A Sunday Newsletter (Day 44, 2022)

Iconographies, speculations, more Foolish lore, and an invitation . . . .

First, a serendipity:

• The free Sunday newsletter from Paris Review keeps surprising me with Tarot-related items. For this edition—presumably as a nod to Valentine’s Day—they have shared a 2015 interview with the popular food-and-travel writing duo Jane and Michael Stern. Relevance is that Jane has long been involved with Tarot, and in 2012 published a combination memoir and Tarot manual, entitled Confessions of a Tarot Reader. I wrote an appreciation of the book here on EP last year, with some notes on Jane’s experience growing up in a “card-reading family.” Here’s an excerpt from my commentary:

Jane’s book is so remindful of my own experiences as a full-time reader that it feels as if I might have ghost-written it, and then forgotten.

That’s only an intermittent impression, of course. In skimming the book I often saw points of difference. But its 200+ pages offer an unusual glimpse into one pretty savvy person’s experiences in the odd profession of Tarot reading.

• Jane and Michael divorced in 2008, so their status as a romantic duo is open to question—but they’ve continued their writing collaboration, and the banter in this interview is often quite funny. Especially the part where Michael’s extra-strength acid trip leaves him unable to do anything but watch Valley of the Dolls six times in a row.

Second, an invitation. If you haven’t seen my plan for the Tarot | In Four Dimensions series, I hope you will have a look. Apart from whether you’d like to participate in the series, this overview offers some further insight into my thinking about Tarot.

Now, on to today’s promised topics.

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Iconographies

I found the word “tabletka” written on a page of notes from the Time Capsule—and I had no recollection of why it was there. Then I came across “Rothschild Canticles” in a list of story ideas I’d kept in Notion. And ditto for recollection.

But I’ve figured out both cases, and it turns out they have something in common. Each reminds me in some way of our earliest Tarots.

Today we use the term “icon” to refer to recognizable symbols in general, ranging from tiny pictures on a computer screen to people held in particular esteem. But originally the term referred to painted images of religious figures and biblical scenes, used in the Russian Orthodox Church for devotional or decorative purposes. They were typically painted with egg tempera on wood.

But one variant form, the tabletka, was made by gluing together two pieces of canvas, and covering both sides with gesso (a sort of chalky plaster). By this method, different images could be painted on the two sides—and tabletki were much lighter in weight than wooden icons, which meant they could be more easily transported and stored.

Here’s an example (from the informative website Icons and their Interpretation), showing the birth of Jesus.

You might notice in the painting several familiar items: a stylized sun, a kneeling woman pouring from a jug, an old man leaning on a staff. But I’ve mentioned that only to highlight the common symbolic “vocabulary” found in 15th-century images from many cultures.

I’m fairly sure I made that note about tabletki years ago because I was thinking about the possible use of painted Tarots as a set of displays, for devotional or meditative use. I still think that’s an interesting hypothesis—but I’ve also imagined that illustrated devotionals could be forerunners of Tarot cards. Here are two facing pages from a fascinating book known now as the Rothschild Canticles.

Again, there are familiar symbols—and this profusely illustrated book is actually small enough to be a pack of Tarot cards!

The second of those illustrations came from an article on the Art & Theology website, where you can also see examples of the colorful, mysterious illuminations for which the Canticles are best known. And sometime when you have a few minutes to spare, drop by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection to page through a complete digital copy.

This unusual miniature book is securely dated to slightly before 1300—more than a century before our earliest instances of Tarot. But it occurs to me occasionally that changing book-pages to unbound cards is the sort of thing one might do.

Pictures and Systems

In thinking through some ideas I want to present for the Tarot | In Four Dimensions series, I started writing an essay titled “Why Take Tarot Seriously?” It’s not finished yet, and when it is, I’ll post it here on EP as well.

But as I was making notes for the essay, I realized something that had not occurred to me before—and I think it’s worth sharing in brief.

Tarot is different from other divinatory tools in two ways. First, it’s essentially visual. I know charts have visual meaning for astrologers, and I Ching ideograms have visual meaning once you learn the system. The same could be said for less widely practiced divination methods like geomancy, palmistry, and the reading of tea leaves.

But in and of itself, Tarot is nothing but a stack of pictures. Although we have mapped those pictures to other, non-visual systems, the connections we create are secondary to the essence of Tarot.

To put it another way—Tarot is not inherently “a system.” And that makes it different from every other major form of divination. Without a system of rules and calculations, there is no astrology. Without fixed rules for sorting yarrow stalks or tossing coins, there is no I Ching divination. And so on.

Of course there can be different approaches—astrologers vary widely in the methods they use, and there are several traditions of I Ching. But if you eliminated “systems” completely in either case, what would you have left?

Whereas: Tarot exists as a stack of pictures, independent of any system we choose to apply. I’m still thinking about what—if anything—that means. (Comments welcome!)

Fools

This part begins with more about pictures, but from a different angle. In the January newsletters, I focused on images of The Fool, noting along the way that Fool got his dog early in the Marseilles tradition. But I hadn’t checked on how the cliff—a major symbolic element of the Waite-Smith Fool—had gotten into the picture.

I’d vaguely supposed that it was added in order to dramatize the scene, lending an element of danger. But now I find that Waite makes a point of saying the edge holds “no fear” for the wandering Fool, who is confident of being upheld by angels in the event of a fall.

I couldn’t locate a cliff in any other esoteric decks of the period (though honestly, I didn’t look very hard). However . . . I remembered from writing about the Sola Busca deck that Pamela Colman Smith had taken up some of its imagery. And sure enough, if you focus tightly on the bottom of the Sola Busca Fool, you will see a shallow but cliff-like edge.

I doubt that the often-puzzling Sola Busca imagery had much in common with Waite’s vision of the Tarot trumps. But for whatever the fact is worth, the Fool’s cliff seems to have been nascent as early as 1491.

That’s all preliminary to telling the short version of a long and more recent story. I’ve known about the Blair brothers—Lawrence and Lorne—for many years. First, because of anthropologist Lawrence Blair’s possibly brilliant, certainly thought-provoking book Rhythms of Vision: Changing Patterns of Belief. (A 1976 classic that I keep meaning to revisit. Will write more when I do.)

The second reason is that Lawrence and his younger brother Lorne collaborated on one of the most unforgettable documentaries I have ever seen: the four-part PBS series Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey. If you can track it down, it will change your concept of—well, everything.

In the meantime, there’s a general description in this Los Angeles Times review. And you can watch a preview on YouTube of the expanded, remastered version.

Now to reconnect with Tarot and The Fool. Lorne Blair eventually became a highly skilled and successful filmmaker—but his earliest report card, from a French nursery school, said simply “folle independence.” Until the age of eleven, he spoke only an invented language, and on several occasions he disappeared from boarding school, later to be found living at the top of a tree.

These details come from a beautiful appreciation of his life written by older brother Lawrence. I can’t begin to summarize the whole account, but I can offer this excerpt:

Lorne had the luck of the Irish. He took enormous risks, both financial and physical, and got away with them, until he didn’t. After his first Indonesian adventure, he decided [to live] on his own terms, which he knew would require major gambles. Perhaps that is what carried him through such an adventurous life. He combined being unusually tough, in the sense of persistent in the face of continuous head winds, with an indiscriminately tender and loving nature.

I think anyone who has spent a few moments thinking about our Tarot Fool will surely recognize that description. And I think I won’t need to add more after telling you that in 1995—just a little before his 50th birthday—Lorne Blair was walking down a street in Bali, lost in thought. He fell into a deep hole, and his injuries led to a fatal stroke.

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After reviewing the above, I feel something a little lighter is needed at the end. So I’ll just offer the fact that more than 200,000 Valentine cards arrive annually in Loveland, Colorado, sent from 50 states and 100 countries. A team of volunteers hand-stamps each one in a special Loveland envelope, and sends it on to someone’s beloved.

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll see you on Tuesday for this week’s Time Capsule.

Warm regards, Cynthia