“Celtic Cross, Anyone?”: Jake Arthur on a Tarot-Inspired Poetry Collection

Jake Arthur explains why his latest collection of poetry was inspired by Pamela Coleman-Smith’s illustrations of the Rider-Waite tarot deck.

Done well, a Tarot reading, like all rituals, creates its own aura. Like when you leave a busy street in a European city and enter the calm and cool of a church, a reading is one of those moments when you naturally become silent, when you become serious , because there reigns there an atmosphere of increased meaning, of higher mysteries.

I first discovered Tarot while studying for my PhD in the UK. I had a friend who, whenever it reached about 1 a.m. and we were still at her house in Oxford, she would take her goblet of red wine and become mystical.

Dinners at her house were elaborate. As a starter, she always served quail eggs browned with salt. I had never eaten a quail egg in my life; I didn’t even know whether to dissect it. Even food was a kind of ritual for her.

Her parties ended in two ways. The first involved us all donning our jackets and gathering around a crucible in her garden for a therapeutic burn. On slips of paper, we would name bad boyfriends, bad vibes, or bad feedback from our thesis advisors, and then throw them away. We would hold hands and she would say a few words and burn them, and whatever they represented, to ashes with her lighter.

Either that or she was pulling out the tarot cards. Does the Celtic cross ring a bell?

You might think that Tarot is just one of those vaguely “Eastern” fads, like mood rings or aura cleansing, for which the white West is desperate to empty wallets. It’s true that at least someone is making money from the minor industry that Tarot has become, with custom decks and accompanying books promising that the cards will guide you to financial success, tantric sex, personal enlightenment and, of course, romantic love.

But the origin of the Tarot is European. The figures we associate with the Tarot – those with names like Death, the Hanged Man and the Wheel of Fortune – are trumps, or tarot In Italian, used in a card game popular in Renaissance Europe. Suits, Cups, Swords, Wands and Pentacles are the equivalents of our more common Spades, Clubs, Diamonds and Hearts.

It was not until the 19th century that these alternating face and suit cards, long absent from Western Europe, resurfaced. By that time, they had become sufficiently unknown—sufficiently mysterious—to be used in cartomancy: divination by cards. Their enigmatic names and designs contributed to the impression that these cards had something occult about them.

It’s time to put our cards on the table. I wrote a collection of poetry called Tarotwhere each poem offers a snippet from the life of a different character inspired by the design or meaning of a specific card. And yet I just spent three paragraphs demystifying the Tarot. Why am I killing my own mystique?

Because what fascinates me about the history of the Tarot is that it shows us how things can become mystified. Our civilization is like a very bright light: we are obsessed with the idea of ​​illuminating everything; we seem to hate shadows. But I think we still feel a deep and unexpressed attraction to the strange and the fantastic – and the Tarot is a symptom of this.

The Industrial Revolution replaced manual labor with machines, just as, ironically, medicine taxonomized Our bodies are turning into machines that can break down and need repair. The light of science and industry is pushing back the boundaries of the unknown. But at the same time, the opposite is happening in popular culture, which is turning to folk traditions, exotic objects from abroad, and the Gothic.

It was as if the loss of mystery in one part of life meant that it had to be supplemented elsewhere – as if mystery were something that people necessaryas if it were essential.

A normal deck of cards has become a kind of mystery, transformed into a ceremony with a whole bunch of new attributes: dark rooms, sumptuous fabrics, a Mediterranean beauty or an old woman leaning over a table, first reading her palm by candlelight before turning to the Tarot. The designs on these cards are so strange and supernatural that it seems they must know something we don’t. They seem to come from a distant past. Why wouldn’t they have wisdom to share?

When my friend did her reading for me, she chose the Celtic Cross: an intricate “deck” of 10 cards representing not only what lies ahead and what is in the present, but also your past, your hopes and your fears. , the root of your problem and the forces that prevent you from overcoming them, as well as the “result”: the answer to the question you ask the fortune teller.

The first card placed in the Celtic cross represents the asker: the person asking the question. I was given the Hermit, a figure dressed in dull colors who holds a cane in one hand and a raised lantern in the other. The last card placed is the outcome card, and mine was the Two of Swords. The card shows a blindfolded woman, dressed in white, with her arms crossed holding huge swords.

My friend told me that the two swords symbolized the choice before me, the two paths my life could take. She told me that these paths were perfectly balanced in my mind. I was the Hermit, looking with his lantern, trying to see in the dark. I was too cautious; I distrusted the testimony of my senses; I distrusted my instincts. I risked being wrong. And from these coordinates, my destination was the dead end, inertia. Like the blindfolded woman, I held two futures in my hands and I looked at neither of them.

I had sought advice, but instead was given my predicament back at me. Tarot refused to answer my question and called me short-sighted, twice.

“Reload?” my friend asked sharply, swirling and nearly knocking over her half-loaded glass.

What we need is not always an answer – sometimes all it takes is a moment to frame the question.

Does it matter whether the Tarot is what it claims to be – whether its origin is truly occult or not – whether the ritual we have done around it helps us open up to ourselves and the possibility that we have Need a helping hand, guidance in rough waters? Doesn’t it matter that we might have a fortune waiting for us, if only we could tell ourselves so?

baby
Or The star

Flexible levraut!
More arms than two
IN front of your mother
Swaddled naked, in fat
And soft bones, a hard look
In swish-swash colors
Training for you.

It’s a lot.

Everything is new under the sun
and the sun itself is just a kitten
Held by the neck in the teeth
From a lost star dam.
I am a kind of monkey
& I am your daddy,
Good morning.

Tarot by Jake Arthur ($25, Te Herenga Waka University Press) is available from Unity Books.