My Tarot Master
I follow a strange inner prompting, find myself being channelled, and take my leave of an enlightened tarot master…
I am sitting facing the wall, beneath the sloping ceiling. Rain taps steadily against the narrow gable windows. It is late November, already dark outside. The air is stuffy — there are more than twenty of us in the cramped room. Every Thursday evening a meditation group meets here to practise Zen, shoulder to shoulder.
I began a few months ago. Keeping my concentration at home alone is difficult. During the introductory course, the Zen teacher recommended the weekly group practice. “For beginners,” he explained, “it is much easier to hold the note in a choir than as a soloist.” He was right, I discovered. So I come here regularly, my zafu — the meditation cushion — tucked under my arm, to complete three rounds of sitting meditation and two of walking meditation. Zen practice takes place in silence: I know everyone by sight, but have never spoken to anyone in the group.
I sit and listen into the stillness, aware of my breath, my body, and the others around me.
Then a voice sounds within me. “You must write to Ziegler!” it says, very firmly. This tears me from my concentration. I shake my head in confusion, push the intrusive thought aside, and try again simply to be present and think of nothing. In vain. A few minutes later the tiresome voice returns: “You must write to Ziegler!”
Automatically, the “VII” from the Major Arcana comes to mind — “The Chariot.” And with it, the maxim of that very Ziegler whom my persistent inner voice insists I write to: “Intuitions that arise during meditation deserve attention and should be heeded.”
Ah.
The fact that I am sitting on this cushion in meditation posture at all is, in a certain sense, thanks to Ziegler. And to another of his maxims on “VII” — “The Chariot”: “From a certain point in our personal development, regular meditation is not a luxury but a necessity.”
During my morning meditation the following day, the message from my inner voice the previous evening stays with me. Why, exactly, am I supposed to write to Ziegler?
Although his two books on tarot are something like my personal bible, I have never given much thought to their author. In both books, the last page carries a vague black-and-white photograph of him. I have a rough idea of what he might look like — or rather, what he once looked like, some years ago — but that is all. I have never googled him, and I cannot recall ever asking myself what the man who taught me to read the cards might actually be like.
No matter, I decide, as I settle at my desk, coffee cup beside the laptop. An inner prompting is an inner prompting — there is nothing to argue with. I take out writing paper and a fountain pen. This will be a personal letter; I will not type it. The only question is: what on earth do I write to this mysterious Gerd B. Ziegler?
I stare absently through the window at the grey, wet garden. Images rise in me: I see myself walking with a friend through a dark, rainy night. The wet asphalt gleams, leaves rustle underfoot. We are on our way to an acquaintance of hers who is going to read the cards for me. It was the night I first encountered tarot. The following day I bought my first deck, together with Ziegler’s companion book. It must have been late November — around this same time of year. How long ago was that? Twenty-five years! For exactly twenty-five years I have been reading tarot cards following Gerd B. Ziegler’s guidance.
That, I think, is truly a reason to write. A letter of thanks. Now the words come easily: that his wise books have accompanied me for more then two decades, how grateful I am for his counsel, that my life without him would have taken a different — and certainly worse — course. It takes no more than twenty minutes, and then I am done.
I address the envelope to the publisher, stick on a stamp, and drop the letter in the postbox on my way to the shops that afternoon. By the time the flap clangs shut behind it, I have already forgotten about it. Mission accomplished.
Which is why what happens two weeks later catches me completely off guard. It is a Sunday. Outside it is wet, cold and grey, and I decide to allow myself a day off. Unkempt and in my pyjamas, I am lying in bed at two in the afternoon reading Harry Potter and eating chocolate.
Suddenly something hits me with such force that I am nearly flung out of the bed. Startled and bewildered, I look around — and “see,” hovering above my head, a man sitting at a desk, holding a letter in his hand, peering over the top of it and scrutinising me intently. It is as though a window has suddenly opened in the wall.
I gasp: that is my letter, and the man is unmistakably the author of my tarot books. It lasts only a few seconds, and then the strange apparition is gone. Apart from wondering, once again, whether I might be going mad, it has thoroughly ruined my afternoon. I have no interest whatsoever in being inspected while lying in bed in my pyjamas, eating chocolate and reading Harry Potter. However extraordinary the form of contact, I do not want this. The letter was a thank-you, not an invitation to intrude.
After a few hours I have digested the peculiar visitation and forget about it again. Christmas is in two weeks. I have other things to think about than occult oddities.
Three days later I pull a golden envelope from the letterbox along with the newspaper. I am astonished — an early Christmas greeting? In the kitchen I find that Gerd B. Ziegler has actually written back to me. From his private address.
How very much my words of thanks had moved him, he writes — by hand — and he invites me to attend one of his upcoming tarot courses in Switzerland as his guest. The next is in February, another in June. His assistant knows the details; her number is enclosed; I should contact her to discuss everything further.
I have to sit down. Was this what my inner voice intended when it instructed me to write the letter?
I rack my brains over whether to accept the invitation. When I attend my Thursday meditation group, I still have not reached a decision.
As I sit quietly on my zafu, trying to focus only on my breath and nothing else, a song suddenly comes into my head. By the Beatles. “You say hello and I say goodbye! Hello, hello — I don’t know why you say hello, I say goodbye…”
An earworm. I cannot get rid of it, however hard I try to return to concentration. Walking to my car in the dark after the meditation, I find myself humming the song absently. Then it stops me in my tracks. Wait. The words that came to me are wrong. The song actually goes the other way around: “You say goodbye, I say hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.”
Now I understand what I must do.
The following morning I write a second letter to Gerd B. Ziegler: that I wish to thank him for his generous invitation, but have only now understood why I wrote to him in the first place — because I wanted to take my leave of him, formally. Which I hereby do.
I post the letter and never hear from Gerd B. Ziegler again.
Three months after sending the farewell letter, I meet my first Zen teacher.
Only once I have formally become a student of a teacher for the first time do I understand that Gerd B. Ziegler was not only my wise tarot master, but also my first meditation teacher. And that it had been necessary to close what was unfinished, in order to be open to what was about to enter my life. Exactly as he had recommended in “VII” — “The Chariot.”
The “B” in Gerd B. Ziegler, incidentally, stands for “Bodhi” — the Enlightened One. I never met him in person. But it might be true.
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