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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you. Julia Gordon Bramer with US. Professional Tarot card reader, scholar, award winning writer and poet, former professor of the graduate writing program at Lyndenwood University. That's where we had our live show a few years ago. By the way, She's the author of several books, including Fixed Star's Governor, Life Decoding Sylvia Plath and Tarot Life Lessons. Hello, Julia, Welcome.
Hi George.
Nice to be here, looking forward to this. You're in Saint Louis. I am too, in a hidden location.
Oh wonderful the weather.
The weather has been amazing, hasn't it.
Oh it's yeah, gorgeous. In fact, I'm covered with mosquito bites for something. They just got me in the last bit of the season here.
Oh yeah, their last, their last, hurrah, I think, isn't it. Hey, Julia, how long have you been involved with the Tarot cards? Oh?
Wow? So I started reading when I was sixteen years old, and this month I will be turning sixty, so we're looking at forty five years.
Well, happy birthday. How'd you get involved in this? What got you into it?
You know? I tell the story in the first chapter of my book, Tara Life Lessons. I was, as I said, I was sixteen. I wandered into a mall on a hot summer day and there was a magic shop there. This was in the nineteen seventies, so magic shops were not what they are today. You know, today we have these New Age shops with crystals and pendulums and all kinds of spiritual books. They did not exist in the
nineteen seventies. What I walked into was gag gifts and rabbits and hats and you know, foam balls that you can hide up your sleeve, that sort of thing. And there was this young woman behind the counter who was maybe about four or five years older than me, but to a teenage girl, I mean, she seemed to possess all the wisdom of the universe. And she looked at me and said, do you want to see some real magic? And she guided me to the tarot deck and she
showed me the cards and that was it. I was spellbound and my life took a turn and I never looked back.
What are there seventy two cards in the deck.
There's seventy eight cards at seventy eight uh huh.
And what do you think of the death card? I mean, I've had Tarot card readers tell me it doesn't mean you're going to die.
No, not at all. It's a card of transformation. So people see it and they get scared because of all the movie stuff, you know, sure, but the death card is saying the old life is behind you and you're in a whole new life. So you may see the death card when you graduate, or when you get married, or when you have children, you know, anything, when you retire,
anything that everything's changed. And the thing about the change is that it is scary because we don't know what the new life looks like, right, So you've got just that fear of the unknown. But it can also be very exciting. So the death card is usually considered positive, a card of transformation.
Julia, do you find that more and more people are getting interested in serialt cards and readings?
Well, what I know from my clients is that these are very dark times and people need something, you know, whether we want to say faith. I mean I was telling some clients at a festival I worked this weekend. You know, every day I start my day and I ask Spirit, God, whatever you'd like to call it, to let me be a channel of love and life and to you know, just to be something positive in these
dark times. And I think people need that. And the other thing I think is that in all of this world chaos, people tend to diminish their own problems and they tend to say, well this is you know, I'm not important, you know, not compared to Israel and Gaza, you know. And so I through the Taro am away to see them and hear them and acknowledge what, you know, what people go through on personal levels, because our day to day stuff does not change. We still have it even in these really hard times.
From the book Taro Life Lessons the subtitle Living Wisdom from the Major Arcana. What is the major Arcana?
So, as you mentioned, the Taro has seventy eight cards. Twenty two of those cards are the major arkana and those are the milestones. Those are the famous tarot cards that you do see in the movies, like the Fool, like the Love, like the Death Card, the Hermit that we've all we probably all know the Hermit best from the Led Zeppelin four album. If if you're of a certain age and you know it's uh, those are they're the the big deals. The every culture has these milestones.
We have a card for the mother figure, the fathers, uh, the elders. We have a cards for money, we have a cards for you know, cards for temptation and uh and and collapse. You know, we've all had our dark nights of the soul. So there's a Tarot card for what Carl Jung would call the process of individual individually and individualization, what Joseph Campbell would call the hero's journey, uh, the sort of process of life that we all go through.
And I so the major Hannah is especially meaningful. The minor Arkhana is also very helpful. That aligns more along with a regular deck of playing cards, and that the minor Arkhana is thought to be the more day to day stuff. But the major Kana are those those big issues.
It's fascinating, indeed, And you use a lot of stories in the Terror Life Lessons book from real life episodes tell us about that.
Yeah, yeah, so these all came from my journals over the years. And you know, my husband has always said, you know, you got a lot of good stories you
should write about that. And I never really thought about it until COVID, honestly, and they were they were all written because I had journaled them, and so during COVID, I just put it all together and I had very much of what I would call a god moment where I had a fan letter on Instagram about some of my I'm also with Sylvia play a scholar and a young woman had read my other three books on Plath and her mysticism, which a lot of people don't know about,
and she said that, you know, she was really interested in that. And I told her about this project that I was kind of working on during quarantine, and she said, oh, I want you to talk to my editor friend over at Inner Traditions, and she connected us and they just snapped it up on the spot and they are also going to be publishing via Cult Sylvia Plath next year. So I am just so blessed and could not be
more pleased with my publisher, honestly. But as far as these stories go, yeah, they're real life stories of clients that have had especially interesting, you know, situations with me. I'm not just dishing. It's not just gossip because I process my end of it. So you're going to see how human I am as a Tarot card reader. I am not the guru who's sitting up on a mountaintop,
you know, telling everybody how to live. You're going to see me wrestling with boundaries and insecurities and occasionally being a bit intimidated. Every story is different. There are there are murders, there are scam artists. There are people who are so very desperate for love, and you know, and I think we know all of these people. I think they're universal stories. There are gold diggers, there are people
struggling with children who have died. And so I've matched each story to one of the major Arkana tarot cards, just a sort of the overriding theme. That's an idea I got from Sylvia Plath, my literary mentor, and it gives it a nice flow. If you are a tarot card reader, you will see and understand how I read the cards. Also helpful for people who are interested in the taro. But if you are just looking for a
good story, you know you can. You don't have to focus on the tarot details that it's not overloaded with those. This is not a how to read tarot book, because there are way too many of those already. I wanted real life application of taro. I wanted people to see how taro is used in real life with real people.
And you don't hold back to you. I mean, if you see something strange and unusual and maybe even sad and dangerous, you've let it go, don't you.
Yeah. Yeah, And because these are my journals, George, I really felt, you know, as I was coming to look at seriously publishing this, I really questioned, do I want to put all this stuff in there about me? But I decided, yeah, you know, let's be real and vulnerable. And I am a believer that your heart has to be open to touch other people. And some people may laugh at me, you know, I talk about some visions I had, I talk about, you know, as I said, just some of my insecurities and just how I deal
with this stuff. I think you'll come out of the books knowing I am, you know, for one of Saint Louis's top ten psychics, and all the labels they put on me, I am very very human, and so yeah, there I have not held back maybe two embarrassing amounts of truth telling take.
Us through a hypothetical tarot card reading and just explain to us visually what you're doing. Somebody comes to you what happens.
So I usually say, first of all that Taro puts Taro shows you the path that you're on. I am showing you what you already know on a higher subconscious level, and I am mirroring it back to you. So there is a validation in taro. A lot of times people think they know what's going to happen, or they may have a lot of anxiety or a lot of excitement or something, and the tarot will bring clarity to that.
But that said, if we see something coming up in the future that you don't like, it is an opportunity to do it differently. So I'm never going to tell someone that they're doomed. As I said, these are energies and so we can say, okay, this hasn't happened yet, and let's let's change that energy. And so the tarot card's very good for giving advice, very good for you know, I'm showing you the path that you're on if you
don't do anything different. So usually for a new client, I begin with a very traditional spread called the Celtic Cross, and some people do it with ten cards. I learned with eleven cards, and the Celtic Cross is a basic past, present, and future with three core cards that are kind of a snapshot of who you are today, and so it'll talk about your core issues and the things you're struggling with and how people see you. Those are those first
three core cards. The card above at the very top of the spread is sort of where all your attention and energy is going. The card below tends to be the present day. The card to the left the far left is your recent past, and to the far right is your near future, usually within the next six months. And then there are this column of cards that runs up the side. Some Tarot card readers will say that that column is sort of the direction of your entire life.
I personally think that's ridiculous. I don't think any of us have any sense of our entire lives. I read that is the next two years, So my reading tends to be about two years out. Where you're going, where your attention is, what might be tripping you up, what you might want to focus on to build and grow and you know, and what you might want to change.
Interesting now when you're with a person physically and they're there with you, who picks the card? You were them?
If they're with me physically, I'll usually have them pick and they have the added option of choosing what deck to use. And I'm a little different from a lot of Tarot card readers because I do like to offer a selection of decks I have found and I have hosted some of these on my Instagram. By the way, I have found that people choose the exact right deck they need, and time and time again, cards will show
up that look exactly like them. So it's very interesting that the artwork really calls to people and that they are right there in it, you know, And how does that happen? That's part of the magic, right But I have so they choose the deck in person, over the phone or video readings, and I do readings for people all over the world, you know, lots of international callers will will get me on WhatsApp and we'll do phone and video readings that way, and I will show them
the cards and I pull the cards for them. But some people like the phone because there's just a little bit more anonymity. Some people feel very you know, they don't want me to to see them, or you know, they feel just exposed for people who are very very guarded on their privacy. I have regular email clients, and email works a little bit differently. I just have them send me all the questions that they want me to look at, and then I figure out what the time
is going to take and what that will cost. There's a little extra time because of course I have to type it all out, but I am a fast typist because I'm also a writer, so I you know, I will give a price for that that's not just the standard three dollars a minute that my my regular phone and video clients and in personal clients pay. And then I also come to events for parties, and that's a whole other thing.
Interesting take now, when we do a phone calls next hour and you do readings for our listeners, are you going to pull like one card?
It depends on the question, so, you know, because I imagine we're going to be keeping this moving and I'm not going to be spending fifteen minutes on one person, right a couple minutes reach, Yeah, I'll probably do. I'll probably do one to three cards, depending on the depth of the question. How much information I need.
Interesting, Now, if someone's Tarot cards reveal something negative, how often do you temper it?
Almost never, because I find that that negative information is something that they need to know. Before I start. I usually have a short meditation which I've already done before the show, where I ask for who I speak to that I give the message they most need. So I am going to trust that if that negativity comes up, they're ready to hear it and to change it. And do they sometimes. You know, some people are really attached to things like addictions or you know, or even feeling
like the victim, and that will keep you stuck. If you see yourself as just going to suffer and have hard times, you know, I can point that out, and I can show you that you actually do have power in your life to shift out of that, and I can show you how to shift out of it. But you have to want to.
Interesting take. Have you ever had a client lose it in front of you?
Oh? Yeah? Really more often, more often than not, drugs or alcohol are involved. And I do like to say there's a reason we call alcohol spirits.
They walk in that way.
Yeah. It just you know the thing about especially a drunk person. And this is famous for when I do parties, right, and there's usually a lot of drinking, and so if someone is very drunk, I've come to decide. You know, usually I'll say that I prefer not to read for someone who's very drunk. But if the host has bought me for the event and most people are drinking, it can be a tough night for me. But you know, they'll see something like the death card and they may
try and read it themselves and panic. And you know, I remember one girl just wailing, thinking that her life was over, and there was almost nothing I could do to console her because she was just spiraling in her drunkenness. The other thing about drunks, they tend to ask me the same question.
Over an over and over again.
Yeah, holler at me, so it's not fun for me.
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