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“You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a conman,” says Alejandro Jodorowsky, maker of cult films El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, and the unmade psychedelic Dune; writer of the legendary graphic novel series The Incal; and practitioner of the tarot.
When the story opens in the dystopian world of The Incal, our hero John Difool, holder of a Class R private detective’s license, has been beaten up by a masked gang in Suicide Alley and is falling headlong into an acid lake. Difool and Deepo, his pet concrete seagull, are versions of The Fool and his dog from the tarot. Characters across the galaxy, several fashioned after other cards, converge around the Incal, an ancient artifact of untold power and beauty. The game “begins here, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Teaching Jodorowsky the tarot, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington said: “The tarot is a chameleon.” Salvador Dalí, fellow explorer of surreal realms, designed a deck featuring himself as The Magician. Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, wrote poetry rife with tarot symbolism. A few years ago, Sylvia Plath’s copy of the Marseilles deck fetched $206,886 at Sotheby’s—the one that Ted Hughes had gifted her, the one that had prompted her to write several poems including The Hanging Man, and from Cambridge, write to her mother that she was “on the road to becoming a seeress.” Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot had Madame Sosostris, “famous clairvoyante” and “the wisest woman in Europe,” lay down a “wicked pack of cards” in The Waste Land. More recently, author Erin Morgenstern hand-painted a black-and-white tarot deck to complement her fantasy novel, The Night Circus.
Calling the tarot a “machine for constructing stories,” Italo Calvino wrote a semiotic fantasy called The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Two groups of travelers cross a forest. One ends up in a castle, and the other in a tavern, both having lost their power of speech in the travails of the crossing. Using tarot cards, they tell tales through the night, but no tale is ever quite the truth, only a version of it. Booker winner Margaret Atwood, often accused of prophetic abilities herself, said: “Oracles in the ancient world were always ambiguous. They didn’t say, this will inevitably happen. They were like warnings—if this, then that. . . . There isn’t one The Future. There are an infinite number of possible futures, and which one you get is going to depend on what you do now.” Two-time Booker winner Hilary Mantel, who thought of writing as “the arena of peril,” kept a deck in a drawer of her writing desk. Her character Alison Hart in Beyond Black says of reading the tarot: “You don’t know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know. You have to walk blind. And you walk slap into the truth.”
I hold the old New Orleans deck in my hands. It has a perfectly satisfying aspect ratio. The syncretic vodun artwork is stunning. All decks have 78 cards, 22 of which comprise the Major Arcana. This deck has one extra, a wild card called Les Barons. Top-hatted, dark-glassed, cigar-smoking Baron Samedi and Baron Cimetière walk up some stairs with Manman Brigitte (to the French Quarter Police Station, I’m told). All grinning skeletons wearing long coats and carrying the respective accoutrements of their works—a curved walking stick, a headstone, a cross—they make me smile. Eros and Thanatos, awful without a few laughs. I shuffle the cards, a rustling hush. I hear the Sanskrit root śam that says pacifying, extinguishing; the root śi that says sharpening, focusing. If it’s all a game anyway, wouldn’t you like a deck of cards?
Why Are Writers Particularly Drawn to Tarot? (Rochelle Spencer, Lit Hub, August 2019)
Against the context of the rising popularity of the tarot in the literary arts, Spencer curates a freewheeling conversation with Alexander Chee, Alia Curtis, Laurie Filipelli, Meg Hayertz, Cecily Sailer, Rachel Wright, and Maritess Zurbano, where they discuss how the tarot figures in their lives and writing practices. Among the discussions about its assorted applications in various fields is information about the creative uses they put it to.
Sailer: I was drawn to Tarot because it shares with writing a fundamental aspiration—to articulate the complexity of human experience. Writers must journey into the murky realms of the subconscious and return with material the conscious mind can digest. Tarot can enter this process as a collaborator and compliment [sic]: It shares a writer’s desire to interrogate while providing a different language and angle for doing so.
Chee: It develops a formidably dense amount of information about characters, but it also lends you distance from them, lets you see them in ways they won’t, and you need that. Also, it is useful for teaching students. I will give the Celtic Cross exercise in class and sometimes not explain the link to the Tarot until afterwards as not everyone finds the Tarot credible, even as a structural element with no cards. I find it helps them to start seeing the deck apart from the overly mystical way, by teaching them how to use the elements of the deck’s tradition to tap into their imagination—and power—before they meet the deck itself and assign it some authority it just doesn’t have.
The Literature of Cootie Catchers (GennaRose Nethercott, Electric Literature, July 2019)
Drawing elegant parallels between the girlhood game of folded-paper cootie catchers and the tarot as a literary form in itself, Nethercott suggests in this tender essay that the link between reading—or “reading”—as an act of divination and writing as an act of creation may not be so tenuous, seeing as language is involved. As “an occult power, a supernatural tool that must be wielded delicately,” it can read minds, transcend time, survive life and death, she suggests. Every card has a story to tell and that is a powerful act.
Like so many divinatory games, young women have long been the keepers and practitioners. In our patriarchal society, young men have been emboldened to select their own paths, to determine who and what they wanted to become—leaving boys with no true need for fortune telling or luck. Why bother with divination when you can control the future? Adolescent girls, however, were never afforded this promise. Thus, girls have long been drawn to games of chance, of luck, of peering into a future that seemed to already have been decided for them. If they couldn’t control the future, at least they could get a preview of what’s to come.
If something can tell a story, chances are that it can tell your story. The Fool who steps into the unknown… the Three of Swords bearing heartbreak… the patient, dangling Hanged Man… As any good writing teacher can tell you, the microcosm contains the macrocosm—within the tarot, we view an individual illustration and immediately it expands, jumpstarting associations with similar images in our own lives. And so, through these archetypal narrative images come tales. And tales lead to questions. And questions lead into the future.
The Truth About Tarot (James McConnachie, Aeon, May 2017)
A creative tool, a beautiful game, a clarity device for a confounding world? Or perhaps in our era of pervasive despair, where we endlessly medicalize nature and culture and press them into therapeutic service, should the tarot be seen as psychotherapy? Carl Jung did say in a 1930s seminar: “They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” In this thoughtful essay, McConnachie tours the cultural history of the tarot, examining various origin theories and influences—it was a parlor game to begin with—and arriving at ways the tarot and the reading of it appear to operate. A tool of “cold tricksters or wise therapists,” he seems to ask, but is there a difference?
The poet William Empson, no less, wrote to the London Review of Books in September 1980 to protest that ‘nobody in the Renaissance would invent such a random thing without making it symbolical’; that ‘the picture cards of the tarot are rather aggressively mysterious’; and that the tarot pack was unlikely ‘used merely for games’. [The philosopher Michael] Dummett replied that: ‘Intellectuals, scholars and other serious-minded people are prone to consider playing games a trivial occupation,’ yet in the courts of early Renaissance Italy, by contrast, ‘men and women did not despise games as trifling, but cultivated them and took them seriously, by which I do not mean portentously.’
My original question: ‘Why does tarot survive?’ In a sense, tarot does encode wisdom – albeit within an invented tradition rather than a secret one. It is a system for describing aspirations and emotional concerns. It is a closed system rather than one based on evidence but, as such, it is not dissimilar to psychoanalysis, another highly systematised, invented tradition whose clinical efficacy depends ultimately on the relationship between client and practitioner.
Bonus: The Deck of Cards that Made Tarot a Global Phenomenon, Atlas Obscura
The Querent (Alexander Chee, The Morning News, August 2011)
The querent is the person who asks the tarot—“78 windows into the secret life of the world, hidden somewhere beyond the air, under the skin of existence”—a question. In this moving personal essay, Chee starts with fortune telling, buying a deck that the (in)famous occultist Aleister Crowley designed together with Lady Frieda Harris, seeking “one of those mirrors, the ones positioned so you can see around a corner, but for my whole life.” He ends up with something else a lot harder to define, something he must meet with his eyes closed nonetheless.
On reflection, it seems to me much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot—archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car—I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming; I wanted to be its author.
On the subway home, I remembered the story of my own trip to a fortuneteller as an infant in Seoul. All she would say, apparently, was, “This one, he has much to do.”
If she said anything else, no one remembers. I think sometimes of asking, but it seems to me now, after my uncle’s story, that you think you want to know the future until you do. It would be like waiting for a bullet to pace its way to your side across the years.
Tarot of Transformation (Sonja Swift, Creative Nonfiction – True Story, July 2017)
In this luminous piece categorized as experimental-hybrid essay-memoir, Swift draws for us 22 deeply observed, deeply lived true stories laid out in the pattern of the 22 cards of the Major Arcana. Here is everything we have been talking about so far. Here is what the tarot can do for one who wants to see and make. As Yogi Berra famously said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
The Magician/1
One Christmas, when I was a child, my grandmother offered an unusual gift: she would make a donation to the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Palm Desert, California, on my behalf. What animal did I want to sponsor? I said wolf. She was furious, I was later told, that I would pick a predator over something sweet and cuddly. But, probably after a long talk with my dad, who may have offered her some ecological reasoning, she sent me a card with a photo of the Mexican wolf. I was so proud of that card, not because she had donated a token sum of money in my name for the fund-raiser, but because I had allied myself with wolf.
The Moon/18
Anne Carson stated it confidently: “I do not believe in art as therapy.” Upon reading these words, I sighed with relief. She had said it. I had nodded. Art, the dedicated work of making. Therapy, the tenacious work of healing. Nodding, I realized two things about myself. One, I had matured as a writer, an artist. Two, I had healed some deep fissures in myself. Otherwise, I might have retreated at her comment, belligerently disagreed. There is no way around the curvature of grief; one must lean into it, buck the heavy swell. To write well is to name pain with beauty and strangeness. That’s the art of it. Creativity, which could just as well be a word for God. Learning these things was one of the greatest freedoms of all. Some people think writing is easy. I want to tell them, try to face yourself daily in the salt pan of the empty page. Try to go there and come back unscathed.
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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