The first thing that Ellen Goldberg, an 81-year-old who resides mostly in Woodstock, New York, asks me when I am (finally) able to get her on the phone is when my birthday is. Then she wants the place and time of birth, along with close-up photos of both my right and left hands. Also, if I use Venmo.
This may seem like the set-up for a story about identity theft, but in fact, this was a woman preparing to give me a very thorough reading.
That was the idea, anyway. In the past week, I have called, emailed, and direct-messaged Goldberg, the founder of The School of Oracles, seeking a tarot-reading lesson. Tarot is something I’ve been skeptically curious about since my days as an assistant at Goop, but the ancient practice—purported to give you insight into the past, present, and future—has recently come back into the cultural conversation, with Celine’s Trevor Ballin hosting readings for the fashion set and an exhibition on tarot recently running at Manhattan’s Morgan Library and Museum.
Claire Gilman, a curator of the Morgan Library’s exhibit, previously told Vogue that in a cultural climate as fraught as our own, a return to the cards makes sense. “It’s in these moments of uncertainty [that] we look to other ways of understanding our lives that lie outside of standard methods,” she said.
I found Goldberg through her website, which advertises tarot and palmistry classes, along with straight-up readings. A lesson seemed to go something like this: prepare a deck of tarot cards (she suggests buying a used Rider-Waite-Smith set), pull, and discuss. My version was a bit more chaotic.
After navigating some computer trouble, Goldberg and I are finally face-to-face on Zoom. She’s wearing a black turtleneck, her snow-white hair pulled back from her face with coordinating barrettes. Her eyes, the color of a chestnut mare, are majorly magnified by her wireless glasses. (I’m charmed by this because it reminds me of my first introduction to a mystic: Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter.) But before our lesson begins, she pauses. Where are the photos of my palms? When I assure her that I sent them over text, she closes the Zoom room to look. Several more texts and three calls later, we pick things up again over the phone.
A reading commences, and it’s the most I’ve ever focused on my hands outside of my bi-weekly nail appointments. “Because you are right-handed, that means your left hand shows the qualities you were given at birth, and you right hand changes as you change,” Goldberg says. “Everything changes as we change, and it’s reflected in the palm. This is where you can see everything.” (At that moment, I’m relieved we’re no longer on camera because my jaw drops. You can see everything? I’ve spent the last two weeks in a spiral over Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary. But then again, I’m not alone in that.)
