7.11.2024
It's complicated . . .
Hello everyone. And as always—a warm welcome to new readers. There are more newcomers than usual recently, which I’ll be writing about in a longer post this Sunday.
But I wanted to post something today, because (as many of you know!) I’m obsessed with the numbers 11 and 22. And I didn’t post last month on the 22nd, even though I started off with excellent intentions. Here’s the top of that draft:
What happened? We’ll start with the text I’d already written . . .
From Arjen Mulder to Little Monsters
Brief recap for new readers: I sometimes recount a series of co-incidences that lead me through several transforms to something interesting about Tarot. This particular trip started on May 12, and went as follows:
I was doing research on a project that has reference to a Dutch biologist-turned-media-theorist named Arjen Mulder. That part is interesting but irrelevant, except that in looking for something connected with his work, I was led along to the name Renata Adler.
Adler is a well-regarded journalist whose semi-autobiographical, cleverly satirical novel Speedboat was trendy in 1976. (The connection here was Joan Didion, which will either make sense or you can ignore it.)
A day or two later, Adler’s name popped up again, in a completely different context. Whenever this happens, I check to see if there’s a Tarot connection—and there is, sort of. Speedboat contains this passage:
[who was] accidentally pushed through the window of a bookshop on the Rue Bonaparte, where she nearly bled to death among the old, incomplete sets of tarot cards. The complete sets had been bought up by American students of The Waste Land right after the war.
That’s quite funny—though I’m not sure how many of Adler’s 1976 readers would have gotten the joke. But now we have a gap, because I cannot figure out how I got from there to Little Monsters Tarot. This has never happened before!! Either my memory, my notes, or my trusty browser history will tell me how I got from any Point A to any Point B, even well afterwards.
But not this time.
And yes, readers, I dropped the ball at that point. I never figured out the trail of breadcrumbs, though I think it was something to with Google and/or Amazon algorithms—which is often the case.
So there wasn’t a 6.22 post. But I did have the notes for where I meant to go, and even though I never connected the dots, I can share two discoveries that came out of the original process.
1. The Little Monsters Tarot
It looks like I learned about the guidebook first, from this listing:
Highlights I couldn’t resist:
“stemming from folklore, history, and traditional associations found within the tarot as a whole”
“several gem and mineral decks”
“wanders the face of the earth in search of knowledge”
Just as if fate had sent me an engraved invitation!
I’ve only browsed the guidebook, but quickly found a passage I like very much:
maybe you’ve heard before that we are all made of stardust, that all of the iron in our blood came from stars that exploded long, long ago.
maybe you’ve also heard that atoms move about somewhat unimpeded by our ideas about the laws of the material world, shifting around and changing in ways invisible to us.
the high priestess is content to disintegrate in every moment, to be never not falling apart into dust and chaos, to be reborn in the next moment from one speck, one seed, one atom that leads the charge . . . .
And the deck is delightfully strange.
I really am continually amazed at the ways Tarot manifests itself!
2. The Ship of Fools Tarot
I think I can figure out why the algorithms led me on to the Ship of Fools—there’s a similarity of style. But the background and approach of the two decks differ greatly.
The creator of this deck, Brian Williams, was a brilliant interpreter of the Tarot tradition, in addition to being one of its most influential innovators.
I’ve borrowed this description from Tarot author Joan Bunning:
The Ship of Fools Tarot is an entire deck built around the Fool "the human personality in its sweetest, simplest, most innocent, most impetuous, most courageous state." Artist and writer Brian Williams was inspired by Das Narrenschiff, a masterpiece of German literature written by Sebastian Brant and published in 1494.
Das Narrenschiff translates as the “Ship of Fools.” It contains about 100 woodcut illustrations that capture humanity's never-ending capacity for foolishness. Williams discovered some of these woodcuts fit the themes of the major arcana perfectly. He "borrowed" these without change, and others with only slight adjustments.
In addition to being an extraordinary artist, Brian was one of the most interesting and generous people I’ve ever known. So I’m grateful to synchronicity for the opportunity to revisit, and share, this unique deck.
Brian was also amazingly prolific. I’ll follow up soon with notes on his other decks—which range from the elegant Renaissance Tarot to the ingenious PoMo Tarot.
So that’s where I was headed on 6.22. But since then, I’ve stumbled over a new connection with the number 11.
Or to be exact, 11.11.11. November 11, 1911.
That was the date of the Great Blue Norther—a weather event so extreme that nothing like it had ever been recorded before, and nothing like it has happened since.
On that day, a broad swathe of the United States experienced sudden drops in temperature that ranged from 40-70 degrees Fahrenheit. In Springfield, Missouri, the temperature plunged from 80°F in the afternoon to 13°F at midnight.
I’ve long been interested in extreme weather events—which I’ll say more about one of these days. But until a week ago, I’d never heard of the Great Blue Norther. And I wouldn’t know about it now if I hadn’t been looking for elevens!
Thanks so much for reading. More soon, C
The Ship of Fools deck is exactly what I was craving. Thank you!
Dear Cynthia, thank you, Ed