TAROT - How to Read the Cards

Evangeline Adams was born during the Victorian era. She came from the Boston area, in her own words, "the most conservative circle of that conservative city". Some of her forebears had been Congregationalist ministers, and this conservative religious group was the successor to the Massachusetts Colony's Puritans. Although Adams would from young adulthood espouse untraditional views and unorthodox beliefs, her upbringing was what would in those days have been termed "quite proper." Extremely independent and liberal-thinking, Adams nonetheless had as part of her nature a strict sense of social morality. Her telling and sometimes humorous account of an early consultation with a prostitute gives us insight into her background. "That first interview in Boston prostrated me. I wasn't myself for weeks. And I have the same reaction even now on a less violent scale." Here we have a woman with a certain moral code. And we can expect that she will always try to conduct herself in a manner consistent with good taste and proper decorum. Strong social forces forced Evangeline to keep her private life private.

Adams' impressionistic style is what makes her writing so enjoyable. But as we have seen, it also make it quite difficult to verify particulars; intuition must fill in the gaps. Her writing technique, which I feel was quite natural, contributed to what I view as the "myths" which surround Adams. Many stories are so richly symbolic and almost parable-like that they lend themselves quite easily to embellishment upon repetition.

Take, for instance, Adams' arrest for fortune-telling in New York in 1914. Many publications have repeated the fiction that Evangeline made astrology legal in New York. Anyone who took a look at Section 889 of the NY Criminal Code would see that it still remained illegal for anyone to "tell fortunes." So where does this misleading statement originate?