Daily Notes #4

Searching for the "Information Door"--and getting lost in dreams

I’m sure the following description made sense to me when I wrote it—but that was quite a while ago . . .

The information door. From this vantage, you will see Tarot as a data structure that organizes relationships among various concepts and representations, and can be queried by various means. | Along the information path, you might find anything from the Akashic Record to artificial intelligence theories and Tarot technologies.

And now that I’m wondering how to illustrate / illuminate this path, I really can’t come up with anything.

So I’m thinking about replacing it with “the history door.” After all, a fair number of people are not much interested in going through the other nine doors (except maybe symbolism) but are fascinated by the historical development of Tarot, along with its relationship to playing cards, gaming, the printing industry, and so on.

I’m going to give that idea more thought. But in the meantime, we need something for today’s note, and here’s what I came up with.

A Reflection on Proto-Tarots

I’ve always been interested in Ice Age art, petroglyphs, and other forms of very early human creativity. I’ve looked at a lot of photographs, read some articles, and even visited some rock art sites in Nevada and Texas.

Based on my modest expeditions, I can testify that being in the actual space of ancient artworks is a very different experience than looking at pictures. For one thing, you realize how hard it was to get to some of the spots where symbolic drawings were left, thousands of years ago. And for another, you can sense the energy of the landscape, and imagine what it must have felt like when the natural world was still largely untouched.

If you ever want to do this yourself—Valley of Fire State Park is an hour’s drive from Las Vegas (a significant bonus, in my book), and the hike to Petroglyph Canyon is short and easy.

Rock drawing at Valley of Fire State Park

But even if you wanted to put forth a lot more effort, and go back much further in time—you can never, ever see the world’s oldest drawings, which are located on the walls of France’s labyrinthine Chauvet Cave.

Even scientists have tightly limited access to the cave system, in order to prevent damage from human presence. They can stay in only for short periods, only at certain times of the year—and they cannot get within breathing distance of the walls.

The ethereal drawings that line the recesses of Chauvet are believed to have been made about 30,000 years ago.

Humans never inhabited the cave, which seems to have been used exclusively for ritual purposes. And we can only imagine what those might have been like, based on the artwork, and on the seemingly purposeful arrangements of animal bones found throughout the cave.

These varied traces were preserved by a rock slide that sealed the cave entrance more than 20,000 years ago—so everything once created remained intact, but unseen.

Until 1994.

That’s when three caving enthusiasts came across a small opening, tunneled their way through the collapsed limestone walls, and discovered an undreamed of treasure-trove. Since then the site has been meticulously mapped and carefully studied—but very little photography has been allowed, as exposure to light is also strictly limited inside.

Somehow, though, the brilliant documentarian Werner Herzog got permission to film inside the cave for a few days in 2010. And the result is one of the most beautiful, evocative, thought-provoking films you will ever see: Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Static pictures do very little good in conveying the film’s magic, so watch the trailer. Then watch the whole thing on Netflix (or wherever), and if you get hooked—order a 3-D Blu-ray disk.

So what does all this have to do with Tarot? Just that every time I watch the film (it’s addictive), I think about how Tarot occupies a place in art history that should also be recognized as extraordinary. On a much lesser scale, of course. But I don’t know of any artistic concept or model that has been so widely influential as the twenty-two trumps of Tarot.

More about that for another Daily Note. But in the context of forgotten dreams, I also think about whether the ritualists in that ancient cave practiced divination. And which of the drawings relate in some ways to Tarot iconography. One especially beautiful wall is covered with lions—so of course you think of Strength. There are horses, so Chariot. Or the Visconti card we now call Justice.

Threads of symbolic imagining wind across 30,000 years.

All of which, and more, comes into my head because Tarot association has become a habit of thought. How useful that is I’m not sure! But at least it provided me with some ideas to share in this slightly-too-long Daily Note.

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Thanks for reading! C