Interview with Christine Payne-Towler

BC: I was (and am!) very impressed with your work in “The Underground Stream”. What led to the publication of this book?

CPT: Mary Greer started me thinking about doing that. My neighbor during the early 1980’s (Tina Rosa, who ultimately helped me shape the chapters) talked about us to each other for a few years, and then finally found a way to introduce Mary and I later in the decade. I still have the notes Mary scribbled down as she quizzed me in her intense way, about what I would say if I was going to write a book. She basically handed them over after our chat and challenged me to write it up and share it with the world. It only took me 15 years to follow through and get it done. Endless thanks, Mary!

Ultimately, I got tired of saying the same thing over and over, year after year. My students kept giving me copies of their class tapes for my archives, so it seemed like the logical thing to do was get it all transcribed and down into print. My husband of the time was a publisher in his own right, so making a book out of it seemed as natural as falling off a log. Of course, I didn’t have any objectivity about it, had no idea what was going on at the discussion groups and Tarot conventions of the day, and had no clue how it would be received.

I also had very low computer skills, which became an issue when we endured a terrible loss during the last six weeks of production as well. My content editor Tina Rosa’s husband, Steve Rogers, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died as the book was going to the press. He had been the one who transcribed most of the tapes into computer files for me, and Tina was one of my long-time students. Of course this changed all our plans, including our division of labor in the final polishing-up stages. In the final few weeks, Steve and Tina had to leave the state to seek treatment, while my then-husband (the book’s designer, Solala Towler) had a teaching trip scheduled that he couldn’t cancel, so I was left with the manuscript needing things I didn’t know how to do. The thought of Steve’s intrepid transcribing even during his final weeks spurred me on to keep the deadline with the printer, in case Steve might live to see it completed. Tragically, he did not. But the book, such as it is, reminds me how a few dedicated folks, even against great odds, can make something together that transcends time and circumstances.

It also reminds me that ideals of perfection cannot blind us to the goal. Even imperfect, the book is doing its job. And I thank Steve Rogers, Tina Rosa, and their daughter Churpa Rosa-Rodgers for putting so much love and heart into it with me at such a powerful time in their lives. During circumstances like that, you find out who your friends really are!

BC: I love the work that you have done for Tarot.com! How did you become involved with this site, and how do you view inter-active readings of this type?

CPT: Paul O’Brien, owner of Visionary Networks (the company that created Tarot.com) had a dream for years that he could put together a set of tools to serve up spiritual content in a way that would make sense in the computer age. He had already created several computer programs, one a brainstorming aid called Synchronicity, and one about the I Ching called the Oracle of Changes. Paul also co-hosts a radio show in Portland, Oregon, where he reviews new-age books and their authors. He invited me onto his show when I first moved to Portland in the mid-1980’s, and also again just as my family was moving back to Eugene again in 1991. So when he started thinking about creating a program with the Tarot in 1997, he called me.

The offer raised a conflict for me, because I was hip-deep in composing my book already, and was afraid of being sidetracked. Ultimately Paul and I agreed that I could include some of my chapters on the CDRom we were envisioning, and that soothed my concerns about the two projects competing for my loyalty. I ran them both simultaneously – I’d recover from the “grind” of cleaning up the Tarot.com interpretations by waxing lyrical over in my book chapters. For those two years, I lived, breathed, and ate Tarot!

Neither of us could visualize this at the time, but the amount of writing this program required was, even then, enough to fill a small phone book. But before that stage even came up, we had to design the way the computer was going to work with the text so that it could express a different slant on the card every time it fell into a different position across the range of spreads we had defined. We dissected the very act of interpreting the cards, what goes on inside the reader as the interpretation was forming. Only then could we determine the best way a computer could replicate the process.

At that time Paul was inexperienced with the Tarot, but his engineer Eric Rogers had a grandmother who was a Tarot reader, and Eric possessed her old Tarot deck. He put a huge amount of his own time into envisioning how to create a virtual pack of cards that would act like a real pack, keeping it’s unique identity from use to use and fulfilling the true bell curve that a brand-new, bandbox-order deck goes through as it permutes through every possible arrangement. This gave me the confidence to take all 78 cards through their individual range of meaning-permutations too.

You’ve got to understand, nobody had done this before us. Now you see variations on our invention in a lot of places. People saw the genius of its design, analyzed what we did, and reverse-engineered their own versions with new text. But it was Visionary Networks – Paul, Eric and I -- who made all that real, so it could look easy and obvious to the user. We changed the face of Tarot online!

Over the two years of writing it all up, fellow readers told me over and over again “What are you thinking? This can’t work! You have to have a human interpreter there to explain it to the client”. I, too, had always held the belief that Tarot’s answers would not be comprehensible without the presence of a live reader to interpret the oracle. For years I had been turning down the chance to do telephone readings in cases where the caller didn’t have their own cards to handle. So what was I doing thinking that I could write out a generic set of meanings that would ‘automatically’ be somehow relevant to the unknown client and their situation?

Nevertheless, was stubborn, even in the face of my own fears. I kept thinking, “ I am the human interpreter in question, and we have created the program to mimic how my mind works in the act of interpretation. It stands to reason that if I keep the language open enough, people will see for themselves where it applies”. And, for the most part, this is what happens.

For me, this was a chance to assert that the cards themselves have inherent meanings, independent of which deck the reader is using, independent of whether there was a reader present to make sense of it all. In my experience, Tarot readings had been apt every time I used the cards, whether I knew what I was doing or not. Otherwise, nobody would ever get beyond their earliest beginner’s books and decks! Tarot works well as a do-it-yourself art; at least that’s how it was for all of us in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. In my youth as a reader, relatively few people knew much about Tarot, nor was there the glut of books on the market that we find now. Yet and still, we still muddled through.

The goal was to make the self-evident part of Tarot, the part that tutored me through my ‘tarot infancy’, come forward for the computer users. We figured that, for many people, this might be their very first exposure to the cards and how they work. If there was any chance that this writing would be useful enough to live on, the interpretations had to be lucid to the complete newbie.

To be fair to the disbelievers we encountered, it’s totally true that we were flying blind. There was no way to test out whether this was a good idea or not other than to just do it. This not the kind of thing you can do a partial job of to figure out whether it’s viable or not! But I figured, when all was said and done, what did I have to loose? It was another case of thinking, “I have been saying these things over and over for years already, let’s just get it written down!” It truly felt like a huge load was lifted off my back to finally give it a fixed form, so the text could be helpful to people whether I was there or not.

To get the bare bones of the meanings into text form, here’s how I worked: I culled my favorite packs of cards out of my collection, taking the same card out of every pack I wanted help from. I had invented a giant spread with a position for every meaning-module I needed to write. So I laid out my giant spread filled with favorite examples of that card, putting a version of it into every position. Then I dictated it all into my tape recorder as if it were a reading for a client. “When the two of coins is in the Self position, it indicates that… When the two of coins is in the Blocks position, it suggests that….”, and etc. (This was another batch of transcribing that Steve and Tina did for me, may their names resound in heaven for the ages!)

Of course there were endless edits as well, but at least after the dictation was put into files, there was something tangible to work with. I never had to confront the dreaded “blank page” problem. Also, thank God and all the angels for word processing, without which I would never have had the courage to proceed!

What I didn’t know at the time was that my vision, my balance, and my interior gyroscope were slowly coming unglued as I was working on these two projects, and the computer was a big component of the problem. My nervous system turns out not to be standard-issue (big surprise!), and the strain of the writing and editing on the box-style computer monitor I had became the straw that broke the camel’s back. Shortly after the CD and the book came out, just when I should have been running around the country marketing them, I crossed the point of no return and started into a slow collapse and reassembly, which I’m only just now finally on the other side of.

To compensate for not being able to travel and teach, I got engaged in several years of intense argumentation at the Yahoo discussion group TarotL. This was where I found out what kind of a reception my book was getting – which was hugely stressful, but also hugely exciting. Finally I was communicating with people who cared about Tarot, even if they didn’t agree with me! Despite the continued strain on my nervous system (I got a gel screen computer), this enormously stimulating conversation kept me intellectually and psychologically alive while both my senses and my family life were dissolving/resolving around me.

By 2004 I was divorced and moving away to the state of Washington. The miraculous blossoming of the Tarot Magic CDRom into the hugely popular Tarot.com website made it possible for me to survive those losses and rebuild my life on new terms. Now more than ever I am hugely grateful for the opportunity to have done that work, even though it was a major part of my downfall as well.

The fact is, we have to be willing to accept our spiritual assignments when they come to us, no matter what the task or the cost. Even professional psychics like myself cannot know the future, but if we can live in the present saying Yes to our highest vision, then whatever else happens, that Yes energy will carry forward and improve the world. Eventually, our efforts might even wrap around and take care of us too!

BC: What would you tell someone that wanted to approach the Tarot as an initiatory path?

CPT: Well, that last bit was a great lead-in to your question, eh?

Tarot is an initiatory path whether one approaches it that way or not. The images, the names, the numbers and the overall “pack of spirits” format of the Tarot, they all ensure that it is psychologically sticky. These characters and values get into us and start working on our understanding -- the next thing one knows, they are talking in to the back of our minds and showing up in our dreams! Every student I have tutored experiences this, and I encourage it. If a person doesn’t have much of an inner life when then start with the Tarot, they surely will grow one if they keep up with it and develop a regular practice.

But different people have different tolerances for the realization that we are immersed and embedded in conscious energies, literally swimming through a matrix of sentience every second of our lives. Tarot can be creepy; it’s so spot-on so much of the time! People also have differently-calibrated interior equipment, meaning that the same stimulus will hit different people entirely differently. So no two people will experience the Tarot’s operation and effects alike. Each person has to find out for himself or herself “what makes it real”, so they can accept this tool on their own terms.

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