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