Clever Little Cards
My first exposure to the tarot came via The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, a Don Knotts film that I enjoy to this day. A small town ladies' occult society, sort of a Golden Dawn-of-Mayberry, goes around waving their hands and crying out "Tarot, Tarot, Solomon!" when word gets out that Knotts' character has supposedly encountered a ghost.

I was probably all of six or seven, but I went to my folks' encyclopedia and started looking. Between homonyms and poor listening comprehension, it took me a while to figure out what those women were so excited about. When I figured it out, I suspect I said the early-80s version of "meh" and went off to watch He-Man battle Skeletor.

Some years later, my mother the I Ching devotee went through a brief tarot phase. There were a few decks around the house, a couple books, and I poked through them, but they didn't capture my interest. That was around junior high, when I was both immersed in Lovecraft and becoming more aware of girls and sex. (At the time I didn't know about weird erotica and didn't think to combine the two, all the better for mankind's sanity.)

Fast forwarding through high school and my twenties, I read about various things mystical and divinatory, reading 1999-era websites, buying a couple tarot decks, but never got much into them. For a while I was deeply into dreams, Jung, lucid dreaming, etc., but I eventually decided I'd rather write fiction for two hours a day than struggle to recall half-remembered dreams in the hope of extracting wisdom.

Recently I wrote a story that involved a guy who was, for a variety of reasons, spending a lot of time reading tarot cards. I poked around online, asked for help from some of y'all, and got what I needed for the story.

Still curious, I kept reading about tarot, deck reviews, history, etc. This was partly spurred by something John Gardner says in On Becoming a Novelist about ways to get to understand people in all their strange psychology. One possibility he suggested was tarot.

Last week I sat down at my desk, thinking about what sort of story I could tell based on a spread. I thought up a layout that could represent the elements and plot of a story, and did my first reading. And what do you know?



It was, in fact, as if the scales fell from my eyes. As I looked at what was laid out^*, studying card meanings^** in a book, thinking about how I reacted to the images, the outline of a story came to mind. Better yet, it incorporated elements from a couple stories that I couldn't bring to completion earlier this year. I'm still writing, so I'm not going to engage in too much pre-hatch counting of chickens, but damn! If this story turns out as well as I hope it will, there will be more tarot-as-story-aid in the future.

For those of you wondering about the layout I made up, it's like this. Top Row (Character/Conflict), left to right: protagonist, protagonist's view toward the antagonist/central conflict, antagonist/central conflict's view of the protagonist, antagonist. Bottom Row (Plot), left to right: opening, initial difficulties, source of resolution, tying up loose ends, conclusion/climax. The story has developed into something rather different than it began as, but I'm assuming that's a good thing.

This process was useful for giving me a framework to hang lots of things on that have been coming up in stories recently (some completed, some not). If the tarot is, more or less, an arbitrary symbol set, then it gives my subconscious room to fiddle around and slap my writing questions and concerns into the niches where they can fit comfortably.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* Yes, there are a lot of wands. It was a well-shuffled deck. The wands did, however, lend themselves to a story about... well, let's say they fit.
** I was using the Universal Waite deck, which is relatively standard and seemed like a good starting place. I understand there are big debates about imagery, Rider-Waite v. non Rider-Waite, etc., etc. I have a few other decks around, some older, some purchased more recently. I have a Marseilles, but that's more for historical reasons than anything else. Revelations caught my eye for the evocative, colorful artwork, and I suspect it may become a regular for thinking about fantasy stories. The Deviant Moon is entirely appropriate for most of my dark fantasy stories. Both the Revelations and Deviant Moon decks seem to suit me.