9.29.2024

Infinities and beyond . . .

A quick preview: Following up on AI + Yeats at JSTOR + a poetic deck

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First of all—welcome to new readers. And if you’ve been with EP a while, thanks so much for your continued interest.

I’m going to start today with a note about numbers. Quite a while ago, I started using the date as title for (almost) all EP posts. That’s partly to save one decision, and partly because there’s often something in the date itself that interests me.

Today’s date has a small symmetry: 9292. Break it down, and since 9+2=11, that’s my second-favorite number repeated twice. Then we have zero (which is or isn’t a number, depending) and 2,4—the first sequence in the infinity of even numbers.

I look on this as a reminder that even though it seems like “infinity” is a fairly simple concept (goes on forever), it’s actually not. As a matter of math, there are different kinds of infinities, as explained today by my AI sidekick, Gemini Advanced:

I might be stretching this a bit—but there’s a sense in which we could see the Tarot deck as a countable infinity (since it’s circular, you could go through it any number of times and never finish), while Tarot in essence would be an uncountable infinity, since no two readings can ever be the same, no matter how many there are.

The black box above is doing double duty, in that it’s a setup for musing on Tarot and infinities, but also an example of how AI makes my life better/easier. In less than a minute, Gemini provided me with this pretty clear explanation, written as well or better as I would have done. And I didn’t have to spend ten minutes (at least) on coming up with a single paragraph.

I’m going to expand on this point just a little

There are two important reasons why I’m okay with getting help on things like this from AI.

1: I know how to ask the right kind of question.

2: I either know the answer, or know how to validate the answer.

On Reason 2—although I am (seriously) incompetent to calculate anything, I have a basic grasp of number theory, because it’s mostly logic. So I know Gemini has provided me with an okay explanation.

On Reason 1—I know how to get a pretty good result quickly, by putting everything the bot needs to know into the first prompt. And/or, how to follow up if the first result isn’t exactly what I need.

That excursion is meant to carry forward my recent comments on AI in general, as well as preface a continuing discussion of AI and Tarot.

I think AI and Tarot is a really important topic, but in order to talk about it, we need to share a reasonably good practical understanding of what AI is. And (chicken/egg), some EP readers may not be interested in finding out more about AI unless there’s a clear connection to Tarot.

On the other hand, some EP readers may already be interested in AI, or at least intrigued.

So! Here’s what I’m going to do.

• I’ll be writing more about AI in general on my other Substack, The Misfit Writer. And I will mention that here as I go along, in case anyone wants to check it out.

• I’ve created a separate EP “channel” to talk about AI and Tarot. Everyone will get the first of those posts (sometime this week, I hope), but after that you’ll need to opt in if you want to get following posts on the topic.

This approach will ensure that readers who aren’t interested in the topic don’t have to hear about it. And if you are mildly interested but just don’t want it to be in your Inbox, you can always visit those posts by clicking “AI and Tarot” on the navigation bar at the top of EP’s home page.

If you’re a little more interested, you can join the conversation as it unfolds on that channel—where I’ll also be putting anything related to politics and/or the U.S. election.

More to come on all that. But for today, let’s return to more traditional EP subject matter: Tarot in unexpected places.

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JSTOR Takes a Look at Tarot

If you haven’t been introduced to JSTOR, I think you’ll be glad to meet this almost-bottomless well of free and interesting lore. Some of it is “academic” in the least inviting sense of the word, but a lot is just informative, and often thought-provoking.

The article shown above was published in 2018, in the free, weekly newsletter JSTOR Daily. And it starts off with this observation:

Tarot, a card deck used for divination and as a tool for self-reflection, is back in a big way. 

It goes on by linking to a 2017 New York Times story that declared “Tarot is trending.”

I mention this because there’s a general idea that Tarot had an unexpected surge in popularity during the Covid pandemic, when people were staying home, looking inward, and coping with new kinds of anxiety.

While that did happen—I’m inclined to think of 2015 as a crucial turning point in the rise of Tarot interest. That year saw the publication of . . .

• Kim Krans’s hugely popular The Wild Unknown Tarot, and

• Benebel Wen’s almost canonical Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth

That’s also the year that Biddy Tarot began a significant rebranding. What changed for the venerable Biddy, which started out in 1999?

1. Visual identity: A complete overhaul of their online look, with a new logo, color scheme, and website design, intended to create a “more modern, professional, and user-friendly experience.”

2. Brand messaging: Their updated mission included “making Tarot accessible and empowering for everyone,” as well as emphasizing the “transformative power of Tarot for personal growth and self-discovery.”

The quoted bits are condensed paraphrases, but they accurately characterize Biddy’s shift away from “old fashioned” Tarot to a more consumer-oriented, SEO-friendly model.

And that made quite a change in the online Tarot landscape. Biddy not only rose to almost complete search-engine dominance, but is now widely quoted as a definitive source for Tarot information.

However you align (or don’t) with any of these specific examples, here’s the relevance: Tarot became more “popular” because a more accessible model was developed and successfully marketed.

So—getting back to somewhere near the point—there’s a very big difference between 21st-century consumer Tarot, and the Tarot of W. B. Yeats.

It’s true that 21st-century Tarot also produces many interesting creations and elaborations . . . but it often seems they are overshadowed by an aggressive rebranding of Tarot itself. About which I have said a good deal, and am likely to say more.

For now, though, I will take us on a short journey back to Yeats’s world of divinatory, magical, and poetic Tarot—via these three JSTOR excerpts.

But in the 1880s, he was a young aspiring writer living ascetically in London, and, as poet and scholar Kathleen Raine notes, one of his few possessions was “a Tarot Pack.”

Tarot has also long informed poets, providing as it does “a symbolic and interpretable language for the elusive shape of our lives.”

The still widely-used Rider-Waite Tarot deck designed by A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman-Smith grew out of their involvement with the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn—an Order to which Yeats also belonged.

Each of those links will lead you to a lovely read.

Meantime, I’ll close with a note from Yeats himself: “Images well up before the mind's eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.”

I like to think that EP offers a path to exploring that “deeper source,” through the phenomenology of Tarot.

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The Stolen Child Tarot

I came upon today’s deck by the usual method of Googling something + Tarot. In this case it was Yeats + Tarot + images, and that took me through several transits. First, I found out that Yeats’s daughter Ann was a painter as well as a stage and costume designer. She didn’t produce a Tarot (which I think is just as well), but you can find out more about her life and work in this article from Magpies Magazine.

In the process of finding out more about Ann, serendipity brought me to a deck inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem “The Stolen Child.” Written in 1886, it predated his Golden Dawn period by a bit, and reflects the early influence of his interest in Irish folklore, as well as his fascination with the natural world.

I’m going to step aside from any attempt at description or interpretation of the deck or the poem. Instead, I’ll suggest you watch this unique YouTube flip through, in which the narrator reads the poem while turning the cards.

It really is a little hypnotic . . .

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Thanks for reading, everyone. More soon! C