Tarot-Card-Killer Gets Discarded

The victims' families wanted "closure", the dime-store-psychology removal of an obligation to feel bad about something you'll still feel bad about after watching the state murder somebody for your mental health.

The state wanted "justice", which is to show how when something really bad happens to you, it's OK to kill somebody to get even for it.

John Allen Muhammad, the star of the Death show last night, would have understood that idea just fine—vengeance. That seems to have been what he was all about. And he didn't mind recruiting a kid, Lee Boyd Malvo, to help him with his plan to murder as many people as they could.

Why did he want to murder people? Who knows? Who cares at this point? There are allegations he had an elaborate scheme to cover an intended murder of one of his ex-wives. There are claims he was engaged in an act of jihad. Certainly he and Malvo created sufficient terror with their random sniper-killings to be considered terrorists.

But the only reason we are talking about him here, and only briefly, is that seven years ago, Muhammad and Malvo, who initially were not known to be a sniper team, operated under a catchy title: the Tarot Card Killer.

Newsweek Supplied the Name. The snipers
supplied the fantastic and dangerous opportunity
to the Tarot Industry, October 2002.
As it turned out, when a Death card was left at the scene of one of the attempted murders, the MSM went crazy trying to learn as much as it could about Tarot, and particularly the Death card. The story of what happened next, how the Tarot industry reacted to being thrust front and center into one of the most terrifying murder stories in recent memory, I have told in the article The Death of Tarot.

If you have not read it, or have not read it in a while, you may find it enlightening, both as a look at how the MSM operates, and how the Tarot industry processed its bloody gift from the Tarot snipers.

(jk)

Do YOU H8•W8?

International symbol of the Waite-Haters
H8•W8’ers include:

1. Cartofeminists—Greerist oinkers who want to cut off your tail with a carving knife.
2. Pro-Pamists—people who love Pixie Smith, whoever she was, and just want her to get the credit she is due, for stealing all that Sola-Busca artwork. Meanwhile, more jobs for China!.
3. Crowleyites—because Aleister repeatedly told them Waite sucked.
4. Average readers—whom Waite despised.
5. Coherence addicts—whom Waite despised even more.
6. Image bigots—people who think Tarot is exclusively a visual, anti-textual medium.
7. Illiterate nincompoops—all the other monolith-pawing grunters holding their PKT’s upside-down, trying to figure out if Waite insulted them in the very first paragraph referring to the “pathology of the very plain man”. Answer: yeah, he did.

Good News: If you H8•W8, there is hope! You can recover! You may even end up loving W8! OK, probably not.

But W8! I was once a Crowleyite, & a coherence addict, and I got over H8ing W8!

And so can you!

Open your wallet and your heart. Support the H8•W8 Foundation for Recovering Brow-knitters.* Help victims stop loving some silly creature named “Pixie”! Help average people find their way out of W8 and back to Tarot for the Serious Gerbil! Help image bigots LEARN TO READ A BOOK!

*—Tiny print disclaimer: The Foundation for Recovering Brow-Knitters IS NOT REAL, you twit. But if you want to send me money anyway, OK.

Future of Fortunetellers Looks Dim

After all, who needs a fortuneteller, or even one of those fancy "intuitive" readers, when your employer or government snoop can just read your handy-dandy brain scan, showing not only what you think, but picture-images of everything you see, including images from your dreams!

Don't worry, you'll get used to it. In fact, you'll grow to love it (him).
Sound like Minority Report scif-fi?

Nope, it's modern science, moving us rapidly toward Borgification.

Wired ran an article today entitled "Brain Scans Reveal What You've Seen", and while that is no doubt a bit of hype concerning the present state of the technology, the article notes concerning future applications:

"You could have someone talk to themselves, and have it come out in a machine."

Who needs cold reading when you've got one hot thought-reading machine?

Hey, at least we won't have to listen to all the dunderheads over at the EFF blathering about "privacy", and "rights". What passé things are those, even now, but especially after Web 4.0 links the collective active thoughts of humanity into one massive Borg Collective.

And we certainly won't have to waste our time reading those awful Tarot books, promising to teach us how to read cards for self-exploration and transformation. Nope, as with so many human activities that are rapidly being deemed too dangerous for individuals to control for themselves, the exploring and transforming of your selves will be in the hands of your loving and efficient governments, the very ones that we all know are constantly making excellent decisions thinking mainly about your best interests.

I'll bet most of you, who don't wish to be waterboarded into submission anyway, are just thrilled at the prospect you won't have to suffer with all that hard, exhausting thinking stuff for much longer. And your children? Oh, isn't it a comfort knowing they will never have to struggle like you did, because no matter what their material circumstances, they'll be getting steady affirmations of SOMA-streams right into their brains from Big Brother.*

And you know, he LOVES you. Almost as much as you'll love him.

So, I think the future of Tarot is purely artifactual.

And then only in terms Big Brother deems appropriate for any public consumption.

Enjoy your last days of personal folly. Soon that burden shall be lifted from you.

Sweet dreams.

*—Yes, I know, that's a mixed-dystopian allusion. Hey, I'm multicultural!

(jk)

Tarot Weapons

There are a lot of basic occult-Tarot ideas that get glossed over or ignored in pop-Tarot books, or in online discussions, because these are allegedly motifs of Tarot’s dark side, and so, according to the self-appointed “light-side” advocates, they are best left veiled.

One of these little-discussed concepts is that Tarot is a weapon, or a set of weapons. Why should anyone wish to advocate such a dangerous-sounding thing as that? Isn’t Tarot just a pack of cards, intended to bring people to “good” and affirming ideas and feelings? So, ideas like weapons and war and death shouldn’t be in Tarot, right?

Wrong.

The truth is that occult Tarot is built upon a particular conceptual construct, gaming Tarot, and it naturally incorporates the symbolism and the language of conflict and conquest, as befits what the founder of occult Tarot, Antoine Court de Gébelin, called a wargame, not a peacegame.

Now, before the Tarot was invented, its main precursor pack, a medieval Egyptian pack known as Mamluk cards, symbolized various divisions and officers of the Mamluk government, which would be played against one another in the game. Ottoman societies and internal politics were highly competitive and treacherous, and these card games may have been intended to remind the players of these facts of life (and death).

As the game became Europeanized (in highly competitive and treacherous Italy), the suits were modified somewhat to fit European tastes and understandings. For example, the Mamluk polo-sticks, were converted into staffs, and the Mamluk scimitars were straightened into European longswords. The role of the suits in the game did not change however, as again they were pitted against each other, and in combination with the Tarot supersuit of 22 trumps were used to play little cardboard wars.

As the occultists began building their dogmas of Tarot, one of their earliest and most basic observations had to do with how the suits and the social forces or estates they were claimed to represent, were in conflict with each other. Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins might have mutual interests at times, and be held and expected to cooperate in the hand of a particular player of the game, but they all had their respective powers and defects as weapons, in reality and in occult operations.

Antoine Court de Gébelin noted that the ancient Egyptians, who he wrongly believed had invented Tarot, "divined future things" by "weapons in general" and that "the four Signs" (i.e. the four suits of the Tarot pack) would be mixed or shuffled together to form "sentences which the Magi read or interpreted like Judgments of Destiny."

By the time the Golden Dawn synthesized occult Tarot dogma into a highly systematic framework, they viewed the Tarot suits as icons of the Elements, which they called "Elemental Weapons". Each Weapon and Element corresponded to a letter of Tetragrammaton, or the four-lettered Hebrew name of God:

WAND YOD
CUP HE-prime
SWORD VAU
COIN HE-final

There were numerous other correspondences to these weapons, which guided a magus in his choice of which to employ, depending upon his magickal aims.

Aleister Crowley of course, having been trained in the Golden Dawn system of Tarot, also adopted the idea of the Tarot suits as Elemental Weapons, and he writes a good deal about these and their correct applications in his works, devoting a whole chapter to them in his work Magick and discussing them in various places in The Book of Thoth.

For example, in his appendix for the card Magus (or Juggler):

"[Magus] bears a wand with a knob at each end, which was probably connected with the dual polarity of electricity; but it also the hollow wand of Prometheus that brings down fire from Heaven. On a table or altar, behind which he is standing, are the three other elemental weapons.

"With the Wand createth He.
With the Cup preserveth He.
With the Dagger destroyeth He.
With the Coin redeemeth He."

You may ask, how is it that something which preserves or redeems is a weapon? In fact, isn't it exactly the opposite of that which destroys? Indeed, however, these are opposite even of another idea, that of the power of creating, which is balanced against the power of destruction, precisely because Wands-Swords function together—every creation is a destruction after all, and every destruction a creation.

In the same way, if something is saved from this process, preserved in the Cup or redeemed by the Coin, it is condemned to an apparent, even unjust, bondage to some desired stability, of a certain quality that implies spiritual death. In fact, the Coin only redeems when its essential nature and tendency to density and unchangingness is ultimately defeated.

The proper understanding of the Universe, as occult Tarot teaches us, is that the Universe is at War. Perhaps it is a Holy War, in the sense of something essential and divine being expressed or worked out in the constant conflict; or perhaps it is a War in name or attitude only, as the great movement or Way of things naturally rips and tears apart temporary unities as it dispassionately unfolds Destiny.

In any case, it often seems incredibly unfriendly to us as we plot our little lives of desire and attainment. We can look at graveyards and obituaries and see the ultimately hopeless nature of any human cause founded upon a desire for a long life or significance.

So, what good or positive message is to be taken from this dark-side teaching?

Well, the good news I suppose is that we possess any weapons at all. We could have been cast into the maelstrom utterly defenseless, with no hope of making any progress whatsoever. For a very long time, that was the effective condition of humanity. But, very slowly, after the fashion of the Aeonic Elephant lumbering over the centuries, we have learned more and more about how to employ the Elements of our bondage and destruction to commit high acts of impiety to lengthen and in some ways better our lives.

We are still imperfect, even primitive employers of the Elemental Weapons, but we have at least some hope that we shall improve to the point of making some real progress.

Unfortunately, this world, and Tarot, being about realistic measures and odds, we have to view our hopeful attitude as a potentially dangerous impediment to survival, since it makes us stress the benefits of using the Weapons, without considering the incredible risks their use always represents.

By this I mean that one really cannot ever successfully escape the essential natures of the Weapons, and so for example, to Weapon which "preserves", say by cementing certain attitudes about identity and patriotism, can lead to horrific destruction when it comes time to show what you will do to defend what you hold too dear to lose.

We see many examples of that kind of problem in the world presently.

And certainly our Tarots and our readings should represent these dynamics.

(jk)

Cartofeminists Review Harry Roseland's Fortuneteller Paintings

While I don't regularly read Mary Greer's Tarot blog, lately the Tarot spirits have once again been bringing her comments to my attention. This time I found a Tarot mention in some blog called "Feministe", written by a creature called "Aunt B", and B was blaming her own absurd notions on America's most popular cartofeminist, Mary K. Greer.

So, Greer wrote a piece on July 19 of this year on the popular genre artist of a century ago, Harry Herman Roseland. She called Roseland probably "the most significant painter of American cartomancers". One wonders what the list of competitors might be for that title, and also there could be a difference between being the most significant painter, and painting the most significant work.

Before we start with the analysis of what the cartofems have said about Roseland's work, let's examine the significant artist and his pertinent paintings.

Harry Herman Roseland was born c. 1867, in Brooklyn New York. Most bios emphasize Roseland's somewhat parochial outlook, as he never traveled or trained in Europe, and was mainly self-taught, and content to remain close to home. Roseland seems to have understood that his best chance for success was to use his considerable illustrative skill to depict what was familiar to him.

Roseland thus specialized in painting what are called "genre" pictures, or scenes of everyday life, which are elevated from being glorified postcards by the respective skill of the artist in question. Roseland is considered one of the best American genre artists.

One identifying characteristic of his early work especially is his focus on depicting scenes of the lives of African-Americans. These are almost all domestic scenes, showing African-American families in various aspects of their post-Civil-War home lives.

In addition, Roseland painted a large number of works, done over a decade or so, showing various indoor scenes of the same African-American fortune-teller, doing various readings for genteel, young, white women. The young women are well-dressed, with period large hats and parasols, all very beautiful, and they show various attitudes towards the fortuneteller, depending in part on what kind of reading (palm or card or tea leaves) they are receiving. The fortuneteller is depicted as being of modest means, and generally appears to be a domestic servant.

Roseland achieved a good deal of success for many years. In 1913, perhaps tiring of painting scenes showing domestic tranquility—or mildly amusing domestic sitcoms—he created his most controversial and best known work, The Higest Bidder, which shows a young black woman and her small child being sold into slavery. In 1913 New York art society, such a work offended many sensibilities, in spite of its spare and extremely tasteful depiction, and the work was rejected from a planned showing at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Roseland was told by members of the Art Committee of the Institute that his painting "could not be accepted because it tended to keep alive those memories which 'had better be forgotten'".

While Roseland, who died in 1950, continued to paint, he began to fall out of favor after the 1913 incident, and also as his own focus changed to depicting things such as beach scenes from Coney Island, which were not nearly as popular as his earlier work.

The Highest Bidder is now well known because it was recently purchased by Oprah Winfrey, who says it is her favorite painting, and inspires her because it reminds her of who she is, and where she came from.

When Mary Greer decided to report on Roseland's work on her blog, initially she didn't do much more than show some of the fortuneteller paintings, and provide some links. The comments that followed were generally expressions of appreciation, and little analysis was offered. That changed when a comment came in from someone calling herself Aunt B, who pointed out that she was reviewing the works over at her blog, Feministe.

As you will see, Aunt B feels a lot of things about Tarot, and Tarot reading, for example she says "there's a lot about it as an experience that's appealing to [Aunt B] as a woman". On the one hand, she says she can "speak with authority" because as a reader she knows more than her client. On the other hand, despite this chasm of authority, she claims she likes the "intimacy" she can build with a stranger in a Tarot reading.

And she feels that quality of intimacy is well depicted in the Roseland series of fortuneteller paintings. Aunt B says, identifying with the authority power she says is appealing for women: "The African-American woman is the one with the power, with the literacy to read the cards in a way the white woman can’t." And there's the intimacy thing, too, as she points out "they both lean over the cards, their heads curved in towards each other."

But, then, Aunt B began noticing problems, which she says only became apparent to her as she looked at the Roseland fortuneteller paintings as a group, instead of one pleasing portrait. Aunt B doesn't like the fact that it appears the fortuneteller had her knitting work interrupted by the visit of her clients. She also thinks it's rude that the clients keep on their hats, as if they are "still in a potentially public space". And then there is a truly odd view she expresses about the parasols in the pictures:

"And the parasols! Look at how they point towards the reader in so many pictures, reaffirming that no matter what kind of intimacy we might think we’re seeing, there are some strong and potentially violent barriers between them."

And finally, Aunt B is concerned that only through fortunetelling would the white clients ever consider listening to any advice given by a black woman.

When Greer was made aware of Aunt B's comments, she replied:

"Your insights are so helpful...Your material really inspired me."

But, are these comments by Aunt B based in anything other than her hypersensitive "feminist" concerns?

First off, as a general view of things, I question whether the fortuneteller series represents any interest on Roseland's part to consciously make any social commentary (with one possible exception I discuss below). Whereas I think one could make such a case for his scenes of African-American family life, and certainly for a work such as The Highest Bidder, the fortuneteller paintings are obviously formulaic vignettes meant to entertain the people he was selling his paintings to—i.e., the class of people he depicted as the clients of the fortuneteller.

That doesn't mean he couldn't have sought to bite the hand that was feeding him, but the question is whether that sentiment is really evident in the paintings.

For example, is it really rude or a statement of class superiority that the women keep their hats on in the presence of the fortuneteller? Women back at the turn of the 20th century, at least the ones who wore hats, and that included quite a few black women too, often wore their hats indoors, sometimes even at home. But that would be especially true if they were visiting another house, especially for a particular purpose which might not keep them that long. Women of the class depicted in the fortuneteller paintings worked long and hard to get their hair and hat combinations rigged up just so. And, just to be fair to Roseland, he does depict a number of the fortuneteller's clients bareheaded.

Another point, while it is assumed by Aunt B and I suppose many viewers in every case the scenes depicted are the residence of the fortuneteller, we have no way of knowing if the room belongs to her, or is the servant quarters of a property perhaps owned by her employer, or is someplace she's using to do various businesses. The same model used for the fortuneteller paintings also shows up in a Roseland work entitled "The Dressmaker".

As for the parasol theory, again Aunt B's "feminist" instincts lead her quite astray. The vast majority of the fortuneteller paintings show the client parasols pointing either straight to the floor, or away from the fortuneteller! I suppose one could argue the parasol wielders were violently pointing their parasols away from the fortuneteller to show their disapproval.

Lastly, the answer to the question of the form of the fortuneteller's counsel, and whether it is only through a mantic act that her clients allow her to advise them, may be "yes", but is that anything to do with the fortuneteller's race or ethnicity?

Would the fortuneteller's clientele take advice of an important or intimate nature from any person they deemed to be in a much lower social station? And would that be any less true today for people similarly distant in that manner?

Maybe one of the relevant charms of Roseland's fortuneteller series is that it suggests to us that a mantic art like cartomancy has the power to enable a human connection to which society would normally object. The fact that Roseland chose in each of these paintings to show well-off white women being aided and counseled by a poor black woman, suggests he was hoping to communicate the idea to his own white customers that a lot of them already accepted that black people were wise and worth listening to. This would be one exception I can see to my point above about Roseland not seeking to do social commentary in the fortuneteller paintings.

Reading the Cards, 1899. Roseland shows how cartomancy can bridge
a considerable social divide.
In one of the cartomantic paintings, Reading the Cards, from 1899, Roseland shows a pretty-in-pink white girl, lap flush to that of her fortuneteller, to form a table for her card reading. This is one of the few fortuneteller paintings to show physical contact between the client and the reader. Here the white woman also rests her left arm behind the shoulder of the fortuneteller, which increases the sense of intimacy between them. The cards form a link between the two women, and they stare intently into the possible future. I note not only is the girl's parasol pointed down but also away from the fortuneteller. Further, it appears the fortuneteller herself has a parasol, resting behind the sofa.

There are a number of interesting questions raised by the Harry Roseland fortuneteller paintings. Not the least of these is whether his depiction of of a black fortuneteller, especially one skilled in a number of mantic arts, is realistic, or mainly his imagination. Was his model for all those years a real fortuneteller? And who might she have been? Were black women often engaged as card readers at this time? Or was that an unusual mantic practice for them?

So few artists ever seem to keep designer notes. Too bad. It would be good to know more about the origin of these paintings, and why Roseland ever began them in the first place.

(jk)

Tarotmania

On the left, Tarot Therapy, otherwise known as Tarotmania, on the right the infamous Tarotmania Map, showing the Tarot world, c. 2004.

Someone asked me a question on the Facebook Tarotica group: “What is the definition of a Tarotmaniac?”

It should of course be easy to answer a question like that. It is, actually. But consider that a definition is something like a biography, and the more we edit for the sake of off-topical convenience, the less justice we do the telling of the story. So, I seek here to definitively answer the above question—i.e., I shall endeavor to tell you much more than you shall ever want to know.

---

Disclaiming Preface

Let us begin with a disclaimer—if somebody wants to pick up a Tarot deck and have whatever ignorant impressions he gets from looking at it be the source of meaning of this deck, he doesn’t require any authorization from anyone to engage in such a solipsistic exercise. Most especially, you don’t have to buy a book to tell you not to bother reading books. I will tell you this for free right here. Now go get yourself a Tarot deck and start masturbating all you want—although, that is a rather odd erotic stimulus—but different strokes for different ends, or asses.

This process of semantic (or orgasmic) acquisition is generally called by a misleading term in most pop Tarot books and websites: intuitive. This is claimed to provide better, more accurate, i.e. more personally relevant meanings, than can be gotten from reading meanings provided in books, or from studying the symbolic contents or historical contexts of Tarot decks.

On the other hand (the evil, chastising one, which of course does it for some of you), don’t for a moment pretend to yourself that such a lazy and witless self-indulgence is going to teach you much of anything about Tarot. If you blather to somebody that the Hermit means that you need to take a vacation and get away in the mountains, because that’s what it personally makes you feel like doing when you look at it, knowledgeable people will naturally treat you as if you just spammed them with 78 photos of your misbegotten kids for them to suffer through. What it means to you is just not that interesting to anybody else.

But again, who says you need anybody else’s approval to feel what you want to? Nobody.

The thing is, nor does anybody owe you their approval if all you bring to the table of public Tarot discussion are ignorant personal opinions. Tarot is no different in that respect from other subjects requiring serious study to understand.

So, what follows is not, as is often alleged by Tarotmaniacs, an attempt to deny somebody’s right to be intuitive, or to make up whatever personal narratives comfort her in her tiny dark troglodytism. No, what follows is simply a cartocultural excavation.

---

TAROTMANIA, a Brief History of a Word and its Constituencies

The notion of mania being associated with playing cards is an old idea. Tarot of course always had a Fool card, and gambling has been described as a craze, even a madness from time to time. In the 19th century, there was a famous cartomania, basically a photographic social-networking phenomenon. The first mention I have been able to find where playing cards and the word mania were mashed up, is in an 1814 Italian book, Dialoghi italiani e francesi all' uso delle due nazioni, by P. L. Costantini, in which fortunetelling with cards is ridiculed, as the cartomania of witches.

Of course, cartomania is very similar in sound to cartomancy, the word meaning to divine the future with playing-cards. The root -mancy is from the French -mancie, tracking back to Latin mantia and Greek manteia. Mania can also be tracked back to Greek, in mainesthai, ‘be mad’.

Perhaps it is fair to say there are two main understandings, and political affiliations having some use and claim upon the word Tarotmania. One party, which I think can fairly be called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Tarot (or POFLOT), views the word as a weird kind of therapy, understanding mania as a means to sanity in effect. This is not a view the opposition party, which could fairly be called Opus Taroticae (OPTARO), would wholly dispute; although Optaro’s understanding of the word and the mania as a positive or therapeutic characteristic is meant purely (or impurely) in an ironic sense.

Optaro defines Tarotmania in the following way:

1. A term describing the affections and obsessions of Tarot enthusiasts and advocates.
2. A term of sardonic derision, describing the hopeless and implacable irrationalism of the Tarot community, sometimes referred to as the land of Tarotmania.

Tarotmania is, obviously, the product of a collision of two words:

Tarot—the pack of 78 cards used for various games, including fortunetelling and occultism.

Mania—madness, “marked by periods of great excitement, delusions, euphoria”; also “excessive enthusiasm or desire—an obsesssion.”

In 1979, Jan Woudhuysen wrote a book, Tarotmania: or why only an Idiot would want to become a Fool. So far as I have been able to learn, this is the first appearance of this word, and in fact Woudhuysen calls it “his” term. As we have seen, there was precedence for a carto-maniacal mashup of this sort.

On Woudhuysen’s website today, he says he originally wrote Tarotmania “as a protest against all the mystical back-to-the-Egyptians books that explain the tarot cards. As far as I am concerned, I don't believe in tarot cards, I just make use of the cards to find out what's going on. Tarotmania was first published in England, then in the US (under the title Tarotherapy) and subsequently in Holland and Germany.”

Woudhuysen’s book is a very peculiar production, and most uncharacteristic of modern Tarot books, which are usually proudly ahistorical (or anti-historical) works of popular fiction, aimed at peddling weak ideas to weak minds. Tarotmania on the other hand at least attempts to raise the bar a bit on the ideas, and the author does say a few provocative and even interesting things about Tarot. Unfortunately, his reasoning as to how these things work or make sense is often defective.

For example, to his credit, Woudhuysen obviously did bother to do some research into the history of Tarot, and understood enough about it to know that the occult claims for an ancient heritage of the Tarot were at best a mythos, and no history at all. However, he stops short of looking deeper into why the occultists chose to make this myth and how it impacted the development of Tarot, and instead, in a chapter called “Tarot And Its Lack of History”, attempts to establish there is so little factual basis (particularly any written records) for anything like history to be performed on Tarot, that our only reasonable option is to dismiss all authorities on the subject and admit we do not know and likely never will know the history of Tarot.

This sets up a major premise of his book, that meaning in Tarot is mainly the result of a personal relationship between a Tarot reader and his deck. Ultimately, the only definitions of meaning for any Tarot card that should matter, Woudhuysen tells us, are the ones any individual feels are correct for himself.

At the same time, he doesn’t exactly mean by this that the modern preference for purely personal meanings of Tarot is the right way to go. Woudhuysen seems to have had a problem about that level of freedom of choice in Tarot, as he may have realized what utter chaos that makes of the notion of Tarot having any but the slightest of any transmittable significance (see Tarot, a Semiotic View for a discussion of this), and that it essentially reduced Tarot to a glorified coloring book.

But, Woudhuysen had a difficult time making the distinction between perfect freedom to color as one desires (however ignorantly), and what he viewed as the stunted expression of somebody seeking the one true Tarot authority. He hoped to free the latter kind of person, while not giving license to the former, who he viewed as wanting to make a “new life” (for themselves and Tarot), by completely reinventing the meanings of the deck.

This internal confusion and conflict about the right level of freedom of personal invention in Tarot is evident in Woudhuysen’s writing, as he is constantly telling readers that he wants them to pay attention to some idea or set of meanings, as if he were an authority to listen to, even though he has told them before they are the only real authority. In fact, he never says to completely throw out the occult meanings, or to ignore the mythos of Tarot, because again he realizes how much that is interesting and valuable in Tarot would be lost if you did that.

At the end of his book, in a postscript, Woudhuysen attempts explain what he means by Tarotmania.

He says there are three kinds of people, Morons, Idiots, and Fools.
He writes:

“We are all Morons to begin with: we follow the dictates of the world, and grub around trying to fit in with the order of things…the main thing all Morons have in common is the desperate insistence on the ‘rightness’ of certain principles…”

Woudhuysen tells us it is only through the destruction of his confidence in the rightness of his principles, that the Moron makes progress, and becomes an Idiot. The Idiot is one who “admits to himself that he doesn’t know.” More than anything though, the Idiot realizes his opinions, right or wrong, don’t really matter, because he has no power to implement them, and realizing his own ignorance, he understands this is a good thing. The good thing about being an Idiot is that one can shut up blathering about his own ideas, and try to learn from someone who might actually know what he is talking about.

An advanced Idiot finally comes to realize that in fact nobody truly or completely knows what he is talking about, and that at best everyone is just an Idiot, or should be anyway, a person with non-consequential opinions. At this point of awareness, that the Universe is beyond conquering with knowledge, and so one is really foolish living with a certain fixed brand of gravitas as his guide, the Idiot becomes a Fool.

I think the following is an example of how Woudhuysen’s understanding of Tarot is sometimes useful and interesting, although in this example I think one reason for this is how much his opinion resonates, instead of deviates from, occult tradition:

“In the Tarot, the Fool is the first and last card, it is the card without number. The Fool can do anything, be anything, say anything. In a sense, the Fool is the person who allows the Will of God to flow through without impedance.”

Let us just say that sounds like a very occult view of things, and not the product of bold, personal reveries about Tarot.

Woudhuysen concludes his book:

“But the change from Idiot to Fool requires tremendous work on oneself; the use of the Tarot is one way to aid the work.”

As noted above, when Tarotmania was published in the United States, they changed the name to Tarot Therapy, the implication being that the “work” was therapeutic in nature and Tarot could be used as a kind of psychological analysis tool to help the patient overcome his obstacles to achieving Mania, or his ultimate goal of becoming a Fool.

Needless to say, these ideas of Tarot as a personal tool of self-discovery or a therapeutic aid had much influence on the Tarot books published in the 1980s, which themselves would go on to influence the dogma of much modern exoteric Tarot.

(jk)

Whoopi's Reading and Mary K. Greer's Redacted Memory

Seldom do these stories of Tarotica, of Tarot cartoculture, have happy beginnings or endings, and I have to say even the middle journeys are often wretched things, revealing only pain and miasma.

But, fortunately, you're just looking for a few cheap laughs, right, so here is the story of how a silly Tarot "psychic" went onto The View to read cards, and ended up being scolded by Mary K. Greer, for of all sins, not being sufficiently historical in her on-air tarotblather.

Co-hosts Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg looking perfectly
incredulous at "psychic" Sandy Anastasi's tale of Tarot history
Now, that is really something, considering how, for so many years, Greer argued against the value of Tarot history and its historians, chiefly because their "mere facts" rubbed her fantasies about Tarot the wrong way. And also, a lot of them were men, and she doesn't like men telling her what to do. So there.

Over the years, unfortunately for Mary's pride and dogma, the possession and even expression of some basic facts about Tarot history, became generally required if one was going to opine authoritatively about the subject. Eventually, she began to posture as if knowing some history and some facts might even be good things, like flossing or something.

And so, when poor Tarot psychic Sandy Anastasi went on The View to read Waite Tarot cards for co-host, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sandy expressed an opinion about Tarot's history, in Greer's view Sandy had the professional reputation of the entire stupid island of Tarotmania resting on her psychic shoulders.

Unfortunately, the best Psychic Sandy Anastasi could come up with about Tarot history was the following:

"The Tarot cards are rooted so deeply in history, nobody really knows where they came from. Our earliest history is the gypsies carrying them around Europe, and we know them as a divination tool, a fortunetelling tool."

Well, OK, so that's really not true, Tarot cards are rooted about 560 years ago or so, in northern Italy, where they were invented to play card games. We know this for a number of reasons, but chiefly because the oldest decks are from this time and place, and Tarot card games are about all Tarot was known for until the 18th century, when some Freemasons applied their Egyptomaniacal theories to the cards and invented occult Tarot.

As for Gypsies, well the myth of their involvement with Tarot goes back to the 18th century, since of course Gypsies were wrongly believed to be the remnants of ancient Egyptians, the Egyptian theory of Tarot promoted by the Freemasons included a mention of how the Gypsies had been responsible for introducing Tarot to Europe. There wasn't any evidence that was the case, but it made a good and resilient story.

Of course, eventually the Gypsies heard they were supposed to be using Tarot cards, and they actually did adopt them into their collection of fortunetelling tools.

Anyway, as you'll see when you look at the video of the reading, things didn't go so well for Psychic Sandy. For one thing, she had to deal with Loopy Elizabeth Hasselbeck, whose role on the show seems to be that of court jester. Hasselbeck went so far as to attempt to correct the hapless psychic, who had placed the cards upside-down, silly rabbit, so the television audience couldn't properly see them. Of course Psychic Sandy had to explain to Elizabeth that in fact she used inverted cards, and now Elizabeth had gone and changed the meanings and everything! Hasselbeck laughed about her newfound power to alter the future, and Goldberg, whose cards and future were being mangled this way and that, just seemed wryly skeptical and bored through the whole mess.

Now, if the reading had not been such a Tarot trainwreck, and put onto YouTube for everybody to laugh at, most likely Greer wouldn't have felt challenged to ride forth in defense of the realm. But, of course she heard duty call, and off she went to blog about the unfortunate spectacle of Sandy Anastasi's Tarot tribulation.

Greer started out trying to appear to be nice—"I don’t like to criticize someone else’s reading"—but nice is really not in Greer's nature of course, and she went right to work, pointing out how unprofessional Sandy had been:

“I was shocked that the reader, Sandy Anastasi, knew nothing true about the history of tarot when there is so much documented and written about it. As a tarot author and spokesperson, it is incredibly irresponsible and unprofessional for her to spout such nonsense."

So there, stupid ole Sandy! Mary K. Greer says you are INCREDIBLY IRRESPONSIBLE to be so full of nonsense about Tarot history! You simpleton you!

Yeah. OK.

But, here's the problem with Greer's histrionics. She knows damn well that she herself has said precisely the same kinds of things about Tarot that Sandy Anastasi promoted on The View, BUT she also knows that you would be hard pressed to find those things, even on the big world wide web, because she's worked hard to erase them.

Specifically, what I am referring to is the Tarot History section of her 1984 book, Tarot For Your Self. New editions of that book have Greer's new more facty history section, which she claims couldn't have been acquired back in 1984, because back then people didn't know (or more importantly care) so much about silly old facts and stuff about Tarot.

Of course, Greer's claims about that are utter nonsense, as the general factual scheme of Tarot's history was mainly reported accurately even back in A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a century ago.

In Greer's 1984 book, however, she was pretty clear about how unclear and yet really powerful the mystery was about Tarot and its history.

Right at the start of the book, in the section "What Tarot Is", she alleges:

“The Tarot is an ancient Western occult psychological and philosophical system consisting of 78 cards divided in the Major and Minor Arcana. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana represent in archetypal symbols wo/man's [sic] journey through life, a journey which Carl Jung envisioned as the process of individuation.”

She doesn't say how she knows the Tarot is "an ancient Western occult psychological and philosophical system". She knows that line is just a blob of newage buzzwords, and its historical relevance or factual truth is not important.

Later, in her section on Tarot history, Greer offered:

“No one knows for sure where or when the Tarot first appeared.”

And

“The very mystery of the origin of the Tarot adds to its power...I choose to believe that the Tarot didn’t just happen by accident. The Tarot is a map, deliberately drawn to aid each of us who stumbles upon this path. Who drew this map, and when and where, is another story, for another day.”

Now, recall that Sandy Anastasi had said:

"The Tarot cards are rooted so deeply in history, nobody really knows where they came from."

And again, Mary K. Greer:

“No one knows for sure where or when the Tarot first appeared.”

Now, Greer complained about Sandi "She lost a good opportunity to inform the public that the tarot originated in 15th century Northern Italy—most likely in the courts of Milan or Ferrara (and not with the gypsies!")

But then looking back at Greer's own assessment of the Gypsy situation in Tarot For Your Self, she says (having noted Gypsies couldn't have introduced Tarot into Europe, nevertheless):

"...the gypsies picked up the use of playing cards quickly and perhaps helped spread their use, giving them the reputation of “fortune-telling” devices.”

That isn't much different than Sandy's:

"Our earliest history is the gypsies carrying them around Europe, and we know them as a divination tool, a fortunetelling tool."

While Greer doesn't say it is "our earliest history", she does suggest the Gypsies could have begun this spreading in the 15th century, so about the time Tarot appeared.

One of the things I have noted about Greer over the years is that she delights in beating people up for making the very same mistakes she makes, and which, when she's saying wrong things, she defends as her right to add ignorant power to Tarot. But, as noted, the bits I have quoted here from Greer's 1984 book, are almost wiped clean from the web, as if she never wrote them. Now at least they can be preserved on this blog.

You don't have to thank me, Mary.

(jk)