As we delve further into the symbolism of the suit cards in the Tarot de Marseille, we come to the Sixes. According to the system I’m using, these cards take their meanings from two of the Trump cards: The Lover and the House of God. Note that both of these cards have different names in […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: The Sixes"It’s 3:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep. The reason I can’t sleep is that I’m on the academic job market, applying for jobs as a professor to start next academic year. So far, I’ve applied to 22 tenure-track jobs and one postdoctoral fellowship; I have three more postdoc applications to submit in the […]
Read more "Choosing the Tower"“I do not know these good people,” the prisoner replied. “Truly?” “Truly.” “And now tell me, why is it that you use the words ‘good people’ all the time? Do you call everyone that, or what?” “Everyone,” the prisoner replied. “There are no evil people in the world.” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita This […]
Read more "The Devil and the Star: There Are No Evil People"There are plenty of ways to draw connections between the cards of the Major Arcana. You can do it through numerology, through astrology, through the septenaries or visual cues in their symbolism. One of the simplest ways to find the connections between the cards, though, is simply to fold the sequence of the Major Arcana […]
Read more "Pairing the Major Arcana, Forward and Backward"I don’t really know how to write this post. The conversation about Black Lives Matter (hint: they do), about police violence against Black civilians, and about endemic racism in this country is such an important one, and we all have a duty to fight racism in every way we can. But it’s also not my […]
Read more "Black Lives Matter, Revolution, and the Tower"Today concludes the three-part series wherein I assign one James Bond film to each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 if you’d like to catch up with the rest of the series. Thanks again to Deborah Lipp for helping me put together this list. XV. The […]
Read more "The James Bond Tarot (Part 3)"Every now and then, I sit down with a notebook and a pen. I write out a numbered list going from 0 to 21 (or, more rarely, four side-by-side lists going from 1 to 14), and I start to take notes, trying to see if I can look at Tarot from a new angle. This […]
Read more "Dividing the Majors: An Experiment and a Spread"Spring is coming. You wouldn’t know it to look out my window right now (we had a massive snowstorm across the northeastern US this week), but the vernal equinox is only a week and a half away. So I thought now would be an appropriate time to talk about two cards that I associate with […]
Read more "The Empress and the Tower"Fun fact: When I was sixteen years old, I won a literature scholarship for a creative writing portfolio on tragedy. The portfolio itself was utter garbage, and I cringe even at the thought of the pieces I wrote (I defy anyone to be a good writer at age sixteen), but nonetheless, I’m proud of my […]
Read more "The Tower and Shakespearean Tragedy"I have a lot of thoughts about the Star. Like, a lot. It’s interesting to me that, in the order of the deck, the Star follows the Tower, because in real life, things go the other way. The Star is purity, and the Tower is the fall from grace. In the normal course of life, we […]
Read more "Perfection and Completion in the Garden of Eden"
Jack Chanek 