The Tuesday Newsletter (7.20)

Surveys, surrealism--and Tarot perspectives on the Voynich Manuscript

Some quick links:

1. I was delighted to see this story about painter Leonora Carrington’s 1955 Tarot pop up in a recent issue of the mostly literary Paris Review. The short essay offers a helpful introduction to Carrington and her work, along with some thoughtful remarks on the nature of Tarot. Please read it, and follow up with a longer account (more pictures!) in Art & Object.

2. Reader Jan Lelie added a thought-provoking comment to my recent essay on “The Future Factor.”

3. Just discovered that the always-surprising Robert M. Place recently offered a course on “Alchemy and Tarot” for one of my favorite offbeat websites: Morbid Anatomy. It’s impossible to summarize what Morbid Anatomy is all about, but if you want to see active imagination at work, stop by.

Invitation to a Survey

Are we "users" of Tarot — or is it the other way around?

Personally, I believe that Tarot either adopts you or not. Once adopted, you have a responsibility to listen to the cards, explain them to others as best you can, and never use them in any way that is manipulative or exploitative.

That kind of relationship is cooperative, personal, creative. By contrast . . . those who treat the Tarot as an ordinary object, or think they can control it, are likely to have an empty experience— at best.

But that’s just my own opinion. And opinions about Tarot are a dime a gigabyte! So I began to wonder if there is any way to look at the relationship between Tarot and its users in a more objective (even quantitative) way.

Which led me back to a previous effort along those lines. When I wrote my second book (Methods, Mastery, and More), I sent out questionnaires to about 200 people with an interest in Tarot.

That was in the 1990s, and the whole thing was a lot of work. Printing, mailing, reading the answers, compiling responses by hand, tabulating, and following up. But the reward was some fascinating information about how people connect with Tarot.

If I can find a copy of the original questionnaire, I’ll share it here on EP. I’ll also share some excerpts from MMM that summarized the original findings.

In the meantime, though, I’m happy to say that information-gathering is much easier in 2021. And as part of my quest to locate Tarot in relation to the wide world, I’ve whipped up four new surveys that I hope people will be willing to take.

I’m rolling them out one at a time, but for a look ahead—here’s the overview . . .

• 1 Cups: Tarot Connections

  In this survey, you’ll have an opportunity to share a little about your history with Tarot—how you found it (or were found by it), how you started out, and how you see it now. This survey is already active, so just click the link to participate.

• 2 Pentacles: Professional Tarot

  If you ever read Tarot publicly and/or for some sort of compensation (barter, payment, donations), I hope you will respond to this survey.

• 3 Wands: Personal Tarot

  What role does Tarot play in your life? How do you relate to decks and spreads? Do you read for yourself? Et cetera!

• 4 Swords: Thinking About the Wide World

  A survey focused on attitudes and levels of engagement, looking at political, spiritual, social, and cultural aspects of our larger world.

I have something in mind to fill the Major Arcana spot in this deck of surveys, but it’s still incubating.

Obviously, the more responses there are, the more interesting/meaningful the results. So please share the survey links with anyone you think might want to participate.

Tarot Perspectives on the Voynich Manuscript

I mentioned in the News + Letter 7.15 that I attended a webinar presented by Yale’s Beinecke Library, offering some insider insights on the beautiful, baffling Voynich Manuscript.

Just as a refresher—the Voynich is famous because it was written in an undecipherable “language,” accompanied by an assortment of drawings that are simultaneously familiar and very strange. The vellum manuscript now contains 240 pages, but there were originally at least 14 more. A few pages fold out to form larger displays.

About a third of the manuscript seems to be sort of an herbal, but the illustrated plants don’t exist (on Earth as we know it, anyway). For example:

The remaining pages fall into various categories, including some that contain only text, and others that contain illustrations which seem vaguely alchemical and/or astrological. For example:

A few pages contain drawings that seem merely fanciful, or decorative.

The Voynich is so intensely visual—and so perplexing—that you really have to spend some time going through the whole manuscript in order to appreciate its fascination. Fortunately, that’s easy to do, since the Beinecke has digitized the entire work and made the images widely available. If you haven’t ever explored the Voynich, there’s probably no better place to start than the very thorough Wikipedia article. And Wikimedia Commons offers the easiest way to flip through the pages in order.

The text portions of the manuscript are written in a loopy sort of script, composed of these units in varied combinations:

Matters are complicated by the fact that these individual symbols (glyphs, letters, whatever they are) are sometimes run together or stacked up in combinations that could be something like diphthongs, or could signify modifications of some sort, or could represent completely different letters/words/tenses/cases/concepts.

Once you start down the Voynich rabbit hole, don’t count on coming out anytime soon. But you’ll find an amazing variety of theories, analyses, and commentaries along the way. Predictably, there are many amateur attempts at explanation, and the Voynich has inspired a considerable amount of what we might call “fan fiction.”

It’s more surprising to realize how many highly skilled specialists in a variety of fields have focused their careers on the Voynich. And that, in 2021, they are no closer to an explanation than anyone has ever been.

Two such persons gave presentations in the webinar I watched: paleographer Lisa Fagin Davis, and linguist Claire Bowern. Simply put, Davis studies the handwriting and Bowern studies the language. Their discussions were rather technical, and really applied almost entirely to this particular manuscript—but a couple of things that came up made me think about Tarot.

Carbon dating of the Voynich has proved within reason that it was produced in the first half of the fifteenth century, around the same time as the earliest painted Tarot cards. And once you start looking at the Voynich images closely, some of them (particularly in details) might remind you of the earliest printed Tarots.

Of course a number of people have pointed out such similarities, but casual resemblances are not very significant, since common styles and symbols can be found in most examples of 15th-century art. What separates the Voynich from every other artifact of the period—including Tarots—is its large quantity of unreadable text.

That disconnect brings to mind a different quandary: there are no words associated with the earliest Tarot cards. Nothing written on them, nothing written about them, other than scattered practical references (such as accounting notes) and rules for a game that could be played with them.

But nothing whatsoever regarding the images themselves, their origins, or their meanings. We’ve all gotten used to that fact by now, and since so much has been written about Tarot since the 18th century, there’s no lack of reading material.

The Voynich is essentially a reverse case—plenty of text, just no way to connect the text with the pictures.

And one reason for so much attention to the Voynich “language” is the hope that decipherment of the text will explain the pictures. But as far as I can tell, much less effort has gone toward decoding the pictures themselves. What would we think about the drawings if they stood alone, like the Tarot images?

My second Tarot connection was sparked by the complexity of so-called “Voynichese.” The amount of brain power, computer power, and pure resourcefulness that’s been applied to understanding this language-like assembly of symbols is just amazing. And you can get a sense of that from Lisa Fagin Davis’s paper, “How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript.”

The paper—which is more fun to read than you might think—offers a longer version of Davis’s webinar presentation, and details the investigations that have led her to certain (tentative) conclusions. Among them: that five different hands can be detected in the manuscript, writing in two different “dialects.” Most pages were written by one scribe, but on a few, two different scribes write on different sides of the same page.

This means, for one thing, that creation of the manuscript was a collaborative effort. And for another that the pictures might have been drawn first, and the text laid in around them. So the scribes may have been commenting on or analyzing the images.

Alternatively, the multi-scribe scenario may suggest that several people were working from a pre-existing document (now lost), and had divided up the copying tasks.

At the very least, painstaking study of the Voynich has given us a glimpse of creative imagination at work in 15th-century Europe. And I came away from my brief visit to Voynich-world with this image from Lisa Fagin Davis’s paper:

These are examples of the same glyph taken from different places in the manuscript, then grouped by shared paleographic characteristics.

There’s obviously no real connection, but the arrangement looks so much like a Tarot spread that I stopped to think about the enduring appeal of card-like objects—and the ways they can be used to create meaningful groups and structures.

What if the Tarot images had been a mural rather than a set of individual images? They would have been in one order, telling one story. But instead, we have a kit of parts that could potentially tell every story imaginable.

I think we may not appreciate that quite enough.

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As always—thanks for reading. In the next issue, a look at Tarot in the New York Times, some notes on cultural appropriation, and another survey link.

Warmest regards, Cynthia