Catching Up: Tuesday 5.31.22

A map of the week . . .

First, a farewell to the month named after Maia, mother of Hermes—the Greek trickster/messenger god who was fathered by Zeus, and later renamed Mercury by the Romans. Eventually, Hermes acquired attributes of the Egyptian god Thoth and became “Hermes Trismegistus,” putative author of many magical treatises.

So May has some non-obvious connections with the esoteric history of Tarot. And there are even more symbolic connections evident in this 18th century etching:

Christian Bernhard Rode’s Allegorical representation of the month of May depicts the twins Castor (resting on a cloud) and Pollux (with a spear and shield), watching a shepherdess. The twins are associated with May because the astrological sign of Gemini moves into prominence this month. And I’ll have an interesting note on one Gemini’s Tarot (courtesy of astrologer and cultural commentator Frederick Woodruff) in an upcoming Daily Note.

In the meantime, though, I want to welcome quite a few new subscribers who have made their way to EP via the relatively new Substack publication Fortuna Arcana. The newsletter is written in Portuguese, but if you look up in the righthand corner of any page, you will see a translation option to read the post in English.

I use Google Translate a lot, and I’ve found that it does a very good job for some languages (and some writers), but is hilariously bad in other cases. So I tested a few stories from Fortuna Arcana and found the translations quite readable. I also found the posts very thoughtful—especially Tarot and Space: Reflections on a Class.

I was lucky enough to spend time in Brazil many years ago, and learned a tiny bit of Portuguese along the way. Later on, a Portuguese translation of my first book was published in Brazil—where there is a good deal of Tarot activity. So I was delighted to spend a little time exploring Fortuna Arcana.

Julio Soares, who writes the newsletter, also has a blog, and from one of his posts, I learned about two works on Tarot that I had never heard of:

• El Tarot o la maquina de imaginar [Tarot, or the Imagination Machine] by Alberto Cousté. A prolific writer, critic, and esotericist, Cousté was born in Argentina but spent most of his life in Spain. His book on Tarot was published in 1972, but it has never been translated into English, and the Spanish editions seem quite hard to come by. If you read Spanish, you can check out the first third or so of the text on Google Books. And Soares has provided a link to this Portuguese translation in PDF format.

• Trilogia de Estudos Completos do Tarô e Curso Completo de Tarô [Complete Tarot Studies Trilogy and Complete Tarot Course] by Nei Naiff. I haven’t been able to make my way further into Naiff’s work yet (there’s a generous website), so I’ll rely on this quote from Soares: “It is impossible to talk about tarot in Brazil without mentioning Nei Naiff. The Complete Tarot Studies Trilogy is possibly the most sophisticated and didactic tarot guide in the world.” The trilogy comprises Symbology and Occultism, Life and Destiny, and Oracle and Methods.

Even without knowing Spanish or Portuguese, you’ll be able to figure out some simpler aspects of these works, since the terminology of Tarot, occultism, psychology, symbology, and other relevant areas is much the same across many languages. And at the least, you may fall in love (as I did) with these Portuguese titles for the Major Arcana:

“O” and “A” by the way, are gendered articles—masculine “the” and feminine “the.” “As” is the plural feminine.

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Approaches to Tarot differ a great deal around the world, but we forget that when looking at the topic through an Anglo-American lens. More to be said, when time permits.

As for now—I had a whole list of other topics planned, and since it’s been a while since my last EP newsletter, I’ve decided to do a series of Daily Notes this week. There’s a “horsey” theme for Thursday, along with notes on a collection of Tarot-inspired horror stories. Both came to light as I was putting together some research that will appear tomorrow under the title “A Very Short History of Tarot in the News.”

On Friday, I’ll provide updates for several previous topics, including Leonora Carrington’s stunning Tarot, and the Tarot vignette in Have Gun, Will Travel. I’ll also be sharing some of my favorite posts from other newsletters.

In the meantime—if you are new to Exploration Project, be sure to take the guided tour. And to everyone, as always . . . thanks for reading. C