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Cocktails and predictions: Tarot cards add zing to the corporate party
Naples Daily News, July 28, 2002
http://www.naplesnews.com/02/07/neapolitan/d793415a.htm
Sunday, July 28, 2002
By MARIEE PILKINGTON, Columbia News Service
NEW YORK — At this year’s corporate party, Angelica Taranto, a secretary at Cravath, Swaine and Moore, made sure she got to the Rainbow Room early to beat the line. She knew from last year’s get-together at the swank penthouse restaurant in midtown Manhattan that there would be a crowd — all for the tarot card reader.
No longer the province of boardwalks and carnival booths, tarot card readers are popping up in the most unlikely places, among the gray suits and wine spritzers of the corporate party. To enliven the cocktails and hors d’ouevres atmosphere, corporate party planners have made tarot card readers a staple feature of the fun and games at these annual events.
[...]
Back in 1993 when the party scene started humming after the lean years at the end of the 1980s, Nanus first added four tarot card readers to her offerings. Today she employs 12. A typical lineup at a big corporate bash will consist of four readers, two caricaturists and then maybe celebrity look-a-likes or photographers taking digital pictures, she says. Her clients are a who’s who of Manhattan’s top companies, including the investment bank Goldman Sachs, the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather and BlueCross BlueShield insurance.
[...]
Tarot evolved from a group of 22 playing cards called tarocchi used in 16th century Italy that were added to an extant deck of 56. In the late 18th century, the French started using the cards for fortune telling. In today’s tarot decks, the 22 cards are the trump cards with such fantastical illustrations of characters dubbed the Fool, the Devil, the Sun, the Lover and Death and the 56 cards, consisting of kings, queens, knights and knaves.
A reader will use a person’s birth date to signal many of the predictions, adding the numbers from the month, day and year in a complex formula, the results of which correspond with particular cards in the deck. If the numerological deductions or the final number correspond to the Emperor and Death cards, for example, they represent organization and movement in the client’s character and life.
Outside the party scene, a reading can last as long as two hours.
[...]
The draw is easy to understand, says Joe Nickell, senior research fellow at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, in Buffalo, N.Y. In the end, we are all interested in ourselves, he says.
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