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I feel very blessed that I was gifted with a "heads up" from Deni Richter (www.worldtarotnetwork.com) about the new Enchanted World site (www.theenchantedworld.com). This absolutely stunning site showcases the life long efforts of husband and wife team Monte Farber and Amy Zerner - both their individual and their combined efforts. The work reflected on this site is extremely diverse - but it has one common goal: reflecting the sacred in life, and offering avenues to personal empowerment. I was extremely pleased when Monte agreed to do an interview for Gateway To Tarot - I feel that this couple still has a great deal more to say, so the podium now goes to Monte!
BC: Monte, "Enchanted World" is stunning in many ways - presentation, content and intent immediately come to mind. The "intent" part is what grabs my intention. Everything - literally everything! - that is offered on this site comes from the heart - from the sacred within you and Amy. How did it happen that your lives took this route?
MF: We are so glad that you understand our intention and our website so well. Like everything else we have created together, Amy and I have tried to make our Enchanted World website an expression and an extension of the enchanted world we’ve made together since 1975 and that we are lucky enough to live in every day. Of course, we have challenges and sorrows just like everyone else, but we also have the best relationship that we know or know of and that is the foundation and source of everything we do. The reason that you felt the heart connection with all the things that we offer on our website is that you felt the love that we share with each other; we try our best to put it into everything we do. Sharing Amy’s incredibly gorgeous fabric collage tapestry fantasy art ¾ which is really the heart and soul of all of our work ¾ and sharing our love and the techniques that have helped us attain and maintain our enchanted relationship, mixed with a large helping of compassion for others, for we’re all in the same boat, is what all of our books and tools, and now our Enchanted World website, are all about.
When I met Amy in 1974, she was an accomplished artist who was studying tarot and astrology and I was a studio musician who was studying Amy, so I learned about the tarot and astrology, too. I had no previous knowledge or understanding of what they were about, though I was very interested in the nature of personal reality. I was reading the “Seth” book with that very title, “The Nature of Personal Reality” by Jane Roberts at the time, and trying to get over the pain of my difficult childhood and the confusion of that difficult time by trying to understand reality in a logical way. Amy had had her own brand of difficult childhood, but her mother, the master illustrator Jessie Spicer Zerner, was an amazing and truly spiritual person and I was deeply moved by both she and Amy, despite her New York City edge, because my saving grace is that I can recognize the truth when I hear it and it was easy to hear and see that Jessie and Amy were real people, the kind of people I had never met before.
Before we met, we had each been using our art to make a living and as an expression of our beliefs and our search for meaning. As we learned more about astrology and the tarot, we began to explore and blend the magic and mystery we were coming to know with our unique takes on the times we were living in and our hopes for the future, too. We are both very practical people and if something is not useful in a pure and meaningful way, we will not have very much to do with it for long.
Astrology and the tarot were eminently practical and also the language of our love affair. Learning and growing in our understanding of both of these beautiful wisdom teachings fit perfectly with our desire to learn and grow as people and as a couple. We met in October and by the following May we were living together and on the road to working together.
BC: The work presented here is extremely diverse. How did it come about that you and Amy chose to present your work on one combined site?
MF: We never thought of doing it any other way until we read your question! It certainly would have been a lot less work and expense if we had decided to “just” put up our interactive Enchanted Tarot, which in itself represents several years of work in terms of the seventy-eight fabric collage tapestry tarot cards Amy created, the two books worth of text I wrote that is presented and spoken by the seven actors hired to give our tarot cards voices and the incredible animations that bring the cards to life (for those with high-speed internet access) that have just been rendered in Flash by the Workers of Electronic Miracles at Yikes, Inc., our incredible website designers.
However, as you said in your introduction to this article, our website showcases our life long efforts; we have made a lot of efforts during our life! Each of our creations is like a child to us and we don’t want to leave any of our children out of the light. We want everyone to know everything we’ve done because we are proud of it and especially because the main reason we have created our divination systems is to help people. We use them everyday and we want other people to benefit from using them every day like we do. We feel that we have a unique take on things and we want to continue adding our voice to the collective discussion about tarot, astrology, alchemy, The Goddess, affirmations, shamanism, and especially the development of everyone’s intuition and psychic powers - that is where my work is headed now.
I couldn’t write the way I do without Amy because without her I wouldn’t feel the way I do about life. She couldn’t make the beautiful, positive work she does without my support. We are a self-contained support system and that is what we are working to make our Enchanted World website into. To do otherwise would be like putting together a family album and leaving out pictures of those you love. Of course, like all life long efforts, our website is not complete, even though it already contains several times more content than the websites of some major corporations. But that gives our members and us a lot to look forward to!
BC: What part does working with oracles play in your lives?
MF: We use oracles every single day. In fact, we have used our oracles to help us create other oracles. It is a rare decision that is made around here without checking in with one of our “kids” for advice and guidance. And now that The Enchanted Tarot is online at our website, we can use it anywhere in the world with Internet access, though we always have our deck with us.
My first published oracle was “Karma Cards: A New Age Guide to Your Future Through Astrology,” which Penguin published in 1988. Since then we’ve created ten more and in each of them we have stressed that the purpose of an oracle, the purpose of divination, is to help you develop your creativity and intuition and especially to put you in touch with the divine within you. I’ve often stated that the ultimate goal of using an oracle is to develop your intuition to the point where you don’t need an oracle anymore, but it turns out that I was wrong on that count. After writing all of these books and doing all of these readings over the years, I have become quite an accurate psychic medium, but we still like to get readings from professional readers and we like to use our oracles to trigger further insights. When you’re asking about something that is very important to you, it is a good idea to get a second opinion and sometimes a third.
BC: I worked with the interactive Tarot oracle on your site, and got an absolutely stunning answer - one that really hit home. And yes - it was with the one card, free version of the oracle! Can you give us a little background on how the "Enchanted Tarot "(the deck used with this oracle) came about? (The interpretations are done in sections, which at first may seem non-traditional. When they are actually worked with, they work as they are meant to - they allow the Seeker to put the wisdom of the cards into their lives.)
MF: Amy had always wanted to create her own tarot deck, it is a great way for an artist to express her or his self. She is a National Endowment for the Arts award winning fine artist who is always working on a multitude of projects. She is the hardest working person I know and she is also the most positive person I know. She wanted to create a tarot deck that would express the benefits of maintaining a positive attitude in order to successfully deal with all of the challenges of life. She also knew that my brand of street-smart spirituality would help to bring our tarot system into balance and make it accessible to everyone, whether they came from the unspoiled endless mountains region of Pennsylvania like she originally did or the streets of Brooklyn, NY, like me.
We called our version “The Enchanted Tarot” for several reasons. We wanted the title to convey the magical quality that comes into one’s life when they become aware of the powerful synchronicity operating at all levels. The word “enchanted,” which literally translates as “to sing into,” has a very strong resonance with our childhood. Children’s books have always been an important thing to Amy since she was a child being read to and before. Her mother got her start at a very young age by writing a children’s book called “String” that got successfully published.
The three of us lived together and always helped each other with our various individual projects. Jessie and Amy got to collaborate on three children’s books towards the end of Jessie’s life, a real blessing for us all. Our home does have a sort of enchanted cottage feel to it, something noticed by everyone who visits.
Amy and I have a dear friend, Lori Solensten, who had a small publishing company that was going to publish my Karma Cards. She invited us to the 1986 American Booksellers Association convention (now called the BEA) in New Orleans so that we could learn about the book business. I had mocked up two sets of my Karma Cards and I had given her a set with my book proposal, and both of those sets kept giving us the worst answers about Lori’s company publishing them, but neither of us told that to the other until we got down to New Orleans. When we confided in each other, Lori told us to walk the show and see if we could find a bigger publisher.
While walking the aisles of the convention I spied a booth run by two very intriguing British gentlemen and displayed above their booth was The Book of Runes by Ralph Blum, which they had packaged to great success. I walked right up to them and said “I have an astrology card game that tells the future,” and rather then say “That’s very nice” and send me on my way, they said “Let’s play it!” They both did, got great answers, and it turned out that what they had asked was about the outcome of their packaging my Karma Cards, so we shook hands and that was that!
At the same exact moment a few booths away, Amy was meeting Stuart Kaplan of U.S. Games and showing him samples of her art. He was quite impressed and asked her to make a couple of sample tarot cards. We left New Orleans feeling great; nothing in our lives had ever worked so smoothly. The next ABA, my British friends and I sold my Karma Cardsto Penguin Books who published it around the world, but Amy and Stuart, who remains a friend, couldn’t agree to do a deck together because of his strict policy of keeping for himself the original artwork of every deck he publishes - even then Amy’s work of the size of the 78 tarot cards (3’ X 2’) was selling for a couple of thousand dollars a piece, but my British colleagues were eager to package ourEnchanted Tarot as the follow-up to Karma Cards, which had sold almost fifty thousand copies the first few months it was published. It was the first project that Amy and I worked on together and we’ve been working together ever since. We’ve sold over a million copies of our various books and tools and in nine languages.
The other reason we call it “The Enchanted Tarot,” besides the enchanted manner in which it came to be published and changed our lives is the three-fold presentation method we used in the book and translated faithfully to the website experience where the cards come alive and speak to you. The first thing they describe is “The Dream,” an explanation of what imagery and symbolism Amy put into each card. Then you can click on “The Awakening” to hear what the card can mean in a reading. Finally, a glowing “Enchantment” is offered to you in glowing silence, a gentle ritual designed to help you reinforce that card’s meaning in your life and your own intention.
BC: How do you and Amy feel that the interactive oracles on your site can be best used - so that they are empowering, and not just another ship passing in the night?
MF: Well, intention is a two-way street. You have to believe that you are going to get advice that you can consider and use, not just be entertained by the pretty pictures assembling before your eyes. I even have a tongue in cheek article about why online oracles work as well as readings done with a physical deck of tarot cards. The point is that you can get a reading from the most accurate tarot reader in the world, but if you don’t take it to heart and, if it resonates with you, act on it, you might as well have stayed home. If a person uses the interactive oracle on our website, they are going to get good advice presented to them in as professional a way as we are capable of presenting. We tried to put everything we know into the answers.
When you get a reading on our website, besides the audio and text of the Dream, Awakening, and Enchantment, there is also a paragraph of position specific text above the “stage” where the card animates. This text relates each card’s meaning to a specific position of the Celtic Cross spread. We use those position specific texts to answer the one-card readings.
For example, when a person asks a one-card question about what’s blocking them from attaining their goal, the program calls up the meaning of the card chosen as if it was occupying the “Block” position of the Celtic Cross. In this way, the text answers are phrased in such a way as to directly relate to the question asked. Our goal in making an online version of our Enchanted Tarot was to make it as close as we could make it to getting a reading from us and I have to say that spending several months meditating on each of the 78 cards in each of those positions did cause me to come up with some precise meanings that I wish I could always remember! In that way, getting a reading online can sometimes give a more precise answer than I might be capable of giving live. It’s all meant to stimulate the querent’s intuition and creative imagination.
If the querent asks a sincere question and does the free association exercises, which are vitally necessary to get the best possible answer from a personal divination system, then they are going to be empowered. There is nothing about our readings that makes light of the tarot, human tarot readers, the online technique, or anything else. We’re serious about the tarot, although we have to put the “For entertainment purposes only” statement up for legal reasons, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. Life is too short not to have fun as much as you can and so our interactive oracles are a blending of fun and practicality, which is what our lives are, too. It’s alchemical, “As above, so below.” The microcosm of our website reflects the macrocosm of our lives.
BC: The oracles for Alchemy and Astrology are at this time works in progress. Can you give us a little background about them, and about when they will be active on the site?
MF: We are hoping to have The Enchanted Astrologer up by the end of January or early February and The Enchanted Alchemist up by March, hopefully before we leave on our Power Place tours to Tuscany and Malta. I’m not sure which is going to go up first because Yikes is working on them both at the same time. I do hope they have high-speed internet access in the hotels we’ll be staying at in Europe so we can beta test them along with our Members, who are the first to get the new stuff we’re adding. We’re also going to add an Enchantments section that is going to be based on the two affirmation card decks we’ve done for Chronicle Books, “Gifts of The Goddess” and “The Healing Deck,” though that will have to wait until we get back from visiting the ancient sites.
The Enchanted Alchemist gives you a formula for transforming a situation that you are not satisfied with, “lead,” into one that brings you peace and joy, “gold.” You will be given the Action you should take (Fire), the Idea to keep in mind as you take that action (Air), the Emotion you can expect to encounter either in yourself or in others (Water), and the nest stage of your Process (Earth) as you move towards your goal. We’ve gotten more letters from therapists who use the Alchemist then from non-therapists, not surprising for a transformational tool. They tell us that they use it to get their patients talking about real things and to even consider the possibility of change, something that we take for granted. We also have six exciting movies about the four elements and “ether,” the fifth element of Alchemy, the element of pure energy, as well as a movie about Alchemy itself and a few surprises to add to the five movies about tarot that we currently have on our website.
We’ve created two astrology oracles in book/card deck form, Karma Cards¸ which I said was published by Penguin and The Enchanted Astrologer, for St. Martin’s Press. We’re going to combine the two of them to create the online Enchanted Astrologer. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s going to be the same kind of three dimensional experience - animation, sound, and text, as The Enchanted Tarot and Alchemist online.
BC: I love the free e-card section. There is grace and beauty in the cards that is often hard to find. Will Amy be adding cards to this section periodically, and is there any chance that you might move into print card sets with these themes?
MF: The plan is to keep adding eCards from our Enchanted Tarot and the other systems as we keep adding divination systems. We’ll probably be adding at least four each month. We already have five of Amy’s tapestry collage Goddesses, four tarot cards, four alchemy cards, and all twelve zodiac signs.
Amy’s mother was also a well-known greeting card illustrator, whose pen name was Peja so it’s in her blood. Actually, we already do have note cards available of some of Amy’s images. We haven’t put them up on our Product Showcase yet. Sigh. So many products, so little time!
BC: What are your future plans for the Enchanted World site?
MF: Eventually, we’re going to add our Oracle of The Goddess, Psychic Circle, The Pathfinder, and the projects that we are working on now. We believe so strongly in the power of the Internet to build community and share knowledge and, we hope, wisdom, that our intention is to make www.TheEnchantedWorld.com a kind of living, growing extension of us and all we do. I am going to publish chapters of the books I’m writing in our News/Letter and use the feedback to help make the books as good as I can make them. We’re going to continue to have contests and listen to our visitors and Members, so we’re going to be making changes that I cannot imagine now. Plus, there are our own active imaginations. Of course, some things are thought impossible to translate to the web, but we think of those things as challenges and opportunities, not limitations. Luckily, Yikes thinks that way, too.
BC: Is there anything that you and Amy would like to share about the site, or about your work?
MF: Forgive me when I take what you say literally and say that we want to share everything about the site and our work, that is its purpose. We’ve tried to create on online oasis where people can come knowing that they are going to see beautiful art and fashion, inspirational and educational movies, get unlimited free readings with the coolest online tarot reading system you can imagine, and not be sold anything. On today’s internet, THAT is an OASIS! We don’t sell anything on our website, except membership. We have a Product Showcase for visitors that want to know more, but if they want to buy anything, then they’re taken off site to one of our partners. We don’t even get an affiliate commission from our partners because to do that, you have to send your visitors to an affiliate “gateway” where they’re assaulted by innumerable products other than the one they’ve come to see. We decided to do direct links that can’t be counted by our partners, but we don’t care. We’re not doing this for the money; we’re doing this as our way of giving back to the Universe for allowing us to live so well in our Enchanted World for so long. Our most sincere thanks to you Bonnie and your readers for visiting with us and helping us get the word out.
Love, light, and laughter,
Monte Farber and Amy Zerner
BC: I want to thank Monte for taking the time to do this interview. I enjoyed the "Enchanted World" site immensely, as I am sure that all of you will!
Bonnie Cehovet
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