2.14.24
Happy Valentine's Day!
Hello, everyone—and a special welcome to new readers.
First: I’ve just discovered an addition to the several newsletters I shared in the most recent EP post. Until today I hadn’t realized that Carrie Mallon—co-creator of the Spacious Tarot—has a Substack.
If you haven’t seen her deck—a collaboration with artist Annie Ruygt—let me introduce you:
Find out more about their work, and then read Carrie’s two-part appreciation of Rachel Pollack’s The Forest of Souls: A Walk Through the Tarot.
Second: As usual, there’s a bit of synchronicity at work here. An hour or so before I found Carrie’s post, I was going through (yet another) rediscovered box of papers, and came across a 1994 issue of Gnosis. It contains Erik Davis’s now-classic interview with Rachel and Neil Gaiman, titled “The Gods of the Funny Books.”
There’s a copy of the interview on Erik Davis’s website if you can’t wait to read it. But the onscreen version just doesn’t have the same feel as the original, so I’ll scan and post it soon.
The interview is full of fascinating commentaries, from two writers of great imagination and originality. For example—this reflection from Rachel:
The tarot deck I made is not a system. I didn’t have any plan, I just let the pictures come. The pictures I chose I would hope would induce a kind of sacred experience as people worked through them. So they don’t just look to the book and say, this means I’m going on a trip, and this means I’ll meet a tall dark stranger, but they will get a sense of their own connection to primeval imagery.
If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll read more about Rachel in:
I’ll be back in your Inbox very soon. C
That’s a real research tool/gift — all of your Rachel posts on one PDF. Thank you, Cynthia.
Thank you so much for sharing heads up and links to other Tarotists work. There is so much out there that we don't know about!