A Cup Full of Tarot
A few years ago, I started to write a book. I stopped. It was only temporary, but it’s been a few years “temporary” now. Since Ruth Ann and I decided to attempt this blog, I thought maybe I could finish that book here. Or at least take it a little further.
Also, I might get some idea of whether you would like it if it ever became a real book. So here goes…
A Cup Full of Tarot
In the Egyptian desert near Giza, there stands a riddle carved in stone. It has the body of a lion and the head of a man. It is famous the world over and its name is synonymous with mystery. 240 feet long, 66 feet high, and 4600 years old; measured, considered, analyzed, fantasized and dreamt and written about, it can be neither missed nor ignored. But the great question, “What does it mean?”, can’t be answered either. At least, not definitively.
Tarot, like the Great Sphinx, is a riddle without an answer. Whether someone knows, or ever really knew, the answer is not important for us. For us, there simply isn’t one—and far better that it is so.
This page is being written early in 2004, some 45 years after my introduction to tarot. During that whole time, I have played with tarot on every level and in every way that I could think of or that became known to me—study, experiment, reading, contemplation, meditation and magic—and for a portion of that time, teaching. I was 17 when I began this journey, and the end is nowhere in sight. It is, however, entirely possible that I may soon have had enough of it.
Before that happens, if it does, it seems to me that I should set down the essence of what I’ve learned over all those years. It may serve as a warning that I’m sure will be ignored. It may answer a question that no one has asked. It may teach a lesson that needn’t be learned. But it will, I think, come as a surprise.
45 years is a long time. It is long enough to have reached the boundary of repetition, where the imagination comes to an end and everything that can be seen or said has been seen and said before, over and over again. It is a kind of death, and it tends to catch its victims unaware. It is so subtle that, even as I write, I don’t know for sure whether I have died that death or not.
In my family, ultimate questions were dinnertime conversation. Symbolism was daily bread and cheese. Tarot was a toy that came to me late in my childhood, long after I had learned to juggle images and aphorisms gracefully. Like a toy, I picked it up and dropped it as my interest awakened or flagged. And although I knew its parts and uses intimately from an early time, I was 50 before it really mattered to me. Now, somewhat more than a decade later, I feel like it’s time to put it down again. With it goes any interest I may once have had in symbolism, and philosophy, and spirituality.
But the sound of these things things leaves a lingering echo long after the instruments have ceased their playing. And I don’t know what will happen next. This is the moment to capture the resonances of an earlier time on paper, before they disappear from consciousness and memory.
This short introduction is the only part of the book that was written with the intention of contributing to it. Everything else between these covers emerged spontaneously from the process of living and teaching tarot over a period of six years, from 1998 to 2004.
My wife and partner, Ruth Ann, together with two friends and myself, founded The Tarot School in New York City in February of 1995. This was the beginning of the most prolonged and sustained creative enterprise of my life. At the time, we all felt the serene superiority of experts, who could effortlessly add to any beginner’s repertoire of tarot skill and knowledge. We had no inkling then of the Himalayan learning curve that we ourselves would be required to experience.
For the first three months, there were typically one or two students in a class with four teachers. Then two of the founders went on to other adventures and Ruth Ann and I were left to truly create an enduring school. Classes grew slowly to four, six, eight, ten students and more, every Monday night for nine years, by the time of this writing. Some took one class and never returned for a second. Some stayed for months, even years.
An intricate dynamic arose between teachers and students in which we drove each other to new heights and depths of learning, each demanding of the other more attention, more energy, more knowledge and more skill. This was, and remains, a continuous process. Everyone benefited, to an extent that would be difficult to assess.
The amount of learning that Ruth Ann and I needed to do to keep ahead of our students was enormous. We devoured books, and our library of tarot and related subjects grew to very respectable proportions. We learned to teach, patiently adding technique after technique to our repertory so that we could constantly incorporate new material into our curriculum. And we experimented endlessly, to keep ourselves and our students continuously fresh. We threw ourselves into the process with wholehearted abandon. We re-invented ourselves, leaving our day jobs (yes, our mothers told us, as all mothers tell their children, “Never give up your day job,” but we didn’t listen) to become full-time teachers in a field that did not yet, and still doesn’t, amount to a profession.
But a weekly class wasn’t enough. Over time, we added weekend seminars in related subjects ranging from Tarot Psychology to Past Lives to Qabalah. We wrote an intense correspondence course, and pioneered tarot teleclasses, teaching tarot over the phone to a national audience, in the process creating an extensive collection of audio courses. In medium after medium we taught facet upon facet of tarot, and to this day, we still have new irons in the fire. It long ago became dizzying, and only sheer momentum keeps us from falling over in a breathless heap.
During this time, because it was impossible to keep everything in my head, I began to fill notebooks with random thoughts, ideas, techniques, processes, fears, hopes and anxieties. These notebooks were not systematic. In the beginning the entries in them were not organized by subject matter. Whatever I was working on or thinking about became scribbled notes that were barely legible, but they were the only records I had of the flow of ideas that eventually became classes.
The notebooks piled up over time and I would occasionally find myself just reading through them. Forgotten possibilities, the beginnings of important ideas, heartfelt statements about things important to me but unusable in a classroom, were a rich stew savory with memory and personal significance.
These scribbles were the raw material of a respectable effort to educate myself before I could be of any use as a teacher. I have always been deeply curious about the creative process of others, and here in my hand was, to my complete surprise, the most detailed record of such a process I had ever seen. I thought, someone might well find this process enlightening. Maybe it could be a book.
So a book it has become. As a testament to the process it records, it remains as chaotic, unorganized, rich, and I think, as interesting as it was in its original form. I hope, and I believe, you will enjoy it as it stands.
A word of caution seems appropriate here before this particular adventure begins. Indeed, it might be a useful caveat at the beginning of any book about our lovely deck of cards.
Tarot has become too big for anyone to grasp. Even its parts can only be described as they are seen from personal perspectives. Phrases like “It seems to me…”, “In my opinion…”, “In my experience…”, “My understanding is…”, must be taken as unspoken prefaces to any statement made about its nature. Passionate partisanship for one view or another, or the effectiveness of one approach or another, are insufficient bases to make any absolute statement about it. Even good historical research isn’t good enough to guarantee the truth of any story about tarot, although it may lead to general agreement on the “facts.”
There are, of course, greater and lesser degrees of clarity and cogency. And there’s the question of appropriateness. Tarot speaks to each of its devotees in his or her own personal inner language. Truth to one can be nonsense or rubbish to another. So far, at any rate, I have heard no prophetic voice that sweeps all of us along on one irresistible wave.
It may be that the best I can hope for is to carve out a niche of personal predilection where my words are cups that hold water.
When I first contemplated making my notes into a book, I wrote a draft of this introduction and showed it to some friends. “Great idea,” they said “but this introduction is too dark, too sad; sounds almost tragic. You’ll have to change it or it’ll scare everyone away. Also, the title makes it sound like a book for beginners. You’ll have to change that, too.” Their comments seemed like elementary common sense, Marketing 101.
I confess. Sense, both the marketing and the common kind, go against the grain with me. The Tarot School was founded on swimming against the current of the obvious. It’s a risk I’ve continually taken as a teacher and take again here, as a writer.
This book is not in the least bit sad. It’s a celebration of forward movement. It’s certainly not for beginners. It’s written for tarot people who know a thing or two or three, although beginners will find it an intriguing and auspicious place to begin.
Everything that follows this introduction was written slowly, at the speed of life as it was lived by me at the time, each a living thought caught on paper as it was born. Together these words have, for me, a taste and a scent as well as a sight and a sound. Collected, organized, given the formal existence of the printed page and the published book, they remain unexpectedly intimate. Practical, technical and experimental tarot is entwined with the philosophical, psychological, poetic and purely personal issues that are the matrix from which my whole involvement with tarot arises.
A hundred years from now, we in this present day will undoubtedly be as mysterious to our successors in tarot as our forebears of a hundred years ago are for us. They left us only a carefully composed literary record to remember them by. They put their best, and only their best, foot forward, so that all we have of their real selves is as formal and inherently unbelievable as posed portraits. Biographers, where they exist, can do no more than imagine who they really were from the available historical evidence.
Filed under: Tarot Musings, A Cup Full of Tarot on June 12th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
