INTERVIEW - Cynthia von Buhler Revisits The Shakespeare Oracle

Though Cynthia von Buhler is currently touring to promote her critically-acclaimed children's book, But Who Will Bell The Cats?, she still has fond memories of the insane month which she spent churning out paintings for A. Bronwyn Llewellyn's sumptuous Shakespeare Oracle in 2003. In this wonderfully candid interview, von Buhler relates some of her experiences as a flourishing author, illustrator, fine artist, and possible descendant of the Sforza family. Read the interview...

Tom Blunt: So you told me earlier that this wasn’t exactly a collaborative project in the sense that people might assume, is that correct?

Cynthia von Buhler: Yes. I never spoke with the author. I did not have any say in who was chosen for the cards, and I depicted them any way I chose.


TB: How large are the paintings?

CvB: They were about five by seven inches. I tended to do them really quickly. I had one month to paint all of the cards. This is why I chose to do them as small oil paintings. I had to do one every ten minutes! It was rough. I wish I had more time on them. It was a tremendous amount of work in a short period of time. I would have liked to make them all huge 3-D paintings, but I would still be working on them now. They were a little bit larger than the actual cards -- but they’d at least by the right size if you wanted to read someone’s tarot with them. Originally I thought I could sell [the paintings] as a whole deck that someone could use, but then I started selling them individually because I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to buy the whole thing. It would be quite expensive!


TB: I think that there are probably many artists and illustrators who would probably like to do a deck, but the idea of spending that much time to do each card exactly the way you want it would just be overwhelming. It would probably be much easier as a collaborative project.

CvB: I actually did that once -- worked on a deck of cards, like an actual deck of cards. It was basically four artists, and I was given the hearts. So I did all the hearts!


TB: Sounds great. What is that deck called?

CvB: Oh, it wasn’t called anything, it was just like a deck of playing cards, done for a promotion for some company -- I can’t even remember which company. It was lovely. Even doing just all of the hearts that was a lot of work. But I did do them 3-D, and I actually used pig hearts, but then they ended up thinking that was too scary, so I ended up using milagro hearts, you know, like the Mexican milagros that you nail on.


TB: That 3-D component seems to be a vital part of your other artwork.

CvB: Well usually I make things that are 3-D, but when I don’t have a lot of time I still do 2-D paintings. I don’t normally work so small either, I work quite large. So I was really pumping these [cards] out -- I went to my parents’ house in the Berkshires, and I just sat there at the table and was a one-woman factory.


TB: Were there any particular paintings in this deck that you felt a special connection with? Or that you would have wanted to spend a whole lot more time on?

CvB: Definitely… The Queen, and the Fool. The Hanged Man. There are a few of them that were my favorites, that I actually still own the paintings. And I still have the cover. I actually painted Shakespeare a few times, for a few different projects, and I really like painting Shakespeare. I have very strong opinions about Shakespeare and how to represent the person. You’ve heard the whole thing about how Shakespeare may not really be Shakespeare?


TB: Oh yes.

CvB: Yeah. I don’t really think Shakespeare was Shakespeare.


TB: The first time I looked at the Hanged Man, I felt like you’d put special love and attention into that card.

CvB: Yeah, I liked that one. And I really did a lot of research. This was a while ago, you know, but I had to really immerse myself in the plays and study them.


TB: I can imagine so.

CvB: Luckily my mother reads the cards and knows a lot about them, and gave me a lot of input. Sforza was my grandmother's maiden name (on my mother's side). She was from Italy and rumor has it that we were related to the famous Duke. Leonardo DaVinci painted his mistress and also did his plumbing. In Italy the Sforza name is like Rockefeller or Kennedy in this country. And my mother actually had that deck, the Sforza deck, and showed me that. I think if I had more time I would have liked to make my deck look more like that one -- older and more decayed looking. I just love that deck, it’s so beautiful.


TB: I love using it too, I have the one that’s inlaid with the gold plate or whatever. It really is beautiful.

CvB: And also the cards were large. And they were strong cards, they weren’t flimsy.


TB: What kind of input did your mom give you? What did she contribute to this?

CvB: Oh you know, if I had a question about what a card meant, she would explain it. And explain both sides of it, you know, all of the cards are both good and bad. She would just explain it to me, and you know I didn’t have a lot of time so I really just had to know a quick answer. What does this card mean? You know, I don’t read them myself. Obviously I’ve had them read, I’ve had my cards read many times -- although my mother doesn’t like to read our cards. Superstitious!


TB: Did you give her a deck of these cards?

CvB: Oh, of course. They did actually send me a decent number of the decks.


TB: That must have been very exciting for her.

CvB: I think she really liked it. But she gets very involved in all of my projects. My mother is actually quite artistic herself and I think that she kind of lives through me in some ways. So now when I work on books now as an author, when I work on children’s books, I always send my stories to my mother to give me input on what children will like. I don’t have children and she’s had a lot of children, our whole family had six children.


TB: When did you start writing and illustrating books?

CvB: My major in college was actually children’s books. And my minor was fine arts. When I finished college I had a book I was showing around to some of the publishers and I just couldn’t get any interest in it, so I started doing illustration for magazines and books. And that led to working with Houghton-Mifflin, doing many, many covers for young adult books. Then they asked me if I had any of my own stories, and I said, “Yes, I have many.” And then from there I started doing my own books. So I actually illustrated a few children’s books before I was given the chance to write my own. It’s a really hard field to break into, but once you’re in, you’re sort of accepted. But it’s also very hard to be and illustrator and then have them take you seriously as a writer.


TB: Yes. I can imagine that writers who can’t illustrate their own work would feel threatened by that. I think as wonderful as it is for anybody who has multiple talents and can do so many things, there’s always a flip side to that, trying to gain acceptance as one thing or another when you can actually do both.

CvB: Right. Also, with my book, I created the sets in 3-D and then I photographed them. So I really like to do everything -- because I’m a little control freak and I like to have control over the whole project. So it was really hard illustrating other people’s stories, because they weren’t necessarily how I would have wanted the stories to go. And I also think that it must be very hard for the writers to just be given an illustrator. They really don’t have -- unless they’re at a very high level -- any input in how books are illustrated -- not even the cover. So I like to have control over the whole project. In my contract I actually made it so they have to hire my designer, who I’ve been working with for a really long time. He really knows how to design my art. And it’s such a big part of it, the design, even things like choosing the paper. The coating on the paper, the typography, it’s all really important. And a lot of times when you’re working with a publisher, it’s just sort of whatever they give you.


TB: How excellent. So the fact that you never spoke with the author on the Shakespeare deck isn’t particularly unusual then; considering the work that you’ve done you’ve probably had a lot experiences like that.

CvB: I actually have, and it always sort of baffles me. And I always sort of feel bad for the author. You know, many times I’ve sort of illustrated a book cover and afterwards they’ve called me and said, “Oh, I love that!” Usually I wind up talking to them after the fact, and hopefully they like it. Usually they seem to, but I’m sure that they don’t always like what I came up with! In some ways it would be helpful to talk with the author. I think with the Tarot deck it probably would have been helpful, but that in some ways it would be horrible -- I think that sometimes the author could get in the way. Because the best art comes when you have the most freedom.


TB: Exactly. Once the floodgates are open for input to go input to go back and forth, then where does it end?

CvB: And also, when it’s someone who isn't used to working with an artist, that’s a disaster. You know, with an art director or an editor who was worked with many different artists, I think that they know how to talk and know how to deal with artists and I really honestly feel the more freedom given, the better the artwork. But you know, I actually did a project with Martha Stewart -- I illustrated one of her stories, and I never met her. I still have to talk to her about it, I don’t know if she likes it.


TB: Ultimately, if an author doesn’t like the way it’s come out, I’d hope they wouldn’t blame the artist. It seems like an grievance they’d have with the publisher instead.

CvB: Usually it goes well, so I think publishers know what they’re doing. I think there’s a good reason why they keep those two things separate. And so many people I know who want to do a book, they think they need to come at it with an illustrator in hand, and that’s totally not the case. If you’re a writer, they just want you to show your writing, you don’t need to find someone to illustrate your work.


TB: I think that must be hard for any writers to accept, because I think visualization is such a key part of how you write a story, so I imagine they just want to go into it offering as clear an impression of their work as possible.

CvB: Are you also an artist as well as a writer?


TB: Not in any meaningful way. I’ve done a lot of art and design work, and I’ve had some art shown here in the city, but it’s not my main way of expressing myself. I don’t think I have the chops to make a Tarot deck all by myself, for example. So, tell me a little more about this possible family connection to the Sforza family!

CvB: Well, as I said, my grandmother’s maiden name is Sforza, so my whole life we’ve always talked about how our family comes from the Sforza family. And my family is very fair, we’re actually almost Sicilian… Calabrian? And we’re very fair-skinned -- blondes, redheads. Which is unusual for that area, though actually not quite unusual, because the Vikings came through and raped and pillaged. But still we say, “Oh we’re fair because of the blue-blood connection, and he married a Polish woman and you know, whatever.” I never really looked into it to find out if we really truly are related to the Sforza family, but we have the same name so it’s likely at some point it goes back to that family. The funny thing is that side of the family was possibly involved with the mafia.

It’s actually a very sad story, because when my grandmother came to this country with her husband, and I guess somehow they had a speakeasy -- her stories about the speakeasy were really interesting -- and an ice truck. Who knows what they were doing with the ice truck, if they were delivering alcohol or whatever during Prohibition. One day my grandfather went to collect a debt and he was shot. And that same day that he was shot, my grandmother, who was pregnant, gave birth to my mother. So my mother was born on the same day that her father died. It’s a pretty intense story, and I’ve been meaning to go back and research the murder. I think it’s kind of fascinating -- you know, why was he murdered? I guess it wasn’t really explored...?


TB: Yeah, especially because by the time these stories are passed down to other people, everybody has sort of imbued them with their own narrative and made it into a personal story, so often the facts turn out to be really surprising.

CvB: Right. I’ll say to my mother, “Yeah, you know it sounds like the mafia,” and she says “It’s not the mafia, he wasn’t in the mafia, he just went to collect a debt!” It’s like, Mom, he just went to collect a debt? Come on. You’re in the Bronx during Prohibition, dealing in alcohol and fireworks.


TB: You talked to me about the Visconti-Sforza deck. Are there any other decks that you really admire?

CvB: You know, when I did the research I looked at many, and it astounded me at how many decks there are. Some of them are really beautiful and some of them are kind of haphazardly put together.


TB: I keep forgetting that this was a while ago for you.

CvB: I know, I’m so sorry. I probably should have gone back and done a little research and pulled my files before I talked to you. I have a whole file, I did a lot of research, and I did look at a lot of decks. You know I actually had to have a lot of these paintings that don’t have the characters on them. That’s another thing, I would have loved to have characters on all of them.


TB: Yeah, I have to say I was initially disappointed when I first heard that the Minor Arcana cards didn’t have characters of their own. But now I think that the inclusion of quotes for each card is a really brilliant idea because it really provides a memorable hook for each one.

CvB: Exactly. Okay, my four most favorite cards that I had to illustrate were: The Emperor, The Empress, The Magician, and the Tower.


TB: There are so many different kinds of scenes portrayed here. Some are just portraits but others are like little action scenes. So you really do get a glimpse of a full range of your painting style, because you wind up having to do different things to make each card stand out.

CvB: Right, and there are little details on a lot of these cards, whether it be a rabbit or a bird or something in it, and it all has meaning for that card. So when I was doing my research I tried to get all of the symbols in. To try and assemble things which have something to do with this character or the card.


TB: I know you didn’t choose who would appear on which card, but at least it appears that A. Bronwyn Llewellen put a lot of thought into them.

CvB: Right, right. I definitely think she did. I agreed with a lot of her choices. Most of the choices I thought were pretty good and the connections was actually pretty interesting. And I really was able to just do whatever I wanted as far as the imagery, which was good. I’m looking at the cards now. Oh, the Hermit. I do like the Hermit.


TB: The Hermit really surprised me because I was expecting someone like Prospero to show up in the Hermit card. At first when I saw Caliban instead, I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if I really get that.” But within seconds I recognized it as a bold choice and a beautiful picture, and so I thought, “You know, rock on, that’s amazing.” And then when I saw Prospero on the Temperance card instead, I thought, “Well now I have nothing to complain about. It all comes together.”

CvB: It was really fascinating. You know, that’s one of the things that I like. I do fine art as well, but one of the things I really like about being an illustrator is to learn about things. You know, I will get an assignment to do something and it’s something I may not know too much about, but I learn because I have to research it, and it’s just fascinating to me. I think you can probably tell from my cards and see what I was looking at when I painted them. You know, I was probably looking at certain decks and thinking “Oh, I really like this,” and then steal an idea here, steal an idea there.


TB: The fact that the backs of cards are mostly black seems to give them additional weight. They just look more mysterious. And the background on a lot of the Trump cards is a black night sky.

CvB: If you look at the card carefully, it’s not just blacked out. It’s actually painted, you can see the texture in it a little bit. I like it that they didn’t just use the black ink.


TB: You’re right, I’m looking at a card right now and I can definitely see it.

CvB: I wanted the texture to show, because that’s the one thing I really liked about the Sforza deck. I really loved the texture of them, and I wanted my deck to have that. I got excited because the publisher said I could include a 3-D element in the cover illustration, the picture of Shakespeare. My parents have this tiny Old World globe. And I wanted to have that kind of floating in front of him -- a real globe floating in front of him, like he’s levitating it.

So I had my parents send it to me, and it never actually got to me! You know, I couldn’t find it, and I had this really horrible, evil landlord in my loft. Well, later I found the box in the hallway of my loft, so I think that my landlord stole the globe! He was just a horrible man and he stole my globe. I know he stole my globe. So they’d said I could use the 3-D on the cover, and I was going to do it, but then I didn’t have the globe so I couldn’t do it. I was just looking at the cover and I was just remembering that and how mad I was when he stole my globe.


TB: That’s terrible. I guess you’ve still got a tribute to the globe there on the cover, except for every time you look at it you’re just going to remember how that guy stole your globe.

CvB: Yeah, it’s true. Later I found one somewhere else, so I just bought it and thought, “Okay, I’m just gonna keep this around. Someday when I need a globe for a painting, I’ll have one.” But you know I was on such a tight deadline at the time that I didn’t have time to go and find another one. I had to just to not do it. But speaking of thieves. He reminds me of certain evil characters.


TB: [Laughs]

CvB: He’s like an evil character from a Charles Dickens novel. Or like a troll!

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INTERVIEW - The Terrible Tenderness of Beth Cavener Stichter

We often refer to an artist's subject as being "captured" in the work, but this expression has never been more true than in the zoomorphic sculpture of Beth Cavener Stichter. "On Tender Hooks", the artist's new exhibition at NYC's Claire Oliver Gallery, is a menagerie of all-too human struggles in the form of animals pinned or posed on the walls like heavy stoneware butterflies. The creatures seem to be complicit in their own display, some presenting their weaknesses vainly, others piteously.

I attended Cavener Stichter's opening reception last week. Upon entering I was greeted by the example above, "Humiliation By Design," which seems to bemoan the deceptively simple mechanics of impossible situations -- I couldn't help recalling the Waite-Smith deck's Eight of Swords. Just around the corner, however, you'll find the ultimate expression of freedom in the form of "A Rush of Blood to the Head". The centerpiece of the show, this six-foot sculpture stars two (extremely) male goats locked in embrace, their mouths sealed together passionately. I'm very excited to present this conversation with the artist, in which she comments at length upon her strange beasts and the even stranger humans who behold them.


Tom Blunt: You say that these are actually portraits of humans. Can you explain what led you to abandon the human form in favor of animals?

Beth Cavener Stichter: There is a sense of Otherness when you see something that isn't quite normal; when I was doing more human figurative work, I would slightly distort body shapes, and as soon as I did, people would stop identifying with the images. They didn't want to imagine that altered figure as themselves. It didn't take much – even sheer nakedness would become alienating. In order to try to coax people into empathizing with the work, I switched to using the animal form to express the human condition.

People often ask me, "How do you know animal anatomy so well?" and I just chuckle. If you were to see a real goat next to my sculptures, you'd see that something is terribly wrong. These figures are human bodies that have been subtly morphed into other creatures. They have belly-buttons, collarbones, and surgical scars that I bear on my own body. Most of them have human genitalia. A good deal of the time, these details escape immediate notice.


TB: Certain animals recur often in your work, such as rabbits and goats. How do you determine which animal you'll use to capture a particular person or trait?

BCS: It all stems back to when I was a really young -- we moved every two years of my life, all the way up until high school. I was always in different schools, which meant I would always be the outsider, the stranger. In response I developed a defense mechanism in order to classify people into groups, in order to figure out how I fit into that situation -- more subconsciously than consciously. Since I was a child at the time, these categories were defined in terms of animals, because all the picture books I read categorized human behavior this way. You know, the pigs are this human character type, the wolves are this other type. I'm interested now in what that says about the person making the distinctions rather than the animal being personified.

When I was in graduate school I decided to make the shift into using animal forms, but I was worried about doing it because there are so many animals and cultural associations with particular species – how would I establish developed characters if I used a random animal every time? So I chose three distinct animals that would embody three different personality types: the victim, the bully, and the manipulator. At the time I chose the hare, the wild boar, and the goat to represent those three character types. They were way over-simplified, but it was fun to subvert that – how could I make a manipulative victim? Or a bully-manipulator?


TB: We spoke a little about the book Geek Love, which you claimed as one of your favorites. I'm curious about the ways in which your appreciation for horror has manifested in these deceptively sinister sculptures.

BCS: I love to read more than anything else. I've been drawn to horror because of the intense psychological profiles of its characters -- you have to care about them before it's truly horrible to watch what they do. However, my favorite novels aren't horror novels at all, but ones that really get you inside the characters heads, and make you feel and think like another person and really intensely share their experience. I think as a young person growing up, horror novels were an introduction to that kind of character development.

That was a big move in my own work, too. When I first started making work, I felt I had to tell people what to think. If I wanted to, say, talk about a primal element that's hidden inside, I would marry a primal element with an image of a human. The hybrid figures I made early on were all about that. But it was definitely hitting people over the head with a baseball bat: "Here is my message! And I'll even title it for you so that you'll understand it!" It wasn't until I started applying to graduate schools, where you have to write about what it is you're trying to say, that I realized that I was more drawn to things that were subtle and sneaky and sinister in some way. And they're sinister because they're quiet… I'd rather bait my hook with something that's alluring but still has that sharp, pointy jab. You can't just stick a bare hook in the water and expect to catch anything with it.


TB: You described yourself to me as shy. People have incredibly visceral reactions to the sight of animals in peril, so I have to wonder: do you ever become self-conscious about making, presenting, and defending work that you know will incur dramatic emotional reactions?

BCS: Not when I'm making them, ever. But boy do I build up a lot of anxiety standing in front of the work while people have that emotional reaction directed at me. I've had people approach me near tears, or wanting to mother me, or claim an emotional intimacy with me because of something they've felt in the work. I love that they felt that, but I get alarmed when it's directed at me.


TB: You've described your medium (clay) as having placed you in an artistic ghetto, one that is usually considered a means to "craft" or "design" rather than "art." Can you explain the challenge this has posed to you as an artist?

BCS: I'm cautious about framing my work in an environment that's primarily devoted to design. Up until now I've been shown with other clay artists, so sometimes I'm sitting next to pots and functional work -- which is just a weird context in which to say the things I'm trying to say. I love my fellow clay artists, they've been a very supportive and awesome community, but it's been important step in my career to find a gallery that would represent me, not as a material specific artist but as a sculptor.


TB: Do you ever consider switching to a medium that doesn't carry this association?

BCS: I do have an intense preference for this material; clay is so much like flesh. When I'm working with it, it's as close as you can get to molding another person's body. It responds to touch, it remembers your fingers… everything about it is so sensual. Creating a human form (which, again, is essentially what I'm doing) out of any other material would feel like secondary translation. Which is not to say that I won't work with other materials. I love working with metals, for example -- the way that they change over time and react to the environment. But those other media will always be supplementary.

I’m really excited about my new representation with the Claire Oliver Gallery in Chelsea. I think it’s going to open so many possibilities for the work- both in material, concept, and audience. Showing alongside the kind of talent she has in the gallery, I am more than ready to see how that pushes my work -more risk-taking, experimentation with materials, and a new way of looking at the way that my pieces interact with a specific audience. I am ready to travel into those dark places in my head that I have been afraid to enter- I both excited and nervous to see what the next 5 years will bring.


TB: Seeing [the work] in person at the Claire Oliver Gallery, it really struck me that while "A Rush of Blood to the Head" is obviously an earnest expression of sexuality, it is foremost an earnest expression of love. And I think that's what seems to win people over -- it's shocking at first, but the longer you look at it, the less dirty it seems. Does this mesh with your hopes for the piece? Do the reactions to "Rush of Blood" seem different than the reactions to other pieces in the show?

BCS: Quite a few of the works in the exhibition deal with some of my own personal struggles in my career as an artist as well as the personal and autobiographical stories. The smaller works in particular seem to provoke a distanced or thoughtful reaction from the viewer rather than evoke a moment of intimacy. The three larger works are meant to engage this more visceral sense of empathy- using both human scale, gesture, and an indirect gaze to seduce the viewer into a sympathetic state. As a group, the medium and smaller pieces in the show return the gaze of the viewer, addressing the frame of the space and the context of the encounter in a confrontational manner. These emotional states require another's presence on which to focus their attention. Conversely, all three of the larger works are locked in private inward moments.

"A Rush of Blood to the Head" is the centerpiece of the entire exhibition, because more than any of the other pieces, the sculpture of the two kissing goats deals with something that is profoundly human. The kiss is specifically a gesture of human intimacy. The passion and tenderness of the embrace is likely to provoke a sentimental response, despite the fact that is completely unnatural for two animals to display affection with their mouths in a kiss. When you are just looking at the upper half of the goats, you are dealing with issues of human intimacy and passion that are identifiable by almost anyone. But then we come back to that initial reaction - why does viewing the sculpture in its entirety so often change the viewer’s reaction? When you are viewing the sculpture as a whole, it addresses a complex and controversial social issue which everyone is familiar with. My goal was to make this piece as alluring and passionate as possible, so that there’s always an element that calls to people to remain engaged despite any uncomfortable feelings with its sexuality.

The initial impulse for creating these sculptures is the struggle to overcome my own assumptions about the thoughts, motivations, and feelings contained beneath the surface of the people around me. I am often tangled in a mess of frustration with my own limited experiences, inhibitions, fears, and prejudices that create a barrier between understanding and communicating with the people around me - whether they be strangers or my closest acquaintances.

What really drives the work is the attempt to lure others into confronting these same issues. This is the main reason that I shifted from using the human form to the animal figure. In my experience, I found that most people empathized more readily with animals than humans. There is an assumed moral and emotional innocence that we associate with the animal image which allows me to delve into territory which we normally find too uncomfortable to dwell on. I want to create images that address some tough questions, while at the same time addressing why we find these questions uncomfortable.

Photograph © Beth Cavener Stichter 2009

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Previously On Arcanalogue: The Eight of Swords

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INTERVIEW - Nakisha Elsje VanderHoeven's Rabbit Tarot, A-Z

In Nakisha Elsje VanderHoeven's world, the White Rabbit holds illimitable dominion over all. With her recent creation, the Seattle-based artist has elevated her subject to new heights -- The Rabbit Tarot is rapidly becoming a must-have item for Tarot collectors and animal enthusiasts alike. Nakisha's account of her deck's evolution hints at a creative spirit that's as mature as it is child-like. Read the interview...

Tom Blunt: After working in so many mediums, what compelled you to create a Tarot deck? Did you start out with publishing in mind, or did this begin as a purely personal challenge?

Nakisha Elsje VanderHoeven: It was pretty much a natural progression. I had been illustrating children’s books featuring the Little White Rabbit (The Little White Rabbit A-Z, for example) and playing around with different images in the White Rabbit series. At first I though I would just make a few images from the Major Arcana, but once I got started it just grew. It was a personal challenge to be sure, but once I finished painting the Major Arcana I was positive I wanted to print the deck, and not just the Major Arcana, but a whole deck of 78 unique cards.


TB: How did you come to self-publish this deck? Can you share any surprises or complications that await those interested in designing or custom-ordering decks of cards?

NEV: Well, at first when I finished the deck I did contact some of the major Tarot publishers. Though they liked the artwork, they felt it was too much of a “niche within a niche” market. I had two goals in mind when I was going to self publish; that they would have to be playable, and that they would have to be affordable. I didn’t want to create a rare “Art Deck”; something nice to look at but too expensive and delicate to use everyday. After some dead ends with printing companies I found a playing card printing company I could work with. I did have to make some compromises in the layout of the cards to fit the playing company’s template, but I am pleased with the end result. I like the workability of the poker-sized cards, but hope to someday to have another version that is larger and shows more of the illustrations.


TB: What inspired your Minor Arcana card interpretations? In some places you seem to hew fairly closely to traditional imagery or meanings, such as those in the the Waite-Smith deck. In other cases, such as the Twos, they are much different.

NEV: I guess there is a certain naivety on my part that came into play when I was working on the Minor cards. For twenty years I had just the one deck that I would use, the Maddonni Tarot. The Maddonni’s Minor Arcana does not have individually illustrated cards. Though these cards they had great meaning for me, I wasn’t well versed in the imagery others had used for those particular cards. I sort of took the meanings I had for the cards and translated them into my own visual vocabulary.


TB: You included meanings for all the card reversals. Do you read reversals when you give readings, or are you just being extra helpful?

NEV: I generally read the reversed cards as external rather than internal forces at work. A lot of my reading is how the cards relate to each other and what the bunnies are looking at.


TB: In the recent MetaFilter thread about your deck, people pointed out that the Death card seemed to be a Watership Down homage. Are there other cards in the deck that you feel were particularly inspired by this book?

NEV: The Death card was actually the hardest card for me to visualize, especially since part of the concept of the deck is that it would be accessible to all ages. I also did not want to alienate my loyal customers and fans who would probably be horrified if I did a painting of a literal dead rabbit. I borrowed the general concept of the embracing wild black rabbit from Richard Adams, especially since it felt more like the transformation and transcending meanings for this card. There are no direct allusions to the book with other cards, but I think it’s easy to see the connection, since both my rabbits and the ones in the Watership down are very people like, with human emotions and thoughts.


TB: What is it like to give readings with a deck that is 100% your own creation? Has anyone given you a reading with the deck yet?

NEV: It’s been really surprising. I explained to a client once that there was a certain amount of culture shock reading the deck, and that the more I read them the more the meanings clarified and even changed slightly. It’s been rewarding and somewhat disconcerting at times, the rabbits can be pretty mischievous in how they tell me things. I have not yet had anyone officially read for me yet, that sounds fun!


TB: Tell me a little more about the decks you have used and admired the most.

NEV: I tend to get attached to things, I mean the Maddonni Tarot deck that I have had forever is pretty faded and Ten of Cups has a corner nibbled off from my only rabbit who passed away in 1992. (I don’t own any rabbits now.) I wasn’t one for collecting decks, though I admire many artists who have created them, and used to have the Bohemian Cats Tarot which I loved. When I discovered my World card was missing in January, I was told I couldn’t read from it anymore. In essence I had to recreate the world and used my predilection for the Little White Rabbit to do it.


TB: You're very active in the Etsy and Flickr communities. Can you tell me a little about how input from these communities influenced your work on the deck? How has your participation in them or your appreciation of their reach changed now that the deck has taken off?

NEV: I guess the biggest thing that happened while I was creating the deck was the encouragement and enthusiasm for the project from those communities, which often kept me going. I did very little marketing at first once the deck was available, but it was randomly discovered by several Tarot forums and it just took off. I was shocked to be honest; I thought that it would be mostly my “bunny people” who would want the deck, as these were the people who were initially giving me so much support. I guess I underestimated the appeal it had for tarot collectors and enthusiasts, and was quite humbled by the response.


TB: It seems to me that in your deck (and in your other work) the image of the White Rabbit serves as sort of a blank slate, upon which virtually any human thought or emotion can be projected -- something which I think has resulted in a deck that many people can connect with easily. Is that the function the Rabbit serves for you as an artist, as well?

NEV: The White Rabbit has evolved considerably since its early manifestation in my work. He’s become quite a character with a history and friends, likes and dislikes, as have many of the other animals that reoccur in my work. But he’s constantly changing, sometimes ‘he’ is a ‘she’, or he is a child or a wise old soul, sometimes he is very rabbit-like and not very personable, and sometimes he does very human things. I think that you are right that he expresses very human ideas and emotions, but then my work has always been that way. I rarely paint or draw people; it’s always been animals since my earliest memory.


TB: The Dutch Rabbits in the deck offer a sort of benign visual counterpoint to the mystique of the White Rabbits; they appear on 32 cards -- 33 if you count puppets! Most people are aware of the symbolism attached to rabbits, especially White ones. Does the Dutch breed have any sort of symbolic association that you're aware of, or is there a personal association that makes them meaningful to you? (Or am I over-thinking this? Are they simply cute and that's all?)

NEV: I like symmetry and balance. I also am in love with the Dutch Rabbit breed -- so elegant in black and white! I alternated the White and Dutch on the Minor Arcana to make it more interesting as I was working. Now the more I read using the Rabbit Tarot deck, the more the Dutch and Whites seem to group themselves in different ways and to give new insights. Sometimes they group together in opposition, and sometimes they balance each other out. It’s an unexpected element that I didn’t anticipate when I was painting the images. Creating my art is like Tarot reading, it’s is a very intuitive process for me.

Previous Interviews On Arcanalogue...

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INTERVIEW - Sirona Knight's "Shapeshifter Tarot" Journey

I was introduced to the author and druidic High Priestess Sirona Knight via our mutual friend, Ann Bannon. In 2002, Sirona teamed up with D.J. Conway and illustrator Lisa Hunt to create the Shapeshifter Tarot, a Wicca-themed deck which she considers to be a personal gift from the Celtic deity Lugh. In this interview, Sirona describes the process of receiving the deck, and elaborates on its three additional Major Arcana cards. Read the interview...


Sirona Knight: So, I told my mother about this interview. She’s friends with Ann too, she has been forever, right? And you know, Ann is very open-minded, right?


Tom Blunt: Right!

SK: Well, my mother, she’s okay with gay and lesbian, but she’s not okay with Wicca. [Laughs] It’s like “Mom, come on!” She’d rather have me write about something else. But sometimes you just have to kind of be kind to Mom and understand where she’s coming from, and just feed her more of the things she wants to hear instead of what you’re really doing. It works out better. At least in my life it has!


TB: Mothers have all of these hopes for us, and reality can be... inconvenient.

SK: That’s true. That’s true. People pin all these aspirations and dreams on you, especially your parents, right? And if you don’t follow that course, they get very fearful and upset, and their expectation is kind of dashed on the rocks. But one thing that you have to do, and I’ve had to do it with my mom, is just kind of show her that things work out pretty well. I love her and she loves me, and we just have to kind of work with it. And she gets a lot of the things that she values, like my friendship and my companionship -- and her grandson, you know -- but at the same time she doesn’t really want to tell her parents that, you know, I’m an author. In fact, I told her that Ann had basically introduced you and I, and that you were an artist and a writer, and that when you talked to Ann you were very excited that she knew Sirona Knight! And she just got totally cold on the phone. So you know, Mom -- that's actually that’s a good thing, right?


TB: Yeah, I go through that a lot, because everyone in my family was sort of excited that I wanted to be a writer growing up, but one of the first things I started doing was writing for theater and that was something they couldn’t really relate to at all. Like, “Oh, well, that’s… something.” They didn’t even know exactly what that meant, or how to be supportive for that.

SK: Because it didn’t fit into a niche… And they were worried you wouldn’t make enough money and all that stuff.


TB: Exactly. And now that I’m writing about Tarot it’s so funny, because it’s just yet another category that they just don’t even know how to have enthusiasm for.

SK: Oh that’s so funny, I’ve got my cards in front of me. I always do this when I talk to people. I just shuffle them all up blindly, you know, face down. And then I halve the deck, and guess what card came up? The Mother.


TB: Oh, really?

SK: I’m not kidding you, really! I love it when that happens. It’s like, “Thank you, cards!” So the cards are following the conversation. I love that.


TB: I always love that -- there are so many readings where the cards come up and they might as well be written in Chinese and seem completely unfamiliar no matter how well you know them. Or like, every now and then there’s a reading that is just so incredibly difficult for whatever reason. It’s always such a huge relief when there’s something central that you immediately know.

SK: I mean I shuffled these all up and I was being good, I wasn’t looking and I cut them and now I’m like… “Okay.” I love it when it does that. This is a really special deck, maybe because it really has my heart and soul in it. The way it came about was in August -- the first week of August is Lughnasadh, in honor of the god Lugh who is like the master of all gods. He knows how to do everything. He’s a good god to have on your side, and I’ve had a really strong rapport with him. He always gives me a gift the first week of August. Always. It’s always something really special. I can’t really ever identify what it’s going to be, it just suddenly comes up, and I love it -- it’s like Christmas in the middle of summer! And it’s not always necessarily material things, although sometimes it is. One year it was land. You know, he showed me a piece of land that was incredibly cheap and we ended up buying it and living on it. And while I was looking at it there was a hundred dollar bill on the ground. You know, that kind of thing.

So that one year that I just got the deck, I just sat and I did a deep merge -- I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, but it’s where you just merge with everything and nothing at the same time and you become everything and you become nothing and then you become more than nothing and everything. So you check in or sort of tap in to the cosmic consciousness. You know, there really is a cosmic consciousness.


TB: Yes.

SK: I decided, “Well, I’m just gonna do that.” And I started one evening. I think it was August 4th. So the eve of the great day, of the strongest power, the highest power. I just sat there just said, “Okay, Lugh, I need an idea. I really want to do a Tarot deck. I need an idea.” I’d always wanted to do a Tarot deck, because I’d been reading the Tarot since I was like sixteen and I was just totally into it. It was a good divination tool for me, it was often very accurate. So I liked that, but I always wanted to do my own deck because I always thought the Rider-Waite deck was… Eh. [Laughs] It has a lot of cards in there that didn’t work for me, like the Devil and stuff like that.

So I just merged really, really deeply and I got this idea for the Shapeshifter Tarot, half animal, half human. Because I always felt that people kind of demonstrated their animal natures. I was always very interested in shamanism, especially living on ten acres with my dogs and all the different types of animals here, from mountain lions to bears to foxes to raccoons to squirrels.

I was sitting at the desktop, and it was an old clunker desktop, because this was like ten years ago. And what happened was I started going through the Rider-Waite deck, one card at a time in order, and [Lugh] gave me images of what the Shapeshifter deck would be. And it was like I got these complete, whole images, all the way down to how many acorns should be in the tree, what kind of tree it should be, what animals should be on the card, what the people should be wearing, what colors they should be wearing, the poses, the looks on their faces. I mean I’ve never really had an experience quite that all-encompassing and overwhelming at the same time. It was like somebody was lecturing me and I was just taking notes. So I wrote this all down on the computer -- I stayed up for forty-eight hours just writing this down and getting it right. And then after I got it all down, I went through all of my reference books and made sure I had all the pieces right, made sure that the tree or the plant or the color matched what I was trying to do.

[Click to view the entire Shapeshifter Tarot deck.]

TB: Were there a lot of surprises there for you, as far as symbols you’d picked up on?

SK: It was amazing how much it was correct. You know, like the tree or the plant would be correct, or the color would be correct, or the animal would be correct as far as what I was trying to convey in the card. The correlations and the connections were just amazing. It seemed like it was mostly all correct. So it was easy to do in that respect, because I didn’t have to do a lot on my own. It was mostly just listening. And I know that people say, “Well that was inside of yourself.” Well, maybe so, but at the same time I was definitely connecting with something that was outside of myself. So it was kind of both, because you kind of filter it through your own mind, body, whatever. You have your own filters that you’ve accumulated through the years.

When I was merging and going through the experience, I tried to kind of put the human out of the way. You know, kind of step aside and let someone else dictate to me or give me that information instead of trying to grab it and grasp things in my own mind. I was trying to kind of just let that all come in. And then I had an artist that I’d worked with on a couple of other books. She had that amazing ability to draw and paint really quickly. So I sent her the big pages, the sheets of paper that I had for each card, because each card had like a full sheet of paper that had all the descriptions. And then she went through the sheets of paper just drawing, you know pencil drawings for each one of them, and then I made corrections of things I liked and didn’t like, or things that I wanted to add. And then we brought (author) D.J. Conway into the deal. We did that because D.J. was a friend... and I knew that if we both did it together, [Llewellyn] wouldn’t be able to say no.


TB: Right.

SK: [Laughs] It was strategic. But it worked out really well, because she’s older and wiser so she had a different stance on some of the cards. She has the Moon and I have the Sun. We didn’t change each other’s work at all -- what she wrote, she wrote and what I wrote, I wrote.


TB: So at least you know you got to say your piece and you got to say what you discovered and what you found.

SK: Oh yeah, yeah, I think it worked out really well. I’ve had a few people say, “Well you must hate men because that Death card looks like it.” And I say, “No, I’ve actually been married for a long time. I really like men!”


TB: I’ve seen all of the cards but I haven’t read the book. I’ll have to check it out…

SK: Well that’s what I like about this deck, is that you don’t have to have the book. Because I always hated having to drag the book out right away. And I wanted to make a deck that was so easy to use that you didn’t need a book, that you could just look at the cards and know what they meant. And that way you wouldn’t have to always be sort of burdened by the book. I think we succeeded in doing that, because a lot of people tell me that they just use the cards and they don’t necessarily look at the book at all. Though the book does have a lot of information, because we use a lot of the Celtic mythology.


TB: Yeah, the book is a great opportunity, but I have to say that some of my favorite cards in this deck are the ones that are normally a little obscure for people. For example the Justice card, which I think you have in here as "Nature", is that right?

SK: Right.


TB: And looking at it, it’s very clear. It definitely gives you an impression of the card that’s accurate in a classical sense but it’s also very instinctive -- anyone can understand it.

SK: Traditional Tarot people sometimes get pissed off at me because I made it eighty-one cards. “How dare you do that?” I did that because Lugh told me to do that, and also there’s and old myth in the Celtic tradition that there were eighty-one knights that got together a thousand years ago and said that they’d bring the light back to the dark world. So I used eighty-one. So yes, it’s interesting. And well, you know what Llewellyn wanted to do with the Major Arcana cards? They wanted to put the traditional names on them.


TB: Oh really?

SK: We only wanted the Air element, we didn’t want “Wands” put on there, okay? We just wanted the "Air element". We wanted it to just be the four elements basically. And the major arcana means Spirit, the fifth element, so the divine quintessence basically. And they tried to put the traditional names in addition to our names on the Major Arcana and D.J. and I just said nope. We said if you do that, we don’t want to publish this. That’s the only thing we really put our foot down on, and they backed off. Neither her nor I were going to have “The Devil” put on any card, because in our tradition there is no devil.


TB: Let’s go back a little bit to the extra cards, because I think even from a classical sense it doesn’t matter how many of the Major Arcana cards there are -- the main point is that each one sort of “trumps” the one that came before it.

SK: Right, and that’s what I wanted to do with the ones that I added. I wanted them to kind of extend it a bit.


TB: So tell me a little about these extra cards. We have, “The Double”, “The Journey”, and “The Dreamer” preceding the final card, “Oneness” (which is analogous to the World card in your deck). I think that’s a really fascinating place for extra cards to come in, because if you look at the sequence of the twenty-two cards there, towards the end you have the Last Judgement and the World. I think it’s a big leap between these two cards, because they contain such big cosmic ideas to wrestle with. Taking the time to elaborate there and create more food for thought strikes me as a wonderful idea, and I’d like to hear about them.

SK: Well, the Double represents an experience that you have in shamanism. You know this deck is also very shamanistic, it’s not just Celtic -- both D.J. and I have a huge interest in shamanism and had studied it for quite a while. And that’s pretty much where I came from when I got into the whole paganism and Wicca thing.

The Double is about the idea -- which is also my feeling and my experience -- that we’re living many lives at once. There are many streams. We have the ability to check into those lifetimes if we merge deeply enough. And the Double in our tradition is the ability to “double out”. In other words, to purposely try to tap into those other streams of existence that we’re living simultaneously. And that’s the same principle that “insouling” is based on. Do you know anything about insouling?


TB: No.

SK: Insouling is the ability to move from your consciousness into another person’s consciousness. It’s very possible that’s what remote viewers do. It’s an exercise that remote viewers practice. And the Double is the way for you to actually put your mind into another consciousness or to find another part of yourself. The theory being that if you are able to tap into enough of these streams of consciousness, and enough of yourself, that you’ll become a fuller, more developed person in this consciousness.


TB: I can see that as being an experience that might be really important in leading up toward the Oneness card…

SK: Exactly, because then you see how it’s connected through the streams of consciousness. It makes that much more apparent in your own self. And basically the Double is very much the idea of shape-shifting -- only using consciousness, not necessarily using an animal being or nature. It’s astral travelling from multi-dimensional awareness, so suddenly what happens when you start tapping into these streams of consciousness is your life becomes a lot more synchronistic. You start thinking things, and then they happen. Life almost becomes predictable on that level, which is nice in some ways and is sort of a hindrance in others, because a little bit of the spontaneity goes out. But at the same time, it gives you sort of a leg up, a clue as to what may occur, or what is probable that will occur. As for “doubling out” -- that’s what it’s called in the tradition -- it’s an exercise that you can practice and get very good at. It’s not necessarily something you continue doing. Some people use it for harm. You can double out into someone’s dream and you can screw with their dreams. Not everyone in the tradition is a wonderful person. You know, it takes all kinds, as they say. Still, there are ways you can protect yourself from that happening, and that’s part of learning to double out: learning to protect yourself. And it’s important, I can’t stress enough to people, it’s extremely important to protect yourself, because there’s a lot of ambient energy out there. It’s been collecting for thousands and thousands of years. When you start tapping into some of that stuff it can get a little scary, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t have any guidance. You don’t know who else is on the trolley-car. You really don’t. It’s important that you keep that in mind.


TB: And now The Journey, card twenty-two?

SK: To me, life is a journey. And it seems to me that we’re always constantly on a journey and it’s the journey that’s important, not necessarily the end. You know, it’s not necessarily the goal, it’s not necessarily where you end up. But the goal in a sense is to experience the journey one step at a time, and to be aware of that, so that you’re not always ahead of yourself thinking in the future or sitting there wallowing in the past. And as a writer and as an artist you know that’s really, really important. Because you really have to stay in the present moment to move whatever creative work you’re doing along. You know, you can pull from the past -- obviously we all do. And you can pull from the future, because to me it’s all cyclic. I’ve done past life regressions, I’ve done future life regressions, and I’ve done other life regressions, moving into the Double. So I’ve had direct experience that it’s all cyclic. You know, this isn’t the past, this isn’t the future, it’s all happening at once. What you’re tapping into is the consciousness of this time, it’s where you are right now. You’re here instead of over there. You know if you’re over there then you’re not necessarily here, but you can learn to be here and there at the same time with the Double.

The journey is very important. A lot of people just forget that they’re on a journey. And it becomes too goal oriented. Which is good, I mean we all need goals -- goals move us along. At the same time, sometimes that overshadows what’s really happening and what’s really going on. And you miss what’s important. You miss the, um…


TB: …The journey?

SK: Yeah, you miss the experience, you miss that which changes you and moves you along on your journey. Sorry… I’m just playing with the cards here. I do that as we talk.


TB: That’s fine. And the Dreamer?

SK: I’ve always been a vivid dreamer. A lucid dreamer. I’ve always been, ever since I was a little girl. I used to stay in my dreams. I used to not want to wake up in the morning because I’d just want the dream! I would continue my dreams the next day, the next night, whatever. So to me dreaming was always a way to tap into information, and pretty much anybody I’ve ever worked with has become a lucid dreamer -- it’s something that’s not that difficult to do. It’s just technique and it’s just a way of remembering things. Another way of remembering, another way of wiring your consciousness and your memory. And for me, dreams have always been extremely useful and extremely valuable in the sense that I’ve gotten a lot of information from them. I’ve gotten ideas for books from my dreams. I’ve actually had dreams of things that happened the next day, or the next week. To me dreams were always extremely important. The dream world is a part of that Oneness. It’s part of the Double, it’s part of the Journey. It’s that whole shamanic idea of, “What is dream? Are we living the dream or is the dream living us?” You know, what is it? And we spend a lot of time analyzing dreaming, so it seemed to me that that was very important to put in there. That that was perhaps something that was missing from other decks that I had used. People just really don’t put enough emphasis on that.

Sirona Knight is available for personal Tarot consultations using her Shapeshifter Tarot. You may contact her through her website.

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INTERVIEW - Robert M. Place Returns To Arcanalogue (Part 2)

Here's Part II of a special interview with Tarot author/artist Robert M. Place. The first segment focused on the history of the Tarot itself and some of its notable (or notorious) contributors, and also introduced his new annotated deck, The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery. Now Place turns our attention toward the history of divination itself, and what it can teach us about our dreams, mythology, and religions -- especially Christian fundamentalism.

TB: I’m was intrigued by something you said in the book accompanying the Vampire Tarot. You described us as “a culture that is consciously attempting to cut itself off from myth.” Does that mean we have needs that aren't being addressed?

RMP: Yeah, but they get addressed anyway. Jung said that the unconscious is always balancing the conscious. This is a natural, continuous process, mostly happening in your dreams.


TB: How exactly are dreams related to divination and mythology?

RMP: There are three categories of divination. First there’s intuitive divination, which is, essentially, dreams. The oldest and purest form of divination is when you go to sleep and have a dream. Everyone dreams -- some people don’t remember them, but everybody dreams. We dreamed even before we were human; my dog dreams, I can see him dreaming. And dreaming is getting in touch with the Higher Self. Dreams are a source of Shamanic experiences and that’s the origin of all religion. There are Native Americans in the Northwest who have no gods in the normal sense, they just have “Dream Maker.” It’s like a pure form of religion -- Dream Maker, who makes the dreams. That’s because people have always recognized that in dreams, you’re getting other information that you don’t necessarily have access to consciously, information that helps you through life. See, and that’s really the root of the word divination, which is getting in touch with the divine. That’s what it’s about -- not predicting the future, but connecting with God, or the gods, the dream maker, the intelligence of the universe, our higher intelligence, what have you.

Then there’s inductive divination. That’s basically when you’re awake but looking at the world as if it’s a dream. In a dream you see everything as a symbol -- what does it really mean? Once I dreamed I was in the shower, and somebody came into the shower with me; then the next day someone called me while I was in the shower -- the same person who was in the dream. It was predictive, but your mind sort of forces it all together using symbols. There’s that kind of symbolic thinking. If you apply this thinking to your waking life, you start looking at everything as if it’s an omen: if the gods want to talk to me every night (which they do, in my dreams), then during the day they probably still want to talk to me, right? That’s what led to astrology, because the main place people wanted to look for omens was in the stars.

The third category is interpretive divination. I can go to sleep and get a dream, I can look around and see how omens are communicating with me, but suppose there’s a question I want to answer right now -- how do I force the situation? So, I might create a random pattern that I can interpret. This form most likely began with throwing lots, which at first were natural objects such as bones or stones. When you throw lots, you have some kind of grid that you throw them on, and the grid informs you as to the meaning of the abstract pattern formed by the lots.

The grid that the Chinese used was a tortoise shell; they would actually put the tortoise shell in a fire, and let it crack. The cracks became like lots on the mandala-like oval of the shell. Interpreting those cracks led to the I Ching. Throwing lots eventually led to divination with dice, which uses number symbolism. Cards first came to Western Europe in the 1300’s; by the 1480’s, Germans were using regular four-suit decks of playing cards for divination, and that divination system was directly based on dice. After that there were other books on divination from Italy like Le Sorti, published in Venice in 1540, which just uses the suit of coins, (like the minor suit in the Tarot) and the coins are all set out like a die -- it’s very similar. So we can see that divination with cards came directly out of divination with dice and the throwing of lots.

In creating Tarot divination, you’ve basically developed this game in which you’ve actually put archetypal pictures on the items (instead of blank stones or bones with numbers or little dots). And in doing so you’ve actually come full circle, because you’ve actually created something that can give you a waking dream, and so you’re going right back to intuitive divination! That’s what’s so great about Tarot, that it pulls that whole system together, the end and the beginning. Sort of like the Fool in the Trumps -- it could be the first card or the last card, people put it at the beginning or the end depending on their tradition.


TB: In several of your books, you’ve described the powerful dreams and strange occurrences that guided you toward the Tarot, definitely a sort of mystical initiation. Have you had more of these experiences since then?

RMP: I have had dreams that told me about decks I was going to do, or strange experiences that led me to do decks. Especially the Tarot of the Saints. I was brought up as a Catholic, but the symbolism of Catholicism took me out of Catholicism into a broader place. Now I mostly go to churches to study the art and symbolism. One night, I dreamed that I came to a church that was in ruins. And just as I would if I came upon a ruined church in real life, I started looking around for cool things. You know, “Maybe there’s some artwork they missed here!” So I’m looking through the rubble and I get to the altar and I actually find some kind of corpse, and of course I decide to bring it home. I’m sort of jumping ahead here, there was so much more to it, but the crux of the dream is that I took the corpse home, brought it into my kitchen, and started to boil it down on the stove. I’d kept trying to put it in the refrigerator but it kept causing trouble in there, so I guess I thought, “Cold isn’t going to work, I’m going to have to heat it up.”


TB: This sounds like a very alchemical dream...

RMP: Yes, well your kitchen is like your alchemical lab. So I was heating it up, and it started to melt into this goo that was getting all over the place and running down the sides of the pot. Naturally, I got some in my hand and then put my hand in my mouth -- “Chocolate!” It’s like the most exquisite chocolate. And then, as I’m waking up, I realize “of course” because the Latin name for chocolate is theobromide, which means “food of the gods.” And see, the corpse was a saint, because in order to consecrate an altar in the Catholic church, you have to have a relic of a saint, and obviously the most pure relic is part of the body of a saint, or the entire corpse.


TB: Yikes! That reminds me of something else you said in the Vampire Tarot, where you compare the myth of the vampire to the Holy Communion, and how if you’re a Christian, you’re metaphorically drinking blood all the time.

RMP: Or at least eating the body -- in the Catholic church, the priest drinks the blood, then he gives you a piece of the body.


TB: Can you tell me more about this idea of our culture cutting itself off from myth?

RMP: Well, what I started to say before is that Jung claims the unconscious always strives for balance. This happens continuously in dreams, and in the symbols in myths. A lot of people don’t remember their dreams. It’s more common that people don’t remember their dreams, or don’t pay attention to them. And so they’re cutting themselves off from those messages, their personal mythology. So the mythology has to find another way to come to your consciousness, and that’s when you find your consciousness becoming controlled by the unconscious. And since most of the things we do are unconscious, this often comes in the form of infatuations or strange attractions. So we become attracted to certain stories. You hear writers start saying, “This is the story that needed to be told.”

The vampire is basically a moon god that’s a representation of the unconscious, which called an Anima if female and Animus if it was male. It takes the form of a person of the opposite sex, who is alluring, who draws you in. But the face of the unconscious is frightening to people, so the first step is that the Anima or Animus will come to you as a femme fatale or threatening figure. But you’re still attracted to them anyway -- that’s the whole essence of the vampire story.


TB: You have to invite them in…

RMP: Exactly, you have to invite it in. It’s a demon and you’re afraid of it, but somehow you’re attracted to it anyway. And then it starts evolving -- that’s what we see in all this new vampire folklore like Angel and Twilight, they become lovers, heroes, everything. They go through all the stages.


TB: You specify that we’re consciously cutting ourselves off. Why do you think we’re doing that?

RMP: It’s part of the materialistic philosophy. What happened is that in the Age of Enlightenment -- which isn’t at all like a mystical enlightenment -- we started to realize that if we were going to push ahead scientifically, we had to become very analytical. We had to start limiting what we were looking at so we could analyze it better, so we could measure it. And that gave us tremendous technological power to do things that we couldn’t do before, power which we were happy for. That became a power that took over, and now we’re on the flip-side of it.

When Bram Stoker was writing Dracula, there was no doubt who his heroes are -- they were modern men with modern devices, fighting off this ancient evil. I was just re-reading Salem’s Lot, and in the introduction to the new addition Stephen King was saying that when he was reading Dracula, he thought it was the most optimistic scary story he’d ever read. He saw himself and the rest of us on the opposite end of that optimism. The technology that they thought would cure everything back in 1890, the answer to everything. Well, now we see the downside, that it can be even more destructive. And so in King's story, the vampire is going to wipe up this New England town.


TB: So we end up giving power to mythological figures, either consciously unconsciously?

RMP: There’s this idea called an egregore -- it’s a mythical character where the more people believe in it and worship it, the more strength it gets, and eventually it takes on its own character and interact with its worshipers. All the gods are like that, and that’s what these archetypes are. The basic figures of our unconscious are there already, but we give them a certain form. And as we feed into that form, it gets more powerful. What’s happened in Christianity is that they’ve taken one egregore, and they say he’s the only one. All mystics all over the world have known that all the gods are aspects of Oneness, and Oneness is this mystical vision that we search for. With the exception of enlightened Christian mystics such as St. Francis, Christianity basically took an egregore and said it was the One, disregarding the mystical vision. And it’s not true!


TB: Occultists have written about a demon called Choronzon, an entity that supposedly tricks seekers by masquerading as their guardian angel or Higher Self, giving them a false, destructive view of things. Could this be the same sort of idea?

RMP: No, that kind of stuff bothers me. I was on this public radio show in California a few weeks ago, Mystic Musings with Eric. First he had me tell that whole story, about how I had that dream and how the Tarot came to me as an inheritance, and then he took some phone calls. So we got a call from this guy who says, “Where in the Bible does it say that the Tarot is Christian?”

What that does is take the Bible and make it non-mythological. Basically, fundamentalism treats the Bible like a scientific text or law book or something. Nobody in the past would have even thought of doing that. It’s a totally modern thing that began in the 1700’s -- people had begun thinking more scientifically, so then they started applying that to the Bible. Because he’s not understanding the Bible as mythology, he’s not understanding mythology at all.

He got off of the air, and then I talked about the World card and how it’s a symbol of the four evangelists, and how the woman in the center is really based on an image of Christ as he appears in Revelation. So then the same guy called back and said, “So you’re saying that the Tarot cards are related to Revelation? You’re saying they’re Christian?” And I said, “No, they’re a product of the Christian culture in the 1400’s, and the people who made them were using Christian images and iconography.” And of course he returned to, “But where in the Bible does it say…”

To say he's rejecting Christian myth is not enough -- he’s rejecting Christian history. The only way for him to consider these things is to be able to say them like some lawyer, to be able to say “The Tarot is Christian!” This is the essence of what we were saying about Crowley, or about not being able to trust the angel. If I had a vision from a dream, he didn’t trust it -- he wants it to come through the Bible, or he doesn’t trust it. He had cut himself off from direct communication with the divine (divination), replaced it with a book and with his ego, and called that God.


TB: Even if it came to him in a dream, he wouldn’t trust it, because it’s not coming through the Bible.

RMP: And that kind of thinking is what the Bible itself tells you not to do -- it’s actually a form of idolatry, called bibliolatry.


TB: People do exactly the same thing with science -- if an idea doesn’t come to them through science, then they refuse to entertain it.

RMP: Yes, so that shows how fundamentalism is a scientific attitude that’s been applied to the Bible. What they’re ultimately doing is mistrusting the message. All religion starts with dreams -- that’s anthropological. And dreams are our connection to that part of ourselves -- if it’s your dream, then it’s your connection to your Higher Self. And if we dishonor the Self, and call it fake or call it the false guardian angel… I mean, yeah there’s going to be scary stuff in there, stuff that’s hard to deal with, but you’ve been given it to deal with.

In the ancient world, Hermes -- who I always think of as my guide -- was the dream maker. That was one of his titles, the bringer of dreams. One of other titles was angelus, which was like “messenger,” which is where the word angel comes from. So it doesn’t matter whether you say an angel brought you the dream, or Hermes brought you the dream, or God Himself brought the dream. It doesn’t matter! Those are all ways to give solidity to this truth. The trick is to get beyond the words to what this experience actually is. What’s happening with people is they’re letting the words stop them, letting them get in the way of the experience. The myth is supposed to be there for us to interpret -- it’s open ended, it’s creative, it’s artistic. And that’s how we use the Tarot: we’re creating a personal mythology, a myth. When you have a theme like the Buddha Tarot or the Vampire Tarot, you can look at the myth or the story that you see there and relate it to your own life.

Illustration from The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery © Robert M. Place

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INTERVIEW - Robert M. Place Returns To Arcanalogue (Part I)

When I last spoke to Tarot author/artist Robert M. Place, his new Vampire Tarot ensured that bloodsucking fiends would be the subject du jour. Now his unusual Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery has also become available, giving me an excuse to pester him at length about divination, dreams, mythology, and the surprising history of the Tarot. Here's Part I of a special two-part interview. You may never look at the cards the same way again...

TB: Your Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery is being presented in an unusual annotated format -- a sort of portfolio including “the Fool and Trumps with annotations,a title card, three cards containing introductory text, a glossary of unusual terms, and a card with a chart of the seven ancient planets and their correspondences to soul centers, virtues and vices and other references." It's a total of 28 oversized cards. How did the project take on this form?

RMP: It came to me intuitively when I was finishing the Trumps for the Sevenfold Mystery. I was planning to have prints in the show that I’m curating at the LA Craft and Folk Art Museum in January, and then I was looking at a book called Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte, who’s a professor at Yale who teaches a course showing how people can present information with a combination of words and pictures in a way that is both informative and aesthetically pleasing. I was especially intrigued with the examples that he included from the Renaissance -- in the Renaissance, there was no separation between science and art. If you look at Galileo’s scientific notes and drawings and how he presents things, they can be included in books on art, and many different scientific books from the period are beautiful illuminated manuscripts. Also, if you look at William Blake, all his poems were supposed to be artwork; he did these engravings, and the engravings were the poems, words and pictures all together. And then it just dawned on me that that’s my talent, being a writer and illustrator.

So I did it, and by putting it all together, each card teaches you all about the Tarot: what its history is, what its philosophy is, what the symbols mean. What’s written on each card isn’t about divination, instead it’s sort of the formula for divination -- it’s not a divinatory meaning, it teaches about the card itself.


TB: That sounds like a tool for personal study -- unusual considering that divination is generally regarded as a sort of slot machine that's just supposed to spit out answers to your questions.

RMP: Most people’s view of the cards relates to fortunetelling, that they’re going to tell your future. But most of the people who are really serious about Tarot look at it as a spiritual tool. I go to the Reader’s Studio every Spring, and it’s all professional readers from across the world... and they definitely look at divination as something more. I often tell my students that I don’t want them to use the cards for predicting the future, but some people who are very adept readers tell me that predicting is what it’s all about. But the way they interpret “predicting” isn’t that different from what I’m doing. Because we don’t have to “predict”, but we can certainly forecast where things are headed. In a reading, we’re really talking about the present. If you have a car facing north and you start it up, it’s going to go north. It doesn’t have to keep going north -- you could turn it around, you could go left, right, wherever. I call this a forecast instead. To me, a prediction is something carved in stone that cannot change, but a forecast is just how the future looks from the present, and it does not have to manifest.

TB: Do you ever consult the cards about themselves, such as when you’re looking for guidance while working on a deck?

RMP: Sometimes, but rarely.


TB: I’ve been doing that a bit myself. In some ways it’s given me great advice but in other ways I think it’s led me down a rabbit hole and made me very superstitious about the work I’m doing.

RMP: I’m trying to get away from superstition. People are already superstitious enough about the Tarot -- all these things like, “You shouldn’t buy your first deck, it must be given to you,” or “My deck has to be covered with black silk.” And of course, “Don’t ever read for yourself, always have someone else read for you.” I break all these rules.


TB: Do you think that the I Ching and the Tarot, as different as they are, perform the same basic function when it comes to divination?

RMP: One of the things that’s clear about the I Ching is that it’s a philosophical book, it’s one of the classic Chinese philosophical texts. So it definitely gives you a sort of a reference, because if you’re using it, you’re learning philosophy, reading statements from the Higher Self or examples of the kinds of things the Higher Self says. And when you’re reading the Tarot, you can think about the things the I Ching says and see how they’re similar, because it’s all divination, it’s all a conversation with the divine.

In the fifth suit, the Trumps, the Renaissance designers put a philosophical allegory in the cards that is essentially a mystical philosophy, just like those commentators that commented on the I Ching did -- attributed to Confucius and others, though who knows who they really were. The presence of those commentators is something like the occultists picking up the Tarot and saying it came from Ancient Egypt. Obviously, it doesn’t come from ancient Egypt, it comes from the early 1400’s in Renaissance Italy, but the ideas in it come from Neoplatonic and Pythagorean philosophies of the ancient world, which, yes, were influenced by Egyptian philosophy -- Pythagorus studied in ancient Egypt, for example. So the statement has some truth in it, it does “go back" to ancient Egypt, but it’s filtered through all those other cultures over time.


TB: I’m sure people come to your classes and workshops with all sorts of preconceptions like that.

RMP: When I lecture, I first ask, “What have you heard about the Tarot, where do you think it comes from?” At first people are too uncomfortable to answer, and then someone will usually say, “Well I’ve heard it comes from ancient Egypt, but I know that’s probably not true.” Nowadays they don’t even want to say that, because they know it’s going to be bullshit. But you can still find books out there, in regular bookstores and New Age bookstores, that still say it comes from ancient Egypt!


TB: The first book on the Tarot I ever bought was Arthur Edward Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which you frequently refer back to in your book Tarot: History, Divination, and Symbolism.

RMP: If you really read Waite, he’s pretty accurate! In fact, of all the occultists, he’s the most accurate. Obviously we have access to more historical information now, and we have more scholars working on this than he had. But considering where he was at the time, he used what he had and he was accurate. He said there was no Tarot before the 1400’s, and he said all these occultists are making their stuff up, which was right on.


TB: You’re right -- I found it hopelessly impractical and unhelpful when I was sixteen, but I went back and re-read it after reading your book and I was amazed at how rich a resource it really is for more advanced readers.

RMP: Well, he’s this horrible Victorian writer. If he can say something in six words, he’ll say it in thirty -- that makes it sound intelligent to him. He’s not even English, he was born in Brooklyn! And if you read his memoirs, he says stuff about Pamela Coleman-Smith (who was born in England) like, “And there was this talented artist who came to our group, but she needed lots of direction because we didn’t want her going off on her tangents.” He treated her as if he had to spoon-feed her all the information, like she was some kind of idiot-savant. Yet she’s the one who made the deck, made it what it is! It always gets me when people are looking at the cards going, “What did Waite mean by this?” Waite didn’t mean anything by it, he didn’t put it there -- Coleman-Smith did. Waite didn’t even necessarily know it was there. If you read the book, sometimes when he describes the pictures he misinterprets them. Like the guy leaning on a hoe, he describes it as a stick, he doesn’t even know it’s a hoe. Or the Ace of Cups -- he’s saying there are four streams pouring out of it, and there are five. He’s miscounted it because he wants it to be something else. When he’s describing the Devil card, he says that there’s the sign of Mercury at the groin but it’s not there. He’s describing something that’s in Levi’s drawing, Baphomet, not in Coleman-Smith’s actual card. He’s seeing it and it’s not there.


TB: I’m really interested in how deck creators determine the meanings for their Minor Arcana cards. How do you arrive at yours?

RMP: In my reader reviews, that’s the number one issue they take with me, is that I’m so sketchy on the pips, the Minor cards. But it’s only because I’m basing it on the traditional cards. Most of the things that people say about the pip cards are just made up, so I’m trying to go back.

All we have to work with in the pip cards are those four suits and what they symbolize, and they were originally always associated with the four classes of society, or the four elements. I taught a whole class about that, showing how they’re divided into masculine/feminine, like the elements, and how the four elements were also related to the four humors, which give you four personality types. Those make up most of the early divinatory meanings that we know of. Regular cards with four suits were used for divination maybe even before the tarot, so it’s more likely that all cards were used for divination, and that those four suits had meanings for people, and those meanings were very much related to the four humors, the four elements, and the four classes.

And then what do you have? Numbers from ace to ten, which is an archetypal set: Pythagorean number symbolism is based on a set from one to ten. And even the names -- like ace and deuce -- those are dice terms, so there is dice symbolism connected to the numbers as well. So the numbers all have their own meanings that come out of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, though different traditions have slightly different interpretations. Sometimes even those who believe that they are in the Pythagorean tradition are saying opposite things. If you take the number symbolism and combine it with the suit symbolism, that’s how you figure it out. It’s not that hard.

TB: It’s not that hard, but it can be very difficult to explain to people why certain cards mean certain things, because they’re not used to considering things like number symbolism. And if all of someone’s knowledge about Tarot comes from the movies, they may not be that interested in seeing the cards demystified.

RMP: Speaking of that, the Alchemical Tarot is going to be in Monk, in the season coming up. I don’t know which episode, but his assistant goes to a tarot reader and she’s using my cards. And the Vampire Tarot was in Moonlight, and on Animal Planet they’re going to have a special about vampires that’s going to use a lot of the cards.


TB: Do you know how they came across your deck?

RMP: Yeah, Google. (Laughs)


TB: In your book accompanying the Vampire Tarot, you recalled the Comte De Mellet’s interpretation of the Trumps from back to front, which tells the story of mankind’s creation:

“The first group, starting… with the World card and working backwards, illustrated the creation of the world and the golden age. The Judgment card he interpreted as the creation of man and woman, with the people on the card arising from the earth instead of the grave. This was followed by cards depicting the creation of the sun, with the union of man and woman on the lower half; the moon, also showing the creation of animals; and the stars, showing the creation of sea life on the bottom. The Tower depicts the fall of man, and the Devil leads us out of this golden age. The second age, the age of silver, dominated by images of time, fate, and death, was the stage when death and suffering were introduced, but it also contains the cardinal virtues. In the iron age, the chariot of war leads, followed by sexual desire, the temporal rulers … as we continue, we descend to the present fallen state of man represented by the Fool.”

This interpretation is so simple and logical, and would be interesting to apply to readings -- why has it been so overlooked? You don’t even have to know that much about the Tarot to understand it.

RMP: It’s like what you said about Waite’s book -- if that’s the first book you get, then it seems way out there, even though it’s actually one of the most accurate books. So you start reading more things, and authors have had to come up with new things to say so they can compete with each other, and you get a confusion of information and you wind up sort of overlooking what was there in the first place. With the Comte De Mellet, the stuff he said didn’t have much historical basis, but intuitively he hooked into the symbolism.

It’s the same thing with Etteilla , the French occultist who made the first occult deck. He totally reinterpreted the deck, and tried to include all sorts of things like the claims about ancient Egypt. But his interpretation of the cards is connected to an Italian tradition from the Piedmont, the area of northern Italy near France. And his interpretations for the pip cards is based in some kind of tradition that goes back into Italian divination with the cards -- we don’t even know how far back it goes. And his interpretations are being added to and modified and disagreed with. When you look at Waite’s writing, he poo-poos Etteilla, but then all of his own interpretations go back to him, so he’s actually really relying heavily on him. And they all are relying heavily on him -- they’re sort of embarrassed by it, but he’s the only one connected to some kind of tradition and passing it on to them. Historians have been looking into Etteilla more thoroughly now, because here was the first occultist to create a modern occult Tarot and he actually did a fairly good job, at least as good as the others -- he made stuff up, but he actually connected to something and you can learn some things from him. Whereas the later occultists tried to top him and come up with even bigger lies, which they hoped were more convincing.

Crowley’s the worst; a lot of people think it’s so liberating that he turned the Strength Card into Lust. But, it isn’t! A lot of my work has involved looking back through the whole tradition of the Virtues; this is basically our Western yoga. What Crowley did was perverse -- he took a vice, and he made it a virtue. People get confused about virtue, they think it’s all just that stuff they were taught in catechism that tells you “don’t do this, don’t do that.” That’s not what virtue is. A virtue is a way to balance out certain parts of your soul and bring it into harmony and balance. So a vice isn’t evil, it’s just an imbalance or sickness. And that’s what Crowley’s whole life was about -- imbalance. If you “embrace” a vice, you’re just embracing a sickness and you’re going to make yourself miserable.

Illustration from The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery © Robert M. Place

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