mind when October rolls around, I tend to revert to my former self and like a werewolf when the moon is full, I must howl with the best of them.

This weekend I’ll be sitting in a windy tent on a carny bedecked midway doing my thing for the kiddies. Mixed with the heady aroma of apple cider and hay, my table-top display of every odd ornament I can fit into my magic bag will beckon the rubes. Many of which, with tickets clutched in their nervous hands, will take their first steps into the trecherous world of woo. What an awesome responsibility I wield with my packet of cards.

It has always amazed me that even though I may be dressed in black, surrounded by stilt-walkers, people dressed as witches, axe murderers and hawking my wares like a true sideshow pitchman, otherwise sane and sober adults will sit in rapt attention to my readings without he least bit of skepticism. I could be wearing huge clown shoes and a Pinocchio nose and most of these sitters would still take it all very seriously. One lady I read the Tarot for last weekend looked as if she was ready to burst into tears when I simply told her to “look for change.” I hadn’t even turned up the Death Card.

I think this stark willingness to believe or trust to rapidly what a total stranger says in a carnival atmosphere may say something about the sorry state of our society, but I’m not sure. Thinking of the big picture, it seems to me it has always been this way. Perhaps I’m just projecting my self-perceived power trip. Either way, it really doesn’t matter. If you do a reading and do it right, it can cut deep to the heart of any issue. Each sitter will make the most unlikely connections for me. That’s what magic is all about for most people: making connections. The Season of the Witch is when I get to lay it on thick. What a wonderful time of year to get people to think critically!

Suspend your rampant skepticism for a moment and try to see it my way: I’m not rationalizing my job – as bad as it may seem. What I’m trying to do (in my own subversive way) is to get the rational word out in the midst of the most un-educated, bi-polar, divisive and trashed economy since the great depression. What’s a “psychic entertainer” to do? I take advantage of this moment in history and I work harder to twist the perceived idea of what a psychic is to my own objective: to get people to think for themselves. That is what I do.

How often do I get the chance to remind people that The Death Card means change and transformation and further, …that its just a damn piece of card stock with a picture printed on it? Not often enough. But I’m working on it in incremental ways.

It’s fascinating to watch a neophyte sitter nearly jump out of their seat when The Death Card literally “turns up” in a reading. It’s as if I pulled a knife on them or something. When I see this happen (which is frequently) I have to marvel at the naive credulity of our species. If I flashed a policeman’s badge at them, I doubt I would get half the reaction I see in these instances. Their eyes pop out and they will often recoil and groan with despair. That’s how powerful woo is in 2009. This symptom of our situation as a free thinking society frightens me far more than a picture of a skeletal guy on a horse printed on a card distributed by U.S. Games Inc.

Unless you have a knowledge of the Tarot, cards like Death, The Hanged Man, The Tower and The Devil can register immediate dread and fear on the faces of the innocent and uninitiated. Unscrupulous readers take complete advantage of this potentail to control the weak minded, but I prefer to turn it into a educational mini-lecture on perception and fear. I usually tell a sitter that, “…There’s no such thing as a bad Tarot card, only a bad Tarot reader.” If that doesn’t sink in, I might add, “…It’s just like pit bulls. There’s no such thing as a bad pit bull, only bad pit bull owners.” This usually calms the more impressionable folks and gets them to sit back down and lighten up.

Over the years, I designed my own version of the Major Arcana of the Tarot to try to put a contemporary “spin” on the old gypsy con and give my sitters a window to a whole new way of experiencing a reading with cards. Even in a Halloween carnival, what I’m doing doesn’t have to be attached to anything evil or sinister. I really try to be a somewhat reasonable and critically thinking seer. Yes, it’s possible to educate the masses and give them a lesson in skepticism right under their new age noses.  

For example, The Tower card traditionally means a sort of wake-up call; seeing the truth of where you stand and accepting that what you may have thought of as safe and secure may not be quite so safe and secure after all. The positive aspect of this card’s meaning is that once you see the truth and accept it, you can go on without living in an illusion. I’m telling them to wake up, search for truth and stop accepting the world at face value. Not a bad thing to tell anyone is it? Hold on. I’m not done yet…

To illustrate this point and get away from the traditional medieval archetype image of a castle blown to pieces in a lightning storm as in the typical Rider-Waite Tarot design , I used a collage of semi 9/11 images (see below) to illustrate the same point. For The Emperor; I used Elvis and for The Hanged Man, I pictured Houdini hanging from a skyscraper.

The New Mark Edward Tarot

The Real Hogwarts: Another Room at Necromance