Cartomancy and Tarot in Film: 1940-2010

By Emily E. Auger

In the first book-length study of Tarot cards on the silver screen, Emily E. Auger contextualizes cartomancy – the practice of fortune telling via playing cards – and dives deep into its invention and promulgation in film. After providing an introduction to divination and cartomancy, Auger offers detailed descriptions and analyses of the roles that cartomancy and Tarot cards play in films. The book features an abbreviated filmography – including nearly 200 films – detailing their relationships to cartomancy. As Tarot communities continue to grow worldwide, Cartomancy and Tarot in Film will be of interest to scholars of esoteric studies, film, folklore, playing cards, popular culture and religion, as well as diviners the world over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783203338

Emily E. Auger

Emily E. Auger is the author of Tarot and Other Meditation Decks and Tech-Noir Film, as well as the editor of Tarot in Culture. She has taught art history in Canadian and American universities for more than twenty years.

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2016 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2016 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2016 Emily E. Auger

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Production managers: Steve Harries and Mike Grimshaw

Typesetting: John Teehan

ISBN978-1-78320-331-4

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-332-1

ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-333-8

Printed and bound by Short Run Press Ltd, UK

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part 1 Divination, Cards, and Culture

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Cards and Cartomancy The Invention of Cards and Cartomancy Cartomancy Prototypes in Narrative

Chapter 3: A Brief History of the Tarot Trumps The Gaming Deck: From Paint to Print Tarot and Cartomancy The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Popularization and Commodification

Part 2 Cards and Cartomancy in Film

Chapter 4: Cartomancers and Querents as Film Characters Gender, Age, Marital Status, and Profession Ethnicity, Eccentricity, and the Supernatural The Mystic Nomadism

Chapter 5: Cartomancy and Tarot in Film Narratives The Cartomancy Reading The Narrative Roles of Cartomancy and Tarot Scenes Cartomancy and Tarot in Genres and Themes

Chapter 6: Tarot Trumps in Film

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Appendix 1: Filmography

Appendix 2: Charts

Chart 1 Cartomancers and Querents as Characters

Chart 2 Cartomancers and Querents: Gender, Age, Marital Status, and Professionalism

Chart 3 Tarot Trumps in Film

Chart 4 Tarot Trumps in Film Genres

Chart 5 Frequency of Tarot Trumps in Film Genres

Chart 6 Tarot Trumps in Films by Theme

Chart 7 Frequency of Tarot Trumps in Films by Theme

Appendix 3: Cartomancy and Tarot Films by Date

Appendix 4: Carmen on Screen

Appendix 5: Directors of Cartomancy and Tarot Films

Appendix 6: Actresses and Actors Playing Cartomancers

Appendix 7: Actresses and Actors Playing Cartomancy Querents

Bibliography

Sources for Films (Novels, Graphic Novels, Video Games)

Cartomancy Decks Cited

Index

This book is dedicated to my parents.

Acknowledgments

First, and most of all, I want to thank those who contributed to the multiauthor two-volume Tarot in Culture anthology: Ed Buryn, Julie Cuccia-Watts, Tabitha Dial, Michael Dummett (1925–2011), Helen S. Farley, Joyce Goggin, Mary K. Greer, Bruce Hersch, Brian Johnson, Danny Jorgensen, Jeanna Jorgensen, Richard Kaczynski, Marcus Katz, June Leavitt, Carol Matthews, Paul Mountfort, Christine Parkhurst, Robert Place, Rachel Pollack, Casey J. Rudkin, Rachel Pollack, Leslie Stratyner, Catherine Waitinas, and Batya Weinbaum, as well as the original pre-publication reviewers of that manuscript Arthur Rosengarten and Professor Elizabeth Sklar. Working with these individuals provided a unique and valuable collegial context for the continuation of my own research on Tarot. I particularly enjoyed corresponding with Christine Parkhurst over several years in relation to a panel she developed on Tarot and health for the Tarot and Medical Humanities areas of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) conference (2012). (I started the Tarot area of that conference in 2005.) I also enjoyed working with Richard Kaczynski and found his studies of the Thoth Tarot very informative; several film titles are included here because of his research. Mary K. Greer was, as always, extremely well informed and helpful: she identified the Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Playing Cards from a grainy image.

Thanks go also to Sally Sweatman, the Manitoba Opera education coordinator, for compiling the list of films in Appendix 4, and Darlene Ronald, the marketing director of the Manitoba Opera, for granting me permission to reproduce that list here; Geoff Burton for his repeated efforts to send me a viewable copy of his film The Fall of the House (2003); Tristan D. Cajar who provided me with the translation notes he made from my VHS copy of Un Adorable Sinverguenza [An Adorable Rogue] (1983); R. Christopher Feldman, who confirmed some details regarding The Tarot of the Orishas; and Peter Borgwardt who answered my website call for help with a few card identifications. And last, but by no means least, my thanks to Melinda and Steve for helping out with that networking problem; and ML for finding the entire project, from start to finish, so very, very interesting.

Preface

Cartomancy developed as a lesser form of divination in Western Europe sometime after the introduction of playing cards there in the later half of the fourteenth century. It is lesser insofar as it relies on interpretation rather than divine inspiration, but it is a form that usually requires some initiative on the part of the querent, a process the ancient Greeks and Romans prioritized in their valuation of different kinds of fortune-telling. Tarot was invented in fifteenth-century Italy as a five-suited deck: twenty-one trumps and a Fool were added to the original four suits to add diversity to the games that could be played with it. Although not technically a trump, the Fool is often included as one of them in general references. The illustrations on these initially unnumbered and untitled cards related to the significant events, people, and beliefs of the day; the images were conventionalized when painting gave way to printing as the preferred mode of card production. There is little evidence that Tarot was used for divination until the mid-eighteenth century, after which, that gradually became its most popular application. Cartomancy and Tarot also became motifs, first in literature and then in film, where the cards serve as props supporting (a) the development of character, atmosphere, and plot; (b) imitations and fictional elaborations of real-life diviners and divination practices; and (c) dramatizations of the forces of chance and fate once popularly anthropomorphized as Fortune or Fortuna. In these contexts, both historically familiar and new meanings and interpretations are associated with the cards, particularly Tarot cards.

Cartomancy and Tarot in Film expands my previous discussions of Tarot as heterotopian in The Heterotopian Tarot as Genre, included in the multiauthor anthology Tarot in Culture (2014), and in Tarot and Other Meditation Decks: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Typology (2004). Heterotopias are, as Foucault explains, real locations where otherwise incompatible spaces intersect or events that are incompatible with social norms occur.¹ Examples include the spaces set aside for rites of passage and crisis that are often associated with time, such as those associated with puberty, marriage, and death. Such spaces also include, among others, the brothel, colony, garden, library, museum, ship, and theater.² Similarly, Tarot cards and spreads—the arrangements of cards laid for cartomancy—may provide an intersection point for some combination of past, present, and future; of real time, vision time, and/or dream time; and of the motivations, thoughts, and actions of natural, spiritual, and supernatural characters and forces. This study shows that the Tarot heterotopia is often dramatized in film as an archetype of transformation that takes the symbolic and/or literal form of an axis connecting various natural, supernatural, or metaphysical realities. This axis typically serves as a conduit for information, as in the classic predictions of future love or sudden death, from one realm to another. The cartomancer and/or the cards may directly fulfill this role, or they may point to some other person, prop, or location that does. In any case, the cards bear a message related to transformation, and this message is likely to demonstrate the historical and/or new meanings that have accrued to them. I discuss this accrual of meanings in relation to Tarot images, classic and re-invented, in Tarot and Other Meditation Decks; here I expand it to include the representations of cartomancy in film.

There are some scholarly studies that address Tarot reading in contemporary practice, which seems to be more popular now than cartomancy with regular playing decks. These studies tend to validate cartomancy and meditative uses of the cards as the means by which some people find their way through life, particularly in times of difficulty or tragedy.³ Since Tarot found a place in such modern classics as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps (1932), William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946), Hugh Ross Williamson’s A Wicked Pack of Cards (© 1961), John Fowles’s The Magus (© 1965), Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968), and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), it has become a familiar motif in popular fiction,⁴ and is thus discussed in analyses of these works.⁵ Cartomancy and Tarot in film, however, has not been the subject of any previous study, at least none that I have located. Karin Beeler’s Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Characters in Recent Television and Film (2008) does not mention Tarot or cartomancy. Carol Lee Fry mentions cartomancy in passing in her Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spirituality in Film (2008) with reference to the protagonist of The Gift (2000): She is a single mom in a southern town who supports her children by being the local soothsayer (she gives readings from cards), but she’s also a good counselor.⁶ Fry also mentions several films, including Season of the Witch (1976), The Exorcist III (1990), and The Ninth Gate (1999) without elaborating on the significance of the Tarot and Tarot-related images featured in them.

Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940–2010 is specifically and solely concerned with cartomancy performed with playing cards, Tarot, and other kinds of fortune-telling decks, as well as other uses of Tarot cards, in full-length films released for general viewing in theaters, on television, and on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray discs. Such films are of numerous genres and they incorporate the cards in single or multiple scenes that may or may not be mentioned in advertising, trailers, or other promotional material; thus, the compilation of this list of films and the collecting of copies for study was a significant challenge. I started with titles gathered incidentally over a number of years, and then worked systematically through online sources, including Mary K. Greer’s TV & Movie Tarot Watch List,⁷ the Tarot in Movies list at the Tarot Totes website,⁸ and the Tarot cards in popular culture entry at NationMaster.com Encyclopedia.⁹ I also used several keyword searches available through the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Although extremely useful, none of these lists could be taken as authoritative or complete: almost all included titles that did not belong on them. IMDb’s keyword lists are constantly being updated as older films are re-released on DVD or Blu-ray; furthermore, the keywords do not include cartomancy, and fortune-telling and fortune-teller proved ambiguous at best. In addition, some titles that I identified by way of promotional trailers and other sources are not yet available for purchase, and there are certainly more that are yet to be identified as relevant to this study.

I made no attempt to address the numerous short films available on how-to read the cards, or those offering artistic or educational perspectives on the esoteric aspects of Tarot. There are a number of excellent films of this type, but they are beyond the scope of the present study. I further narrowed the field by leaving out animation, television shows, video games, and films that feature gypsies or witches, but not cards or card readings, such as Thinner (1996) and Practical Magic (1998); as well as films in which playing cards are part of special effects rather than cartomancy effects (the distinction was sometimes difficult to make), such as the miniseries (1990) based on Stephen King’s novel It (1986). I omitted those films in which cartomancy or Tarot is merely mentioned. For example, the blind date winner of the wedding ring in I’m With Lucy (2002) mentions his previous girlfriend as being a crazy woman who read Tarot cards to a parakeet; and one of the lesbians in Totally F**d Up (1993) mentions a Tarot reading that indicated she was the nurturing type. Neither did I include films featuring signs for Tarot readers, but no obvious cards, such as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985). It is also possible that I missed a few Tarot references, given that they sometimes amount to nothing more than a small picture of a card on a wall or a deck amid other miscellaneous items on a shelf or desk.

The primary films included in this study are identified in the filmography by title with dates of release, directors, writers, sources, genres, the decks and cards, and information about the manner in which they are used, along with a very brief plot synopsis. In many instances, I was able to identify the decks by the distinctive images on the card faces or backs, by matching cards with the illustrations in Kaplan’s invaluable multivolume Encyclopedia of Tarot and various online sources, and by private consultation (see Acknowledgments). In a few instances, the use of prop backs, the mixing of prop and published cards, or the use of altered published cards made identification uncertain. Grainy or discolored images were also an occasional problem. In a few cases, the cards are visible, but I was unable to identify the original deck. Given the hundreds of decks now in publication, not to mention the hundreds more that are no longer available, this is not surprising, though it is disappointing. In addition, I occasionally had difficulty identifying the actors playing minor cartomancy-related characters, particularly in older films in which only leading performers are named in the credits.

I found the timing and presentation, as well as the heterotopian and axis-between-realities functions of cartomancy and Tarot in film narratives to be generally consistent with Carl Jung’s views about the significance of Tarot, albeit with the circumstances of real life translated into the frequently hyperbolic contexts of movies. He wrote that it seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, which he regarded as closely related to the symbolic process itself. He described this process as an experience in images and of images, which almost always begins with the experience of getting stuck in a blind alley or in some impossible situation; and its goal is, broadly speaking, illumination or higher consciousness, by means of which the initial situation is overcome on a higher level.¹⁰ The transformation archetypes, he wrote,

are not personalities, but are typical situations, places, ways and means, that symbolize the kind of transformation in question. Like the personalities, these archetypes are true and genuine symbols that cannot be exhaustively interpreted, either as signs or as allegories. They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort, inexhaustible.¹¹

Jung does not elaborate on what role the cartomancer plays in relation to his or her handling of these archetypes of transformation, but associations with the archetypes of the wise old man and trickster, which he did discuss at some length, come to mind.

The archetypal approach to the analysis of myth, images, and narrative associated with Jung, Joseph Campbell, Erich Neumann, and others is often treated as analogous to either Jungian criticism or myth criticism, and variously faulted—as most critical approaches have been—as reductive, too structured, unscholarly, irrelevant, vague, or confusing.¹²

The major point, however, as Daniel Russell Brown (1969/70) writes, is

that there are some motifs in literature that satisfy readers and listeners in quite dissimilar societies, no matter what the origin of the motifs. It is the task of archetypal criticism to excavate these mental symbols, idols, and temples in literature to see if important aspects have been overlooked.¹³

Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr. (1995) agree and expand on this approach:

To employ myth criticism is to assume that films have a distinct relationship to archetypes […] Like myths, mythological films take people to places beyond the boundaries of the known world and require viewers to negotiate an encounter with a world elsewhere, with a world that is wholly other and, therefore, sacred or religiously significant. Through its encounters with sacred places, ordinary life is transvalued. Ordinary experience may become invested with mythological meaning; deeper levels of significance may become visible as a result of the encounter with the mystery.¹⁴

Christopher Vogler (1998) and Stuart Voytilla’s (1999) archetypal approach to film is noteworthy here.¹⁵ Vogler specifically acknowledges a considerable debt to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).¹⁶ Campbell used circular and semicircular diagrams to chart the idea of emanations in myth and in the individual’s cycle of sleeping and waking as cycles of renewal and formation. Erich Neumann (1959) addressed this idea in his essay Art and Time, with particular attention to the dynamic relationship between archetypes and their cultural manifestations and to his thesis that a cultural canon once regarded as fixed is disintegrating.¹⁷ He speculates that this disintegration is similar to that which occurs in an individual when for some reason his individual canon, his conscious world of values, collapses.¹⁸ In a world that is falling apart, globally or personally, he writes,

man is inevitably devoured by nigredo, the blackness and chaos of the prima materia, and the two great archetypal figures of the Devil and the Terrible Mother dominate the world. The Devil is shadow, evil, depression, darkening of the light, harsh dissonance. […] Behind the archetype of Satan and the blackness surrounding him, at whose impact the crumbling world of the old cultural canon has collapsed, rises the devouring Terrible Great Mother, tearing and rending and bringing madness.¹⁹

In such a world, whether globally or personally defined, the individual must find the courage to face chaos.²⁰ For some, this courage is found by consulting the cards or a diviner. As Cicero (102–43 BCE) opined centuries ago in On Divination,

In ancient times scarcely any matter out of the ordinary was undertaken, even in private life, without first consulting the auspices […] For just as today on important occasions we make use of entrails in divining—though even they are employed to a less extent than formerly—so in the past resort was usually had to divination by means of birds. And thus it is that by failing to seek out the unpropitious signs we run into awful disasters.²¹

Vogler and Voytilla identify a number of archetypal characters in film, including the Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, and Trickster; and archetypal stages such as the call, refusal, meeting with a mentor, crossing of the threshold, discovery and dealings with tests, allies, and enemies, the reward, return, resurrection, and others. Voytilla uses the archetypes identified by Vogler and adds twelve stages of action and plot development, which he articulates with small images that look, at first glance, like a modern set of re-envisioned Tarot trumps. A horn stands for increased awareness, a palm for reluctance to change, a figure holding up a large boulder for attempting big change, a sword for consequences, and so forth. He analyses fifty films by charting each on a circle: the upper section refers to the ordinary world and the lower to special worlds. The circle is also divided to show the progression around it in three acts: separation, descent, and initiation and return. Vogler’s Herald has some obvious potential as a descriptor for film presentations of cartomancy cards, but the figure lacks their value-laden qualities, specifically the implications of connections between ordinary and Other worlds.

Voytilla’s template for such movements is based on the assumption that many, if not most, popular films can be interpreted as a descent and return, an assumption that is in accord with Northrop Frye’s (1976) observation that the directions of movement in literature include descents and ascents between a higher world, this one, and an underworld.²² The popularity of the descent can be dated back to such classics as the Sumerian story of Inanna,²³ and Odysseus’s consultation with the blind—and dead—prophet Tiersias (Odyssey 10.490-502, 566–70; episode in Book 11).²⁴ Some of these narratives are accounts of a nekyia, in which ghosts are called up from the underworld to find out about the future; others are accounts of a katabasis, in which a protagonist undertakes a journey to the underworld and consults those who reside there.²⁵ Both are associated with consultations with the dead, a kind of divination insofar as the goal is the discovery of information or a course of action. In modern discussions such as Voytilla’s, the distinctions between the two types are blurred so the descent may be psychological or expanded to include both going to hell and hell coming to meet; there being, perhaps, little difference between the two from the protagonist’s point of view as both are likely to produce the proverbial dark night of the soul.

Both Frye’s summary of the directions of movement in literature and Voytilla’s map of these directions in popular film narratives are supported by the films incorporating cartomancy and Tarot scenes considered here. Indeed, Frye’s directions of movement may be regarded as manifestations of the archetypal world axis or tree familiar to myth and shamanistic traditions. In the horror genre, this axis often takes the form of a portal, perhaps in a basement or cave, which allows zombies or other undead creatures to leave hell and invade Earth. In science fiction, it may be a teleportation device that takes the protagonist from the normal world to the Other world and back. Such locations have physical, psychological, and spiritual implications. At the axis, one may go up or down, but return to the physical, psychological, or metaphysical starting point may prove to be impossible; hence, its implicit heterotopian, transformative power.

Mircea Eliade (1952) further explains that it is only at certain spaces

that one has direct contact with the sacred—whether this be materialized in certain objects […] or manifested in the hiero-cosmic symbols (the Pillar of the World, the Cosmic Tree, etc.). In cultures that have the conception of three cosmic regions—those of Heaven, Earth and Hell—the ‘centre’ constitutes the point of intersection of those regions. It is here that the breakthrough on to another plane is possible and, at the same time, communication between the three regions.²⁶

Such centers are, of course, heterotopian. As I have argued elsewhere (2004), Tarot is heterotopian, in that the cards create a place where past, present, and future intersect—fictionalized or real—in what some regard as both a physical and a metaphysical dimension, but others understand more in terms of a psychological state. In film narratives, it is the loss of cohesion—a fall or the threat of a fall into chaos—that is already or soon to be experienced by the protagonist or major secondary character that most often provides the occasion for the appearance of the Tarot and/or cartomancy scenes. The cards, spread, and/or the cartomancer serve as a sort of axis by which a message about or warning of this crisis or descent is delivered, whether it takes the form of an illness, accident, person, ghost, zombie, a previously unrecognized truth, or something else.²⁷

As archetypes of transformation, cartomancy cards—especially cards specifically designed for cartomancy—combine the roles of herald and directional movement, of message and motion, through complex, but more or less instantly recognized, associations of image, object, context, and narrative significance. This recognition may be encouraged by actions and dialogue involving one or more cartomancers, as well as the tendency to anthropomorphize the images on the cards: the Devil card signifies a devilish villain or the Death card means a murderer is about to act.

From the broadest perspective, however, cartomancy is all about chance and fate. While these two ways of understanding minor and major events—as the workings of chance or of fate—are in opposition to the usual emphasis on believable motives, plausibility, and logical sequencing, even in fantasy narratives, they were historically anthropomorphized as Fortune or Fortuna, a goddess whose popularity throughout Western history has been extraordinary. Howard R. Patch (1927) observes that she did not serve a specific purpose as did other classical goddesses, such as Venus or Diana, and was not even the personification of a special aspect of fate, like Lachesis or Atropos. Rather she presented a view of a universal, omnipotent god; and therefore her only rival could be such a figure as that of Jove. Indeed, the favor she enjoyed in the later Roman and early medieval periods was even greater than that of Jove, Because men at that time so regarded the universe—not as an ordered and properly ruled domain, but as the realm of the mutable and haphazard forces which we generalize and characterize as ‘chance’. Christians replaced Jove with their God, but there was no new equivalent for the figure of ruling ‘chance’, and Fortune, accordingly, [continued to have] that field to herself.²⁸

Given the centrality of chance and fate to cartomancy, it is not surprising that they are also central to films in which cartomancy appears, with their effects and outcomes manifesting as flip sides of the same coin. The Hideaway (1995) fortune-teller’s pronouncement about a coincidence of fate perfectly exemplifies the manner in which these two ways of interpreting events are conceptualized into a unified, if imperfectly aligned and contradictory, perception. A film viewer knowing nothing whatsoever about cartomancy—an imaginary film viewer to be sure—need watch very few examples to learn that even the briefest of cartomancy scenes indicates that the plot is likely to be influenced by chance and/or fate; that it will be, in other words, Fortuna-driven. While some film querents, like their counterparts in the film audience, seek the advice of the cards with serious deliberation, the card message is often delivered in a context created on a whim; as, for example, during a spontaneous visit to a fortune-teller’s tent at a fairground. In either case, the film characters involved in the related transformation—unlike their counterparts in the audience (we hope)—frequently respond unhappily when confronted by reminders that Fortuna still rules.

This volume addresses divination in general and cartomancy in particular, contextualizes cartomancy with playing and Tarot cards historically, and shows some of the ideas about cartomancy invented or promulgated in film. Part One provides general introductions to divination, playing cards, and Tarot. In the opening chapter, the history of Western divination is briefly traced from ancient Greece to the present, with note taken of such matters as the varying relationships between diviners and divination and state or church authorities, and the impact of commodification during the eighteenth century and later on cartomancy. Chapter 2 is a concise history of playing cards, with special attention given to their use for cartomancy and the character and card narrative prototypes established in Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (1834) and Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1845-46). Chapter 3 is a short history of Tarot cards, from their invention as a specialized gaming deck to their popularization and commodification as a tool for divination.

Part Two shows the accepted representations of cartomancers, cartomancy, and cards that have accrued in film. Chapter 4 begins with an analysis of the cartomancer and querent as film characters using their counterparts in Carmen as points of comparison with reference to gender, age, marital status, and professionalism, as well as supernatural abilities or beliefs, social liminality, and relative nomadism. Chapter 5 is a consideration of cartomancy scenes and their narrative roles, giving special attention to Tarot and referencing such matters as the relative prominence of the cartomancer and querent, the locations marked by the cards and where the cards are read, and the use of the cards to create ambiance and as genre-related and thematic motifs. Chapter 6 addresses the Tarot trumps with a brief summary of the historical meanings attached to each and a longer summary of the meanings or uses of each card in film.

The bibliography, index, and appendices follow. Appendix 1 catalogs 193 films, two of which are not indexed because I was either unable to view them in their entirety or did not have a complete translation available. 150 of these 191 films incorporate Tarot trumps.

Endnotes

1. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias 1985–86. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory , Ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997) 355.

2. Foucault 353, 355–6.

3. For example, Danny L. Jorgenson’s The Esoteric Scene, Cultic Milieu, and Occult Tarot (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1992) is based on research conducted for his PhD dissertation Tarot Divination in the Valley of the Sun: An Existential Sociology of the Esoteric and Occult (1979) completed at Ohio State University. Arthur Rosengarten’s Tarot and Psychology: Spectrums of Possibility (St. Paul, MI: Paragon House, 2000) is based on his doctoral dissertation Accessing the Unconscious, A Comparative Study of Dreams, The T.A.T. and Tarot (1985) at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Others include Ruth A. Crocker, In the Cards: A Qualitative and Quantitative Investigation of Divination Practice and Creativity Within the Feminist Spirituality Movement, Diss. Saybrook University, 2003; Gigi Hofer, Tarot Cards: An Investigation of Their Benefit as a Tool for Self Reflection, MA Thesis, Concordia, 2004; and Joan Reese, Examining Intuitive-Creativity Via Reading Tarot Cards in a Person-Centered Climate, Diss. Saybrook University, 2010.

4. Nina Lee Braden, Tarot in Literature: A List, Association for Tarot Studies Newsletter . 2002; updated 2008. < http://home.comcast.net/~lucizain/tarlit.html >. Accessed 10 August 2009.

5. See, for example, the papers on The Waste Land , The Greater Trumps , and Nova , by Catherine Waitinas, Joyce Goggin, and Brian Johnson, respectively, in Tarot in Culture , vol. 2, ed. Emily E. Auger (Clifford, ON: Valleyhome Books, 2014), as well as Leslie Stratyner’s paper on Harry Potter and Tarot in the same volume.

6. Carol Lee Fry, Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spirituality in Film (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008) 59.

7. Mary K. Greer’s Blog . Website: < http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/tv-movie-tarot-watch-list/ >. Accessed 21 March 2011.

8. Tarot Totes. Website: < http://www.tarottotes.com/item.asp?iid=1600 >. Accessed 21 March 2011. This website is primarily a sales venue for tarot bags and other tarot-related accessories.

9. NationMaster.com Encyclopedia. Website: < http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Tarot-cards-in-popular-culture >. Accessed 21 March 2012.

10. C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Symbols of Transformation , 2nd Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967) 38–39. Jung thought that Tarot, astrology, alchemy, and many other symbolic systems and symbols are manifestations of archetypes. Such references may be found throughout Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and Symbols of Transformation .

11. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 38.

12. Daniel Russell Brown provides an excellent summary of the criticism of archetypal criticism in A Look at Archetypal Criticism, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 28 (1969–70): 465–72.

13. Brown 465. Many scholars have attempted to do just that. See Maud Bodkin’s classic study Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), and the numerous entries in Jon van Meurs, Jungian Literary Criticism, 1920–1980: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Works in English (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988); and Maria Nichols, A Bibliography of Jungian and Post-Jungian Literary Criticism, 1980–2000, Post-Jungian Criticism: Theory and Practice , eds. James S. Baumlin, Tita French Baumlin, and George H. Jensen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004) 263–95.

14. Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt Jr., Eds Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) 68–69.

15. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Studio City, CA: M. Wiese Productions, 1998); Stuart Voytilla, Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999).

16. See, in particular, the diagram at the beginning of the chapter titled The Keys. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968) 245.

17. This essay includes two circular diagrams showing the relationship between archetypes and the cultural canon. He identifies the lower half of the circle as the collective unconscious; and places directing archetypes as small circles around it with arrows pointing straight upward to indicate the directionality of their manifestation. The upper half of the circle is separated from the lower half, and the rim is intersected with circles identified as archetypal values. The second diagram is very similar, except that some of the directing archetypes have arrows pointing downward to indicate that they are fading, while others, pointing in an angled upward direction, are emerging archetypes. In the upper semicircle, some archetypes are disintegrating and others are new. In the first diagram the lower part of the upper semicircle is marked by vertical black bands, to indicate a fixed collectivity; while that in the second is marked by variously angled dark and dotted lines to indicate a changing collectivity. Erich Neumann, Art and Time, Art and the Creative Unconscious Four Essays , trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXI (1959; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

18. Neumann, Art and Time 111.

19. Neumann, Art and Time 113–14.

20. Neumann, Art and Time 112.

21. Cicero, On Divination , book I para. 16, trans. W.A. Falconer (Online Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923). Website: < http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Divinatione/home.html >. Accessed 21 June 2012.

22. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 97.

23. See Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Descent of Inanna: Myth and Therapy, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought , Eds Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985) 137–86. Jacques Le Goff examines the dynamics between scholarly records of descent narratives and their relationship to popular culture in The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages, Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century , Ed. Steven L. Kaplan (New York: Mouton, 1984) 19–37.

24. See discussion in D. Felton, The Dead, A Companion to Greek Religion , Ed. Daniel Ogden (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007) 95.

25. The term katabasis derives from the Greek word for descent. Raymond J. Clark, Catabasis: Vergil and the Wisdom-Tradition (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1979) 13. Clark devotes a section to the Prophetic wisdom and prophetic roles of Odysseus’s Nekyia (37–52), and discusses this same story as a Catabasis, thus drawing attention to the indications that Odysseus himself traveled to the underworld, rather than called the ghosts up to him.

26. Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols , 1952, Trans. (1961; New York: A Search Book, 1969) 40.

27. In her study Metaphysical Media: The Occult Experience in Popular Culture (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), Emily D. Edwards observes that Technology, like tarot cards and Ouija boards, becomes the very instrument that lets the Devil in (6). Edwards has not made a special study of Tarot cards in film, mentioning them with reference to the film Hideaway (1995), but not their appearance in other films she discusses, such as Hello Again (1987) (126). As the present study shows, Tarot card do not generally serve as an instrument that lets the Devil in in film, as Ouija boards seem to. Usually they deliver the message or warning that trouble is already or about to come knocking.

28. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (1927; New York: Octagon Books, A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974) 4.

PART 1

Divination, Cards, and Culture

Chapter 1

Introduction

Cartomancy and Tarot in Film: 1940–2010 is about the representation of a particular form of divination in popular films. Film is one of the most significant mediums of twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture and although most of the examples considered here, like the accounts of fortune-telling left by Homer and other writers of the past, are fictional, they offer perspectives on the ever-changing beliefs and folklore associated with divination practices. In the Western world, cartomancy is, at the earliest, a late fourteenth-century invention, as that is when playing cards came into use in Europe. Cartomancy with Tarot cards necessarily postdates the invention of the Tarot gaming deck—a regular playing deck with an added suit of trumps and a Fool—in the fifteenth-century. Other divination techniques are much older, as are the interpretation of patterns created by birds in flight or by the casting of stones, the images perceived in dreams or trances, and arrangements of numbers. One ancient method that remains popular today is the Chinese I Ching, which may be based on sources dating to 1500 BCE or earlier. The I Ching is consulted by casting sticks or, in modern practice, coins, as a means of selecting the text passage that answers the querent’s question. Some of these and other methods of divination also appear in film and in conjunction with cartomancy and Tarot cards.

Although she does not specifically address cartomancy, Barbara Tedlock’s (2001) multicultural summary explanation of divination is certainly appropriate to it: diviners use their imagination, perceptions, and understanding of tradition to construct usable knowledge from oracular messages. To do so, they link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience.¹ Through dialogue, the diviner and querent create a sequence of ideas or images that is meaningful relative to the situation at hand, arriving ultimately at an unambiguous classification of the causes of the situation and the material needed to respond to and change it.² The future is of paramount importance in divination—hence the popularity of the colloquial fortune-telling or future-telling—but it is emphasized primarily in relation to establishing a course of action.

Concerns about the future are universal, regardless of the cultural specifics by which time itself is understood. S.G.F. Brandon (1965) finds the Christian view of time to be a medium through which the divine purpose has found expression; Hindus understand time as personified in the highest form of deity;

the ancient Egyptian, sought, through Osiris, to embody in himself the three aspects of Time [yesterday, today, tomorrow]; those who adopted the cyclic view saw life as a dreary repetitive process; [and] in terms of the Buddhist estimate, existence in Time is essentially illusory, for true being is atemporal.³

Regardless of these conceptualizations, people are all aware of time as dividing into past, present, and future, and when they act deliberately, it is with intent about the future. The primary motivation for such planning, as Brandon explains, is the

sense of insecurity that consciousness of Time evokes. Time is experienced as change […] The logic of this experience gradually teaches each person that his situation is never secure; that it is ever subject to change. He finds this knowledge disturbing, especially since it tends to affect him more in terms of its menace of ill than its promise of good.⁴

Hence ancient Greek diviners were primarily interested in clarifying some moment, which may be present, future, or past (Iliad I.69–70) and, most importantly, of determining how the querent, collective or individual, should act under uncertain conditions.⁵ Diviners were commonly consulted about sickness, crops,⁶ and even theft, although this latter point was never made part of actual legal suits.⁷ They were regarded as advisors, but once a decision was made to turn to divination, the matter, whether state or personal, was generally regarded as in the oracle’s hands. Sometimes this assignment of authority had significant consequences, as in accounts of Greek troops endangered because the divinatory signs were not favorable for action. For example, the fourth-century Athenian writer Xenophon describes an occasion when mercenaries with whom he served were held up in hostile territory and short of food, and the entrails forbade them either to move on or even to go out foraging for supplies, for several days. These events caused enormous resentment and discord within the mercenary band, but most of the soldiers accepted the necessity of following the guidance of divination, even when it put their lives at risk.⁸ On other occasions, it seems to have been common to debate the exact meaning of the results of the divination, particularly when the community as a whole was concerned.⁹ The importance and nature of the service diviners provided to the Roman state is indicated by the use of the results of such consultations as propaganda.¹⁰ Edicts issued against diviners, particularly magician-diviners, were exacted most frequently and with the severest penalties against foreigners who, it was feared, might make declarations that contravened the interests of Rome and Roman citizens.¹¹

In spite of the various hazards of divination, either from prohibition or fraternizing with unscrupulous magicians, people are willing to put their trust in an oracle if they believe in its objectivity. As W.R. Connor (2000) writes of the ancient Greeks:

Divination fails of its function if its objectivity is not convincingly demonstrated. Though clients seldom go away with an answer that is unsatisfactory, the possibility must always be present. Divination is a drama that leads through many a perilous reversal to a satisfactory dénouement.¹²

The frequently expressed skepticism of clients did not undermine the practice, as failed prognostications were attributed to the individual diviner’s fraud, lack of skill or ability, or the possibility that they were merely serving their own or someone else’s interests.¹³ The habit of blaming faulty predictions and advice on the diviner, rather than on the signs or the oracle that speaks through him or her, is perhaps one reason for the tendency to value passivity in the diviner and pro-activeness on the part of the querent. (The diviner may thus disavow responsibility for the divination, being only the vehicle by which a message is transmitted, whether it proves true or false.) The Greeks also valued pronouncements from the inspired oracle, or one whose mind was literally taken over by the divine, above inductive divination that involved interpreting signs.¹⁴ The Greeks and Romans alike believed signs and divinatory pronouncements that were sought out by a querent, as, for example, many sought the wisdom of the Oracle at Delphi, had more authority than those that simply appeared, as, for example, in dreams.¹⁵

Like state authorities, the Roman and medieval Church supported officially sponsored prophecies, which some believe include the Bible itself, and condemned others. Church authorities had two problems with divination: one was that they believed it presumed a belief in predestination, and second, it suggested that God’s plan could not be trusted:¹⁶ both positions undermined the Church. Deuteronomy 18.10-12 provides a convenient citation in support of a blanket condemnation of divination, but in practice, the Christian Church appropriated and adapted it in the same way they borrowed and assigned new meanings to Pagan sites and symbols, such as grapes, peacocks, and the image of Apollo. In many instances, even in the Bible, the Christian practice seems directly borrowed from the Pagan: Joseph practiced scrying with a special cup (Genesis 44.5, 15–16); priests cast stones (Numbers 27.21 and 1 Samuel 28:6), and Daniel was the leading fortune-teller to the Babylonian king (Daniel 5.11).¹⁷ The Life of St. Eligius (588–660) is filled with accounts of accepted miraculous events and omens, but Eligius tells his followers not to

consult magicians, diviners, sorcerers or incantators, or presume to question them because any man who commits such evil will immediately lose the sacrament of baptism. Do not observe auguries or violent sneezing or pay attention to any little birds singing along the road. […] No one should tell fate or fortune or horoscopes by them as those do who believe that a person must be what he was born to be. For God wills all men to be saved […] Above all, should any infirmity occur, do not seek incantators or diviners or sorcerers or magicians, do not use diabolic phylacteries through springs and groves or crossroads.¹⁸

Instead of relying on these older customs, Eligius, like other Church leaders, advocated Christianized substitutes for Pagan good luck charms and related practices:

If you are distracted on the road or at any other work, make the sign of the cross and say your Sunday prayers with faith and devotion and nothing inimical can hurt you. […] [L]et the invalid confide solely in the mercy of God and take the body and blood of Christ with faith and devotion and ask the church faithfully for blessing and oil, with which he might anoint his body in the name of Christ […]¹⁹

The ongoing religious-based condemnation of Pagan divination is famously evident in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno: Dante punished the diviners, which include some from classical literature, by turning their heads so that they were only able to see what was behind them.²⁰ The ongoing hypocrisy of that condemnation is evident in the methods used by members of the Church wishing to discover God’s will in a given matter. For example, alternative courses of action might be written on pieces of parchment, set on an altar or under the altar cloth, and, after prayers and perhaps some rituals, a priest would select one. Or, at an altar or shrine, the Bible might be opened to a random page or dice used to identify an enlightening passage.²¹ The Church also advocated the use of various forms of lot casting to aid in the identification of criminals: suspects might all be asked to draw from a selection of pieces of wood, one of which was marked with a sign; whoever drew it was the guilty one.²² Such practices redirected attention from Pagan sites and rituals associated with divination to those of the Church.

The Church was not, however, successful in achieving a complete monopoly on divination. Books of Fate, for example, became popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a method of seeking information and guidance about the future. Paul Huson (2004), who regards these books in relation to the development of cartomancy, describes one example dating to 1501 that was consulted by dice-throwing in connection with questions arranged around a Wheel of Fortune, which led the querent

to a variety of legendary or imaginary kings, whose names in turn led to a variety