Tarot Tracings: Essays in Literature and Divination

By Camelia Elias

Lovers, villains, murderers, magicians, spirit conjurors, and ghosts. You'd think this was a popular book of fiction blending tales of love, war, and magic. It isn't. It's a book written for the curious reader who might like to know what some of the greatest literary figures in Western literature are up to w

• Language: English
• Publisher: EyeCorner Press
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9788792633590

Camelia Elias

Camelia Elias, PhD & Dr.Phil., is a former university professor. After 20 years in academia, she left her career to pursue her interests in teaching and writing on the philosophy and practice of reading cards. She works with contemplative arts, oracular language, and martial arts cartomancy and Zen at her own school, Aradia Academy.

Book preview

TAROT TRACINGS: ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND DIVINATION © Camelia Elias 2020. PUBLISHED by EyeCorner Press. DESIGNED AND TYPESET by Camelia Elias. IMAGES OF THE TAROT: Jean Noblet Marseille Tarot, 1650, as reconstructed by Jean-Claude Flornoy. By kind permission from Roxanne Flornoy. ON THE COVER, Ryan Edward’s Marseille Tarot ‘Gold’ Trumps, featuring Justice as a representation of Camelia Elias.

ISBN: 978-87-92633-50-7

ISBN: 978-87-92633-59-0 (e-book)

April 2020, Agger, Denmark

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission from the copyright holder.

EYECORNERPRESS.COM

For Robert Silhol,

who said to me over wine and roses at

the Psychology and the Arts conference in 2010

: ‘When love is denied, hatred sets in.

’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘until resurrection day,

when there is no more displacement.’

– CAMELIA ELIAS

P.S. This book was published on Easter day 2020.

It was not planned that way. It just happened that way.

‘No, the Moon is a desert...

From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem

sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles,

treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here,

to the center of an empty horizon.’

– ITALO CALVINO

THE CASTLE OF CROSSED DESTINIES

Contents

Italo Calvino’s Plot

Interludes instead of introductions

A Spell for a Claim

Tracing Robert Browning’s mantic eschatology

Walking between Worlds

Tracing William Butler Yeats and the Golden Dawn

Ghos(tt)hesis

Tracing Rachel Pollack in ghost affects

The Round Plot

Shuffling the cards for Calvino

Italo Calvino’s Plot:

Interludes instead of introductions

Iwrote this book because I felt like saying, ‘if no one else claims him, [it] could very well be me.’ This is a line from the work of famed critic and fiction writer Italo Calvino, who wrote an utterly original novel called The Castle of Crossed Destinies, first published in Italian in 1969. This is a novel built on working with Tarot cards. The setting is simple: a castle and a tavern. The protagonists are travelers who got lost in the forest. Once they hit the place to dwell in, they want to tell their stories. They discover, however, that they’re mute, and can’t utter a word.

What to do when the sharing drive for storytelling is so strong? Mysteriously a Tarot pack appears on the table. The travelers start turning the cards, and realize that they can tell their stories with images. A narrator interprets the images for the reader. But the stories get wilder and wilder. What is the story of Parsifal, Faust, Hamlet, and Macbeth doing all of a sudden, alongside the story of the poor, unknown sod who found himself robbed in the woods, or castrated by vengeful queens? What’s the narrator doing? What's he thinking? Is he properly tracing via the images of the Tarot the stories that the travelers intend to tell? Who’s to say? Who can decide? At what cost? The cost of renunciation? You choose a detail, you must give up the other. What if the essential is renounced in the name of some stupid displacement? ‘I published this book to be free of it,’ said Calvino on his obsession with the Tarot, and then continued:

... it has obsessed me for years. I began by trying to line up tarots at random to see if I could read a story in them. The Waverer’s Tale emerged; I started writing it down; I looked for other combinations of the same cards; I realized the tarots were a machine for constructing stories; I thought of a book, and I imagined its frame: the mute narrators, the forest, the inn. I was tempted by the diabolical idea of conjuring up all the stories that could be contained in a tarot deck’ (Calvino, 1977: 126).

In a divination setting, a 3-card spread invites to a snappy reading, to the creation of a short story. 78 cards on the table can stretch the story in all sorts of unexpected directions. Taking a card from the middle of the spread and placing it in the margins will change the configuration of the whole thing to the point of leaving the reader cry, ‘oh, no, not that, just when I thought that he loved me forever...’ What fascinated Calvino is not so much the common sense observation that one can make up stories with the tarot, but rather, that the same cards can mutate the whole range of feelings about what is happening when we move around just one card, or when we note that a card is not covered yet by the course of a narrative. One can’t leave it out.

The obsession with stretching the tall tale to the taller yet is vibrant. When Calvino’s travelers finish going in and out of an intricate enmeshing, where Parsifal and Faust have theirs to say, it’s time for the writer to step up to it and raise the stakes. In the penultimate story of The Castle, ‘I also Try to Tell my Tale’, Calvino shows up for this claim:

To begin, I have to attract attention to the card called the King of Clubs, in which you see a seated person who, if no one else claims him, could very well be me, especially since he is holding an implement with the point downward as I’m doing this moment, and in fact this implement, on closer inspection, resembles a pen or a quill or a well-sharped pencil or a ballpoint, and if its size seems excessive that must signify the importance this writing implement has in the existence of the above-mentioned sedentary person. As far as I know, the black line that comes from the tip of that cheap scepter is precisely the path that has led me here, and it is therefore not impossible that the King of Clubs is the appellative due me, and in that case the term Clubs must be understood also in the sense of those vertical lines children learn in penmanship class, the first stammering of those who try to communicate by drawing signs, or in the sense of the poplar wood from which the white cellulose is pulped and quires of sheet are unrolled, ready to be (and again meanings interlocked) penned (99-100).

Tracings. Let that passage sink in. Including the judgment – cheap scepter – ready to be ‘(and again meanings interlocked) penned’ – and the irony in the reference to the size of the writerly phallus to mean something important. By this point in the reading of the book, the careful observer would have already duly noted the shredding of all meaning, praising his luck also for having come across a novel that's liberated from the tyranny of the symbol, a novel that never departs from the surface of description, or the tracing of the obvious that needs no metaphysics to explain it.

Calvino reads the cards in the same way as any curious person would. Being a writer, one would expect him to be particularly prone to observing how words enter into play on any piece of cardboard along with the image that the card represents. The same with numbers. A curious person would simply ask questions as to the possible correspondence between a particular phrase, an image, and a particular number when they happen to appear together. As Calvino so brilliantly demonstrates, the idea is not to develop any system of beliefs based on ritualizing reading the inherent puns in the French names on the cards according to some presupposed cosmic or numeral meaning, but rather, to have a good laugh at it all.

By being awfully good at paying attention to what is happening on a card, Calvino thus suggests that looking at the card of Le Monde, for instance, depicting a woman dancing inside of a mandorla, prompts one towards the urge to squeeze a LeMon. Such a desire cum plot can elicit more interesting insights than merely associating the card with some Catholic iconography, or abstract thinking about a world that we are quite unlikely to reach in this life time, unless, of course, we would all start behaving very nicely and said yes to every enlightened person that happened to come our way, promising us the Garden of Eden.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we’re surrounded by stories prompted by desire. Desire, in turn, contributes to the construction of plot, of sequential narrative that takes us from wanting to know what happens next to amazement. ‘If no one else claims him, [it] could very well be me.’ As Calvino taught a beautiful