Well, I’ve made it to the fourth promise—but since the Corwin story turns out to be quite long, I think the post will be better in two parts. And we’ll start off with a quick trip back to the beginning of this topic.
If you’ve been reading EP for a while, you may remember when I found a handwritten list I’d made sometime in the 1980s.
In a series of recent EP posts, I’ve tracked down several mystery items from the first two (of four) pages—but I was stumped on the line about Arthur Corwin’s Tarot and the Tapestry of Myth.
Corwin was a legendary professor at the Cooper Union School of Art, from 1966 until he retired in 2000. It’s important to understand how interesting and influential he was, so here’s a brief summary from one of his obituaries:
Arthur was a fine artist and sculptor, a licensed civil engineer, and a distinguished architect. For many of his students, Corwin’s teachings transcended the walls of the classroom, offering a unique perspective on our place in the world through time.
He was noted especially for these two core courses:
Explorations of prehistory, symbolism, and archetypes led Corwin to Tarot—and apparently, he did write a book with the title on my list. At least it’s referenced in Stuart Kaplan’s The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume 1 (1978).
I’m pretty impressed to think I once read through the thirty oversized pages of Kaplan’s “Annotated Bibliography.” But I must have found the Corwin title there, because as far as I can determine, the book doesn’t exist anywhere other than (perhaps?) Kaplan’s personal collection. It was never listed by the Library of Congress, and no publisher is given in the Kaplan citation—which describes the book as being 500 pages long, with illustrations.
Nonetheless. Kaplan clearly had knowledge of Corwin’s work, since he wrote about it in “Chapter II: Origins of Tarocchi Cards.”
Some scholars including Arthur Corwin, who has been researching the subject since the 1960s, view the allegorical symbolism of tarot cards as pictorial metaphors that express the preoccupation of early man with the task of timekeeping. The calendar was an important point of reference to early man. He kept accurate records of the celestial changes that occurred on a daily, monthly and annual basis. He observed the precession of the equinox, the astronomical motions of the stars and planets, and other repetitive events. The calendar was used as a means of survival, including planning for winter food storage, preparing necessary shelter, communicating on a daily basis with other human beings, and recording the length of time required for birth. (Page 12)
This connection would never have occurred to me—and without Corwin’s apparently extensive explanation, it’s a bit hard to figure out how his theory actually works. However! I finally tracked down a substantive description of his ideas, in one of BOMB’s characteristically offbeat interviews.
BOMB is both well-known and obscure, from different perspectives . . . .
But basically, it’s a quarterly magazine featuring interviews between creative people from a variety of disciplines: visual art, literature, film, music, theater, architecture, and dance. I’d never heard of the two people in this particular interview—but here’s what they had to say about each other:
We should get to know Verne Dawson a little more, since he’ll be describing Corwin’s ideas. Gallery notes describe his work this way:
In Verne Dawson’s paintings the ways in which we mark time, invent stories and symbols, and regard the governing structures and belief systems of our lives are caught up in a playful entanglement of narratives that includes the story of painting itself. A painter of both fantastical landscapes and the cosmos, Dawson weaves the prehistoric past into the present embracing a vast history of some 30,000 years.
His work expresses a long-held interest in charting the continuities of human nature and culture and the perpetuation of methods of timekeeping through oral and visual traditions. Dawson's interest in the past is, in part, an effort to show the continuity of ancient, even prehistoric culture in the present, often revealed in symbols and tales relating to the telling of time, marked by a persistent and common use of numbers in attributes of myth and popular culture, holidays and festivals.
Examples:
And here’s what Verne Dawson shares about Arthur Corwin’s ideas. (It’s long—but at least it’s not 500 pages!)
Arthur Corwin, a sculptor, taught me a long time ago. He was a man of fabulous oral memory for fables, folk tales, and myths. He was deep into the tarot with other people in the '80s, although it goes back probably to the ‘60s and '70s when astronomy was being brought to bear on archaeology. You've got astronomers seeing artifacts as remnants of the scientific culture of earlier times. Most of these artifacts concern keeping track of time, of planetary and lunar movement as the only way to organize a society. How do you get involved in any kind of ritual if you can’t keep track of time?
It can be a very bad idea to procreate at certain times of the year, particularly in an ice age. when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the mortality rate for an infant born in September would be far higher than one born in April (hence the popularity of June weddings). Knowledge of time telling, that is to say, of astronomy, was coveted, concealed, and the "ace in the hole" of the priestly caste. Knowing what day the solstice would occur gave power to those who hold astronomical knowledge.
The tarot, with its 78 cards, can be used as an incredibly accurate calendar that needs adjustment only every 2,200 years. As you know, a regular deck of cards is also an annual calendar, with its 52 cards, one for each week of the year, and four suits, one for each season. Each suit has 13 cards representing the year's 13 full moons, one for each month or more appropriately, moonth of a lunar year. The two jokers do what the jokers always do, provide the irrational by occupying, in the form of leap days, those days necessary to balance a calendar. That’s essentially an annual calendar concealed in a deck of cards.
When asked by authorities, people would say it was simply a game or, in the case of tarot, an implausible fortune-telling tool. Both the secret knowledge and the deck of cards can be passed down from generation to generation. When you add in the additional cards of the tarot, the 22 major arcana cards, the calendar then represents big years, the entire procession of the equinoxes, the grand earth in its wobble. The axis points to every sign in the zodiac as it goes around in one complete wobble, which takes 25,800 years. That’s called a great year in many ancient myths, like in the Mayan calendar.
This takes the history of scientific culture back to prehistory, to metaphors, myths, stories with their math intact transmitted over eons through oral traditions of folklore, religion, and superstitions. All rich in numbers related to astronomy, to regimented ways of keeping track of time that are still with us today.
From what I can glean elsewhere, Corwin saw Tarot as a survival of this ancient system—but I couldn’t find out how he thought this might have happened. I did, however, learn that he took his Tarot explorations very seriously. Cooper Union alum Jim Markowich tells this story:
In 1980 or ’81, I spent a week as Art Corwin’s guest in Rowayton, CT. Doug Ashford and I had just purchased a Bolex 16mm film camera which we took turns monopolizing. I brought the camera to Connecticut. Arthur had created an armature that attached to his studio ceiling. The Bolex was bolted to it, and aimed straight down at the floor. We needed the floor-to-ceiling distance to accommodate the width of a tarot deck, laid out like a crown in thirteen columns and seven rows, without using a lens that would add distortion. In fact, an actual card deck would have been way too big. So we were using a photographically-reduced deck — a tiny tarot of 1″ x 2″, Bristol board-backed tiles; a miniature Tarot de Marseilles.
Penciled guides were drawn on the floor to keep these tiny cards in place. We filmed them as a stop animation, moving them in a prescribed pattern that would result in a calendar that was accurate to within a day every 25,772 years. Weeks later, the film was processed and we ran it through a projector at Cooper Union. The film’s resolution was not up to the task, and when projected, the 78 cards were reduced to fuzzy, little blobs of color. It was basically useless. Nowadays, one could just write code to move some sharply detailed graphics around on a monitor, but thirty five years ago we were out of luck. Still, it was an unforgettable experience.
I wish we had their movie anyway, even with the fuzzy blobs.
Here’s a photograph of Arthur Corwin with his cards, arranged in the pattern described by Markowich. I assume the individual cards were fixed in specific places, as part of his theory.
Beyond that—we’ll just have to imagine what else Corwin discovered and theorized in his study of Tarot. And until the next post, you’ll just have to wonder how all this got mixed up with baseball.
