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