Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Rev. Dr. Aphrodette North explains a students card during a tarot class.

More

Multimedia

• A "share group" to handle the mysteries of the cards.

Tarot study group

• Aphrodette North's group meets the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7 p.m. at the Lifestream Center, 2006 Windsor Ave. S.W. Roanoke. Call (540) 344-3031 or (540) 400-0110 for more information.

What is tarot?

• A tarot deck has 78 cards, each with a symbolic picture.

• Tarot readers use the cards to solve problems, to read futures and for divination.

• Tarot decks come in a variety of themes, from biblical to Wiccan to da Vinci sketches.

• Source: Aeclectic Tarot

Aphrodette North glanced down and grimaced.

"The worst card in the deck," she said, her face twisted with worry. "Ten of swords. Total ruin."

Aphrodette, an astrologer, psychic and tarot reader, was leading a tarot gathering at Lifestream, a center for the mind, body and spirit on Grandin Road in Roanoke.

Seven students each had spread 13 tarot cards in a circle. Aphrodette was helping them decipher their cards when bam, right there in her own spread, in the sixth house, the one related to jobs, health, employment and pets, sat the 10 of swords.

"How do you read this?" she said, asking the group to interpret the card. The two men and five women were silent.

Aphrodette, a 53-year-old whose given name is Joy Gambon, has been studying astrology and tarot for close to 30 years.

A small woman with pumpkin-colored hair and an addiction to pencil-length Virginia Slims menthol cigarettes, Aphrodette runs Inner Mysteries Profiled from a Colonial Avenue office building that also houses insurance salespeople and the regional Alzheimer's Association.

Aphrodette charges $100 an hour and $60 a half-hour for horoscope and tarot readings, which include a taped copy of the session.

Many of Aphrodette's customers live far from Roanoke and contact her by phone. She tells them how to find lost pets, when to incorporate their businesses and if their spouses are cheating.

Mostly, she tells them what's going on with the stars, and how the heavens control what is happening in their lives.

Twice a month, Aphrodette also leads the tarot gathering at Lifestream.

Tarot, she said, is an introspective art, a method of using cards to tease problems, possibilities and secrets from a person's subconscious.

"People keep secrets even from themselves, which is why they do tarot," she said.

The origins of tarot are obscure, but the cards probably date back to 15^th-century Italy, where players used them in a game similar to bridge. Centuries later, practitioners of the occult rediscovered the cards and used them to predict the future.

A tarot deck is made up of 78 cards, each with a symbolic picture on one side.

To read tarot, a person picks cards from the deck and lays them in a pattern called a spread. In some spreads, the cards rest in positions called houses, which represent parts of life ranging from sex to self-image to siblings.

A tarot reader draws meaning from the placement of each card.

On a recent evening at Lifestream, the tarot group included office workers, a Web administrator, a store clerk and a college student. Each paid $10 for the two-hour session.

Instead of reading their cards, Aphrodette helped the group read their own spreads, then told them what she saw.

Lailah Glick, a 30-year-old whose mother taught her to read cards, carried her own Wiccan-inspired tarot deck in a wooden box to the gathering along with a rough chunk of crystal.

"Most of the women in my family read cards," she said. "For me it is a sort of self-exploration. The cards help us delve into our psyche."

In Glick's spread, the five of pentacles sat in the house dealing with relationships. The card pictured a gully with two rocky cliffs leading up to a shimmering blue sky far off in the distance.

"What do you see?" Aphrodette asked.

Glick said the card spoke to a relationship she was climbing out of. It was over, but she was still stuck at the bottom of the gulf, trying to climb beyond it.

Yes, you are at the bottom of the gulf, Aphrodette told Glick, but you are looking up, at the sky, which is good.

This is the way tarot works. Each card is a jumping off point, a Rorschach blot that is read and interpreted. Then the reader gives advice.

What a reader sees in the card is subjective, Aphrodette said. But how the cards fall on the spread, she believes, has nothing to do with chance.

"It is impossible to choose the wrong card," she said. It's synchronicity, a coincidence so full of meaning it can only be part of an underlying pattern.

Around the table at Lifestream, there were no doubters.

Julie Hunsaker, a former owner of The Grandin Theatre, was visiting from Austin, Texas.

Tonight, the cards in Hunsaker's spread did not auger well. The cards said she was struggling with her sense of belonging and comfort at home.

The cards also did not look good for Aphrodette.

In the sixth house, which relates to work, health, illness and pets, sat a card covered with silver swords, one piercing a heart.

The 10 of swords. Total ruin.

Aphrodette asked the group to help read the card. The group was silent.

"I think I know what it is," the tarot reader said, her face twisted in worry.

A sick cat had been showing up on her doorstep, she told the group. She had turned it away, fearful that it would infect her cats. Still, she was worried.

It was a problem the cards said she needed to solve.