A general introduction will go here. The next two sections are also introductory material. [[DESCRIPTION OF READING]] Note: In the final version, sources will be continuously linked to the source passage at the end -- I've left them out here because they were visually distracting. An explanation of how a typical reading is preformed will go here. The purpose of this is to familiarize the audience with what might be an unfamiliar concept. This will demystify the subject and help lay the groundwork for both arguments. I will provide several images of Tarot spreads, a link to a simple guide that will explain the basic meanings of each card, and possibly a video of a reading so that the audience can see what a reading looks like in motion. [[THEORY]]This section will discuss various perspectives on how to approach a study of the Tarot. A rough sketch of the argument is: - The idea behind all of this isn't to take apart Tarot -- it's to look at why people like it (including how it's mechanical construction contributes to its enjoyment) - Tt's tempting to encounter divinatory practises as if they are a curiosity without truth value, and as if they need debunking - However, this approach limits the researcher's ability to understand how a person is actually experiencing the situations they describe - Tt also dismisses a wealth of research that has been done on the subject but which is not couched in appropriately scientific terms I will suggest the importance of encountering divinatory practises as something that can "[affect] the observer as truth for the observer" (Patrick Curry). Sources: Patrick Curry, Divination Margot Adler, Drawing down the Moon May also branch off from here with optional personal accounts from both these books. # Now that the introduction is out of the way, we can branch into the two halves of the essay: [[Divination and Communal Storytelling]] [[Readings as Machines]] DIVINATION AND COMMUNAL STORYTELLING - Divination is inherently communal - The conventional wisdom is that cards need to be given, not bought. In practise, this isn't actually what most people do, but the theory behind it still speaks to the idea of knowledge being passed down from person to person - At any rate, the community needs to be somehow found, since it still remains a liminal culture. "In most cases, word of mouth, a discussion between friends, a lecture, a book, an article, or a Web Site provides an entry point.(Margot Adler)" # Specific decks She Is Sitting in the Night: Re-Visioning Thea’s Tarot — The book was created at the request of an author’s friend, who wanted a proper guidebook for Thea’s Tarot — Ruth West created Thea's Tarot at the bequest of her community, working from the descriptions of a fictional deck imagined by Billie Potts. — “Honestly, it’s a bit of a cult deck. I launched it at a time where there were a lot of women-centred decks coming out — there were three in that year alone. So on its launch it didn’t actually get as much attention as I would have hoped. But in the years that followed, I started noticing that people all over would somehow make their way to the deck.” (West) The Raven's Prophecy "I was writing a series that reveled in Welsh mythology and involved tarot, and what started as a gentle dabble in combining the two as a visual extra for readers expanded quite naturally into me drawing the extra deck." (Steifvater) - Again, the creation was not a solitary pursuit -- it arose from a desire to continue telling a story for a particular group of people - In regards to this, it's notable that Steifvater is quite active on her online social media, and frequrntly interacts directly with readers. [[The Neccessity of Communal Storytelling]] READINGS AS MACHINES - The cards aren't placed at random -- there are specific physical positions called "spreads", which allow a reader to frame the answer which they are going to recieve (for example, one might use the Celtic Cross as a general reading, or the Crossroads Spread to answer a querent who is having difficulty deciding between several options) - Spreads can be shared amongst users -- metaphorically or sometimes literally 'downloaded' and added like an extension or a piece of software (it's an inexact metaphphor) - will show various examples of spreads from different books, and possibly from the internet if permission can be obtained There is grammatical consistency in spreads: - Shere are certain recurrent positions in spreads -- for example, time is usually right left to right, and cards which indicate mental obstructions are usually placed over the signifier (ie the card which represents the querent) - the physical orientations of the cards mean different things -- reversed cards, cards offset over one another, cards crossed over one another, etc. Sources to use: Raven’s Prophecy She Is Sitting in the Night Simple Fortunetelling with Tarot Cards Depending on spatial constraints, may also draw a link between this and hard-coded cogntive grammer: (From Reisberg's Cognition) - "The subject of a sentence tends to precede the object in roughly 98% of the world’s languages ... the sequence of subject before verb is preferred in roughly 80% of the world’s languages." etc. The purpose of this is to suggest that Tarot feels remarkably intuitive and 'obvious' partially because its grammatical rules are fairly close to ours. [[Tarot Guidebooks as Hyperlinked Literature]] THE NECCESSITY OF COMMUNAL STORYTELLING - People all want to hear stories about themselves - Oftentimes, members of minoritized groups end up with very few stories about their communities, or none whatsoever - The creation of Thea's Tarot was community-based: "It was a personal process. I was fresh from college, in my mid-20s, and I had recently come out as a lesbian. Lesbian feminism was a big deal at the time. I was searching around for meaning, and looking at the world in which I'd been directed one way my whole life, and challenging those ideas." - The cards are units of meaning that can be combined in a variety of different ways -- even decks that are not specifically made for a particular minoritized community (ie Thea's Tarot) can be read in ways which are open for all people - Tarot, by nature, particurally excells at confessional storytelling (as readings are almost always about things the querents are worried about in some way or another). - This kind of confessional storytelling is identified as uniquely important by authors Christopher Pullen and Stephan Tropiano, both of whom express concerns about youth inability to engage in confessional storytelling compounded by the recent corporate commercialization of queer youth pain (for example, advertising products withing the It Gets Better project) - Tarot is generally fairly accessible, and its liminal status means that it's unlikely to experience mainstream commcercialization [[CONCLUSION]] Here, you can get back to the other path. [[Readings as Machines]]TAROT GUIDEBOOKS AS HYPERLINKED LITERATURE - Guidebooks refer specifically to books paired with specific decks, not to the general-purpose workbooks that can be used with any decks - Guidebooks are hyperlinked texts. "Users construct stories — their own narration of destiny — from the cards even when the softwares that plug into the hardware of the deck are not overtly literary. Readers then switch from being consumers of texts to producers in a move that corresponds to literary and hypermedia idealizations of literature and literary texts proposed by many contemporary theoreticians. (Mountfort)" - "... most Tarot guides have three key macro-level design elements. The first is a rationale, foregrounded through placement in an introductory section or "Part One. As with introductions to many factual texts, one of its objectives is to establish a territory, then a niche, and then to occupy it .... The second macro-level element sits at the centre or core of the guidebook: it is essentially an index of entries on the encyclopedia, or wiki it is a classic non-linear text type whose entries, unlike the chapters in a novel, are designed for access or reference in any order. [to simplify, he's talking about the bit where cards get described] ... Finally, there is a third design element, a 'How To' section with advice, spreads, and sometimes sample readings providing applications of the system (Mountfort)." - Mountfort also notes that the order of these can shift -- for example, in She Is Sitting in the Night and Illuminating the Prophecy, the indexes appear at the end - In the second macro-level element, the typical layout is to have a black and white image of the card surrounded by descriptive text. The black and white image is essentially a hyperlink to the physical card. "If you're new to tarot, I think you'd better take the deck out now. Put it in front of your face. Behold it. Do you have it? Good.(Steifvater)" - Stiefvater, who is here introducing the reader to her book's index, indicates the primacy of the physical card, and the importance of treating the guidebook and the cards as linked. [[The Tower]]Here's where it wraps up! [[MASTERPOST]] [[SOURCES]]This section will be a masterpost of all the various parts in this essay, in case someone wants to go back and look at one specific part (might be useful if someone were, hypothetically, marking this essay) [[SOURCES]] I'll also link to this from the intro, but it visually interrupted the structure of this layout, so I left that link out for now. (The final product is going to look pretty messy, especially with the sources.) Return to [[INTRODUCTION ]] All the sources will be here! I'll also link the various sources to this part throughout the essay. [[MASTERPOST]] Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon. London: Penguin. 1986. Print. Auger, Emily E., ed. Tarot in Culture: Volume One. Valleyhome Books, 2014. Print. Curry, Patrick., ed. Divination. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. Print. Kenner, Corrine. Simple Fortunetelling With Tarot Cards. Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2007. Print. Mountfort, Paul. (201). Tarot Guidebooks as a Literary Genre. In Emily Auger, Tarot in Culture: Volume One. Print. Pickle, Oliver. She Is Sitting in the Night: Re-visioning Thea’s Tarot. Montreal: Metonymy Press, 2015. Print. Steifvater, Maggie. Illuminating the Prophecy. Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2015. Print. Smith, Pamela Colman. The Rider Tarot Deck. Stamford: U.S. Game Systems Inc, 1971. Print. Steifvater, Maggie. The Raven’s Prophecy. Minnesota: Llewellyn Books, 2015. Print. West, Ruth. Thea’s Tarot. Self-published. 1984. Print. Pullen, Christopher., ed. Queer Youth and Media Cultures. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. Reisberg, Daniel. (2010). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind. (4th ed.) London: W.W. Norton & Company. EACH CARD AS AN INDIVIDUAL NETWORK OF MEANING: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE TOWER The Tower is generally considered to be one of the most fearful and inherently negative cards in the deck. However, over and over again, decks and writers take this connotation and use it to portray the cards in a positive way. The preexistent network of negative meanings gives their new interpretations extra strength and emotion. # Simple Fortunetelling from Tarot Cards -- more traditional meanings from the foundational decks Waite Design: “The inky blackness of a moonless night is illuminated with a flash of lightning … the top of the structure … is blown away. The tower catches flire, and two people … plunge to their deaths on the rocky ground below.” Llewellyn Tarot: “The tower is the castle of Bala Lake, which was flooded to cleanse the land of dbauchery, greed, and misuse of power.” Crowley deck: “The chaos and the destruction are equally vivid … the universe is falling apart. In the bottom right corner, the Roman god of the underworld … opens his jaws and unleashes the fires of hell. Four bodies fall from the collapsing tower.” # "New" meanings Illuminating the Prophecy, Maggie Steifvater: “In a dreadful way, seeing this card always excites me. Is it terrible to admit that? Most people find the Tower quite terrifying. The Tower is something that you have come to rely on, a truth you believe utterly, or a way of life that you have grown accustomed to. And in this card, it is entirely destroyed in a roaring, starving fire, leaving a blackened and unfamiliar territory on the other side of it.” She Is Sitting in the Night, Oliver Pickle “This card in a reading reminds you of where your restless trapped unconscious is destroying its cage, clambering out until you’ve caught up with what — in the aftermath — can be revelatory or amazing.” [[CONCLUSION]] ## Here, you can get back to the other path. [[Divination and Communal Storytelling]]