Promises, Part 3
With a touch of serendipity . . .
I didn’t (consciously) plan it this way—but my longest-postponed promise is an exact fit for Memorial Day weekend.
My first mention of the Counterculture Tarot was in the first full EP newsletter: November 1, 2020. Looking back at that early post from the vantage point of now, I realize how irrationally ambitious my plans were!
Months later, in August of 2021, the Counterculture Tarot had not made it into a post, but it was still on my mind, so I made a new promise. Which hadn’t yet been fulfilled in January, 2022, when I wrote this:
The transgressive scholars post did happen (it’s really odd and interesting) but once again, Counterculture was pre-empted when I launched “a week-long series on algorithms, prediction, and Tarot.”
In May of 2022, it was scheduled to be the last in a series of Daily Notes. But this time—I explained in a post the following week—an “infrastructure crisis” derailed EP for a week, and by the time I got back on track, a new batch of irresistible topics had bubbled up.
Obviously, there’s a pattern! As it turns out, there’s so much material I want to cover that some very interesting topics never made it into a newsletter. And because I saw Counterculture Tarot as a major story, worthy of extra attention, it kept being put off.
I’ve gone into this long-running story because it connects with a thought I shared recently:
I often wonder whether Tarot references really do turn up everywhere, all the time, and I just notice them more than others might because my antennae are tuned to that channel. Or does the universe see to it that random references make their way to my personal attention?
I’m guessing it’s the former, but sometimes it does seem like the latter.
I’d still like to go back and pick up other topics—but Counterculture Tarot is the one I’ve kept coming back to the most, without actually getting it done. So I was determined to check it off the promise list today, even if I couldn’t give it as much detail as it deserves.
And here’s where more serendipity comes to hand.
Writer and Tarot creator Tania Pryputniewicz has been referenced in two EP stories recently—and on several visits to her blog, I noticed that she mentions the Counterculture Tarot as an important influence on her work.
But I didn’t take the time to look more closely—and so, until today, I missed the fact that all the way back in 2017, she published an informative interview with the deck’s creator, William Haigwood.
An excerpt from her introduction:
The Counterculture Tarot: a photo journey through the Sixties is a beautiful Tarot deck comprised of black and white photographs from the Sixties. Writer, photographer, journalist William Haigwood offers up on his website a dynamite complete tarot card index (image library) accompanied by fertile mini essays that provide wonderful historical context and associative possibilities for connecting his choice of his own photographic image to each traditional Tarot image.
What I find so exciting and enticing about Haigwood’s Tarot deck is the way he’s used the images from living history to connect what he calls “silos of experience,” lived human experience, to each Major Arcanum’s archetypal essence (something he does actually with every single card in the deck). What a beautiful way to cast one’s net: back in time in order to give us perspective and help us explore the past, questions of the times, and questions we still carry forward as we consider how to shape our current times.
In his afterword, Haigwood writes,
Within the Tarot’s rich and ever augmented symbolism are paths to new perspectives, to places where poetry and history converge. Life may be an aberrant disruption of the cosmos. It may be discontinuous, disturbing, painful, and without apparent meaning. But it is a journey and its experiences—especially those at crucial and decisive intersections—rebound memorably as long as we live.
I urge you to visit Tania’s site, read the whole interview, and explore her thoughtful approach to Tarot. Then take an in-depth tour of Haigland’s extraordinary work.
Each of the 78 cards features a real-time photograph, and is accompanied by an essay that weaves together historical analysis, social commentary, and key aspects of Tarot iconography.
This will give you an idea:
As you might have figured out by now, I suspect the Counterculture Tarot was waiting for just the right moment to appear on EP. And since Haigland’s Tarot captures something of the complex political and social issues that lurk in the background of Memorial Day—I think we’re there.
This Memorial Day seems to require even more reflection than usual, given the recurrence of violent aggression in Europe over the past year. In fact—Counterculture Tarot was promised (yet again) in February of 2022, but was supplanted by a series of posts that related in various ways to Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
It’s been a tragic year since, so finding a not-grim way to end this post wasn’t easy. Luckily, though, serendipity stepped in again—and I was reminded that a diverse group of veterans now serving in Congress had gathered for a third year to clean the Vietnam Memorial ahead of Memorial Day.
The healing power of ritual.
Just one more promise to keep—from this list, anyway. Coming soon. C