a conversation with paul nagy

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: What do you want from the tarot? Has this changed from 1977, when you discovered it?

PAUL NAGY: Well, I did not exactly discover Tarot in 1977, it was just then that I set time aside to formally study the system. Unfortunately this was for me pre-Rachel Pollack, 78-Degrees of Wisdom, so with a trusty RWS deck in hand, I studied A. E. Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) Papus’ Tarot of the Bohemians, Eliphas Levi’s Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, P. D. Ouspensky’s The Symbolism of the Tarot, Mouni Sadhu’s The Tarot – A Contemporary Course on the Quintessence of Hermetic Occultism, (1962) Paul Foster Case’s The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages (1947),  Mayanananda’s  Tarot for Today (1963). This is not a list I would suggest to anyone to learn tarot today!

The net result of this study was a feeling of disappointment. Tarot seemed arbitrary and falsely constructed, especially in the cabbala and tree of life analogs. The card meanings generally seemed contrived and capricious.

With such an inauspicious beginning, it is amazing I stuck with tarot at all. At the same time I had plenty of success reading for friends and strangers, and I wondered how my intuition was interacting with these symbols to create plausible insight for others and myself?

I discovered tarot as a young teenager during the time I furtively haunted Fritzi Armstrong’s quaint second story bookshop on Powell Street in downtown San Francisco. The Metaphysical Towne-Hall Book Shop was furnished like a Victorian pallor. Cluttered with books of the popularly arcane, a shrill and cranky Fritzi or her ubiquitous assistant,  a chunky middle-aged waif, Mickey, would, in short bursts, tolerate my sneaky browsing in various corners, discovering books on yoga, astral projection, spiritualism, crystal-scrying, UFOs and yes, tarot. Here I met RWS, though I have no particular memory of their hold on my attention.  Here I had my first chance to hear a Hindu Swami tell us how to contract and relax rhythmically the sphincter muscles to stimulate the rise of Kundalini.  My curiosity far out stripped any coin I might have been able to proffer. My purchases were carefully considered. The cards were not among them, though I did have uncanny success with an Ouija board.

About a decade later, I attended sporadically Jason Lotterhand’s Thursday night class hosted by Fritzi for years before it moved to Fort Mason in the Marina district. At the time I was not receptive to Lotterhand’s iconic reverence for the archetypes, so I never quite appreciated his dedication to the BOTA variant of tarot. Some of his students were careful to collect the essence of these classes in the book: The Thursday Night Tarot (1989). I read it a few years back and would now give a careful nod to it as a useful approach to tarot. Also a student continues his class (“http://www.thursdaynighttarot.com“http://www.thursdaynighttarot.com) in San Francisco.  At the time I dropped in on Lotterhand’s classes, I was obsessed with a variety approaches to samadhi , non-dual enstatic trances. Working directly with consciousness like that made his orientation to cards seem too tame, awkwardly mediated and moralistic. So this is a summary of my misperceptions at the time and not what Jason was really about.

It’s hard to say what I wanted from tarot in 1977. Probably curiosity about how the oracle worked.  I emphasize how because I was pretty convinced why it worked: Reality is a seamless whole without a second, so that all parts reflect that whole at all times if we but pay attention. If we only pay attention to parts, we have little sense of the whole and meaning may well seem piecemeal and escape us. If, by quieting the mind of distractions and becoming acutely aware of awareness as it is for itself and not as it seems as a servant for our whims and senses, the true simple wholeness of everything shines forth like a radiant jewel. Tarot cards are like business cards to transcendence. Tarot is an invitation to divine reality.

Coming to the realization that I still needed to understand first-hand aspects of esoteric philosophy to come to appreciate how tarot works, I continued to explore esoteric initiatory and contemplative cults mostly of non-Christian and eastern provenance through the 1970s and 80s.

Another way of approach to this question of long-range perspective on what I want from tarot is comparing my first and second Saturn return. 1978 was my first Saturn return and represented my full blooming of adult interests. By that time I was reasonably well-educated (if not degreed) in cultural anthropology as a research paradigm. I had had preliminary training in classical raja yoga, and a close initiatory training in a shamanic style Sino-Mongolian tantric Buddhism. I was reasonably well read in mystical literatures eastern and western and was pretty sure that I was at root a simple mystic who just happen to like to think! (Thinking is stinking! Bliss smells sweet!) I was more keenly concerned with the new eastern religions in America and less interested in the Western style esotericisms. I had been active in the local branch of the Theosophical Society as leader and librarian and was a mystic without religion or the necessity of God and with a drive to learn and understand. This orientation was a self-consistent development from my young adolescence. I knew where I was going and what I was about and I was pretty much going it as my inner lights guided. Besides studying the tarot I also became initiated into Wicca that year, aspects of my initiation can be read about in Starhawks’ The Spiral Dance (1978).

One can say the first Saturn return is: Have I grown up yet?  And am I ready to take on my adult tasks? Then the second Saturn return is a looking backward at my accomplishments. I am then around 58 years old.

During the interregnum I had some advanced esoteric study (1980) of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi at the Chisholm Institute of the Beshara Foundation in the UK. This was especially gratifying as it was an unsought fellowship that confirmed some visionary experiences and inspired a lifelong gratitude for the teaching of the Sheikh al-Akbar.  I advanced the cause of Wicca by helping orient people new to Goddess worship. I facilitated quite study groups (1986-1997) of select esoteric texts, settling after some years with some esoteric Buddhist texts and Kashmir Shaivite Siva Sutras within the framework of dream work, meditation and imaginative individuation (through arts and literature, creative writing).

I also became aware that my person is counter-charismatic and people are not drawn to me. (Trust the teaching, not the teacher; trust the meaning and not the form of the teaching; trust the unmediated light of truth, and not the meaning: then discus that with the teacher.) My esoteric study companions brought in new people. Of course all these activities were without finance. No contributions were sought because what can be bought occults the essence. I avoided any ready identification with a particular religious tradition. As an esotericist I was fascinated in the naked truth nude, not her lingerie.

As my second Saturn return approached I rediscovered tarot as a possible vehicle to share key aspects of my esoteric interests. I am at the age of reaping the harvest of my life. I have lived a quiet and unconventional life: yet one remarkably consistent in a broad but single-minded pursuit of esoteric insight or salvific gnosis.

I did a quick read of Meditations on the Tarot when it first appeared in the mid-80s. I thought our anonymous author’s  superstructure of Christian Hermeticism, a doctrinaire construct, a rationale for casting a broad net  (tarot trumps) into the ocean of metaphysical self-inquiry, in other words, a conceptual autohagiography where the hermeicist (the anonymous author) is idealized as a jack-of-all-metaphysical-trades. Theosophists had something of the same conceit in the 1890s. In fact, such universalizing is much like the French savant that innovated modern occult theories of the tarot divination and its Egyptian origin.  Antoine Court de Gébelin‘s ideas about the Book of Thoth, where tarot cards encrypt symbols as keys to complete knowledge is such an universalizing vision, admittedly legendary, obviously now, not historic, perhaps impracticable, and after Godel’s theorem, indeterminately reflexive, fuels my own tarot hermeneutics project. To move in the direction of discovering how 78 cards may guide our understanding, not only of me but all and everything else too, is the unitative, universalistic vision of tarot as the keys to understanding all knowledge that I share with the Court de Gébelin.

Last year I concluded a 2 ½ year teleconference reading and discussing aloud the entire Meditations on the Tarot. It was developed in response to some tarotists who wanted to explore that rich and complex esoteric work. I have a background that could facilitate an informed reading of the text. We met weekly for about 2 hours to discuss his sense of the Major Arcana. We were mostly tarot readers attending and we noticed how his vision of Christian Hermeticism challenges some of the more pedestrian uses of tarot. Perhaps some variant of his hybrid vision of Hermeticism may seriously inform how we understand the larger scope of esoteric tarot. In my mind his servility to orthodoxy and dogma need not be a serious barrier to adaptations of the core of his views.

As an esotericist I am not generally interested in the cookbook-style, how-to informative pretense to gnosis that clutters the marketplace of tarot commodities. However, I would not ignore them entirely either, because this is where the popular center of tarot practice is. The community of tarot readers is where the future of tarot is. Any successful innovator in tarot needs to respect to a degree majority opinion. And if one wants to shift that opinion or practice, one will need to attract attention their respectfully and then offer persuasive, compelling reasons for a shift to occur.

Personally I am still in creative ferment as how to best proceed to some ideas that clarify tarot structure as prelude to card symbols, which means that I am now more promise than proof. For instance, I am perennially curious about the structure of tarot, especially the numbers and structure derivative from dice and knuckle bones gaming. John Opsopaus’ Guide to the Pythagorean Tarot (2001) briefly touches of this correlation. Jodorowsky in his recently translated The Way of the Tarot (2010) offers an additive only style of number theory that deserves close attention, because of its relative simplicity and elegance.

I believe a closer look at Platonic-Pythagorean number symbolism as archetypes still has not given forth all its secrets as relevant to tarot-structure and generative significance for tarot practice. The logic of experience and experiment as suggested by Gaston Bachelard’s studies of traditional elements offers ways to expand tarot pip associations. The four elements  as experience is still the way we poetically construct our everyday sense of the world, not matter the level of our scientific or technical training.  So the fabric of experience shows we have not much moved beyond the elementary-quaternary structure of the pips. Realizing this helps us to both recognize our habitual limits and attempt to see beyond them.

I have always held a special affection for qualitative numbers; where the qualities of numbers themselves generate mathematical operations and analog qualities of consciousness. Dai Léon’s recent work, Origins of Tarot (2009), as brilliant as it is in attempting to demonstrate a phenomenology of integral consciousness in the cards, arrogantly ignores contemporary tarot traditions of interpretation. Unfortunately this means that few have seemed willing to entertain, much less integrate his insights into the stream of contemporary tarot practice. His somewhat arbitrary historicizing of an ur-tarot, really seems unnecessary, as does his reliance on some of the conceits of perennial traditionalists, though I do plan to give him a closer reading in the near future. So these remarks are preliminary.

My instinct is that after serious nods to archetypal numerology, one must find the key to the living symbols of the tarot, not initially in the images on the cards but in the images from our dreams. If I knew serious tarot reader’s who wanted to awaken to the universal knowledge promise of tarot reading, I would begin any study of the tarot with serious and perpetual dream work. By dream work I mean a commitment to remembering and recording one’s night dreams, struggling with self and others to learn how to understand and interpret them on any and all levels and then inquiring of the tarot by random draw to comment on the dream and the process toward understanding. Such dream study is as potent as any esoteric initiation and so should not be undertaken without realizing one will in due course, change in ways unimaginably radical and fundamental to one’s self. At the same time, it will unfold at the level most suitable to one’s own self because it is the unconscious wholeness of one’s own mind and heart that is guiding the process, not some teacher or teaching.

If dream work was a more widespread discipline for tarot readers, perhaps the promiscuous collecting of decks might diminish, at least as a rational for opening-up the meaning of the cards. Even relatively standardized symbol- sets, especially pictures and images that occur on tarot cards, offer entry to the multivariate meaning genitrix of natural symbols that unlike signs are not arbitrarily delimited by connotation or denotation.

Beside archetypal-numeric-structural-oneiric -imagistic levels of influence on tarot, some knowledge of the history and culture of tarot is useful as a check on anachronic fantasists, even ones of longstanding such as correspondences with cabbala and the Hebrew alphabet. Personally I am inclined to let stand some version of these overlays as they may very well offer useful ways of evolving deeper ways of inquiring with tarot.  Since 1977 I have reconciled aspects of modern tarot innovation by taking the informed long view that tarot is an integral continuation of divination that has an unbroken pedigree to the ancient Sumerians.

It is the discriminate development of some aspects of these overlays that brings me full circle, or spiral round to what I want to do with tarot. I hope to encourage some tarot readers to use the tarot to understand the deeper meaning, or potential meanings that tarot has yet to reveal.

For me tarot is not a map to the spirit and psyche, but is rather the map’s keys.

The map is the living mind and heart of the tarot reader as well as the querent.

I hope in due course to show how there are ways these keys can be read that show more than is now suspected about the self, the world and the tarot itself.

The predominate practice of tarot these days is some form of self-enquiry, usually about the conditions or challenges of adapting to lifespan stages of development and self understanding, unexpected or habitual behavior. This therapeutic model of recognizing that a random draw of cards may very well reframe how we see or do not see the situations before us, is a powerful tool and offers no end to fascination for many. Still as pervasive as this style of practice and use of tarot is I want to suggest to the community of tarot readers that they should set some time aside to explore the living mystery of the tarot in other ways.

True, aspects of that mystery occur potentially in every reading situation, but we owe it to ourselves as readers to the unleashed latent significance of the oracle, to make time to read the cards in ways not dictated by the whims of our querents.

In this preliminary formulation, I suggest whatever you happen to be studying, bring the tarot to it to comment. However once you have your cards and a preliminary interpretation of how they might apply. Seriously consider both sides of the inquiry. How does the appearance of this card alter my appreciation of this subject? Write it down. Next how does this card’s association with this subject affect my understanding of this card and its symbolism? Again write it down.  Keep a log.

The future of tarot meanings as a universal key to all knowledge will be revealed in the community of tarot readers to the degree we reflect upon and share with one another our variant experiences of card meanings, repetitive patterns of cards with diverse subjects and stories, and literary texts, works of art, historic moments.

Like all natural symbol systems, tarot significance, not just card meanings, is reflexive. It carries within itself an indistinct redundancy to reproduce itself in any and all contexts, however, the context, not the reflexivity, shapes the mirroring of significance. Some names for classic repetitive styles of this transformative mirroring are image, sign, representation, mark, icon, pictogram, emblem, badge, logo, indication, character, description, metaphor, analogy, allegory, figure, simile, comparison, parable, genre, story, fable, tale, substitution, transformation and symbol. This list assumes no system but aspects of the mirroring are characterized by these words to narrow or broaden the focus. Metaphor, for example, represents a focus upon the similarity or difference or one thing for another. It is this thing as another thing that creates the energy of transformation that gives sense (cognitivity) to significance.  Even as it (this thing as another thing) both confuses by indentifying one thing and another thing in its image or name as itself, which is false and fictive, and simultaneously as another unlike thing or symbol which is true but falls short of the connectivity of significance. The old paradox is here recognized. If I speak I must lie to tell the truth. And if I remain silent, the truth is ever present but remains unidentified and so may not be known. Why does knowledge require falsehood to prove it? Is there a truth that is not caught in the net of our conjectures?

Linguists claim that word-meaning develops by the use of words in community to apply to variant situations and experiences. The meanings drift by application and context and may spread or narrow in significance depending upon the speaking community’s use of the word. Tarot cards are much more richly endowed with prospective significance than any words or speaking community. I hope to persuade some tarot readers to recognize aspects of this endowment; especially the reflexive nature of tarot and its images so that the open-ended, ever reaching, creativity of tarot may open more doors to a significant life lived in fuller consciousness and contextual, actually, experiential possibility.

Though my focus and emphasis are somewhat different, there is more than an family resemblance to work done by Rachel Pollack in her wisdom readings (See especially, Tarot Wisdom, and Forest of Souls); and by James Ricklef’s Tarot Tells the Tale, that touches upon themes close to my own tarot hermeneutics, especially in adapting random draws to the analysis of stories. I thank Mary K. Greer for alerting me to James’s work.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: My first reaction to your very interesting response is: could someone expect anything from the tarot outside of occultism? In a conversation with Ross Caldwell he said something that I found useful: “occultism is just one way the game is played”, which suggest, of course, there were/are other ways. What do you think? I am asking because in one of your essays you wrote something like “to asses the true importance of occultism, the whole human history would need to be rewritten” (I am paraphrasing here). Won’t be more realistic to rewrite the tarot’s history, by acknowledging the tarot’s link to occultism as part of the broader context of the tarot as a game?

There are several things you touched there and I want you to expand on, but lets start by your comment on dreams, because this is something I have also discussed with Robert M. Place. In our conversation, he hinted at that relationship between the tarot and dreams. This is also something that intrigues me, although I often fail at making my point. Every time I have tried to explain to someone that we can experience the tarot as a dream, they look at me like saying “dreams are dreams and the tarot is the tarot”. Still, from a qualitative point of view, both events seem somehow similar: we experience a scene of a more or less random nature that we read as meaningful by assigning an emotional value -meaning- to each one of its components. Often in a dream we see a character changing faces: “it was my aunt… well, it wasn’t really my aunt but I knew that it was my aunt” just as in a tarot reading we may be successively represented by several different characters. We may be The Emperor and then the Page of Coins, or even that solitary cup in the upper section of the Three of Cups. Both in a dream and in a tarot reading we experience the event as witness and participants at once. Both can, of course, elicit strong emotional responses. Both can be intriguing or useful.

The many strategies to tackle the origin of dreams we know of usually take two main forms: there are psychological explanations and there are physiological explanations. I guess it is safe to say that these psychological explanations are way more popular than the physiological ones. We really like them better! Since psychology is our contemporary branch of shamanism, it’s starting point is that dreams are meaningful in themselves: manifestations of unconscious urges, repressed content emerging into consciousness, inner wisdom breaching out, cognitive rehearsal in response to daily problems, etc. The physiology of dreaming often feels more ‘mechanical’, suggesting something we hate: a lack of agency. From the Activation Synthesis Model of dreaming suggested by Hobson and McCarley, in which dreams are mere neural firing the forebrain ‘reads’ in a meaningful way, to some research suggesting that the kind of dreams we have depend on the sleep stage we are at. In any case, the discussion about why we dream seems to mirror the discussion about why the tarot works. Both come down to some sort of match: Higher Wisdom vs. Chance. Obviously, I won’t want to spend our time together arguing the pros and cons of each ‘contender’, but I wonder: is the tarot a doorway to our dreams, or it is a crutch for the dreamless?

PAUL NAGY: I believe as you note Ross Caldwell’s comment suggests a serious revamping (truly a dissertation-in-waiting) of how we understand tarot!  Yes, it makes sense that we closely look at and evaluate tarot game practices. The historic connection is not in dispute. The unique characteristics of tarot games, their rules and the strategies implied in their play should be explored. Probabilistic scales should be worked out for the various ways one scores the game and the relative odds for winning hands. Most of the tarot games I know and play a hand is pretty much won or lost during the bidding phase of the game. The actual playing out of the hand merely confirms the skill of the bids.

(It is odd that there are no divination tarot studies I know of, to have explored the scales of randomness for the deck. For instance, what are the odds that one is to pull a major arcana card in a five-card spread?  [if my math is right 22/78 = 0.28* for an initial selection, changing slightly with each additional selection and its outcome, to 5/78 = 0.064* comes to about 1, if one draws none it is against odds, if you draw 1 with-in odds, if you draw 2, somewhat against odds, 3 and above quite unusual.] After all with only 78 cards our random field of possibility is quite small and worthy of exposition. Any mathematicians wanting to help an innumerate tarotist get his odds tables right?)

Since the historical structure and images of the deck were developed as a gaming pass-time and that the use of tarot in divination is a relatively recent innovation, it seems obvious we should explore closely the nature of tarot games.  Likewise we should open up to questions of gaming and gambling in general as a contiguous behavior to divining. Both deal with small random fields. Both deal with the mystery of change and stretching to control or know the outcome of change. Time calculated as small increments of randomness. Gaming is set up as a win/lose situation.  Divining is a matter of nuance and fine distinctions of outcome. Both can be understood as a bet on the unknown and unknowable future. Yes there is much to notice in these yet perhaps underexplored relationships between gaming in general and the relations of games to divination. If we recognize the game qualities of tarot it may bring up the shadow-side of gaming, gambling-addictions, issue avoidances that obsessive play may generate in practitioners. I also suspect that much thought has already gone into this academically but has not been as yet tied into tarot divination practice.

When I wrote how a true history of the occult would completely rework and revalue the connections of our cultural histories. I had some work in mind. My acceptance of tarot as it is a community of readers today does not make me think that game theory is the overriding arch into which to next occult tarot practice and innovation. Rather I think primordial divination is the greater arch in which occult and esoteric tarot is a modern innovation. (However I would not reject that gambling and divination may well inhabit the same primitive tent; their purposes seem to carry strong reasons to recognize their difference as well as resemblance.)

There is a nice précis of old world divination as strung upon the vine connection world civilizations continuity by the overland silk road. Brian Baumann translated a relatively common Mongolian textbook from around 1900. The book is relatively brief; it covers basic knowledge of astrology and divination. As a dissertation, translation alone of such a text does not cut it in academia without serious justification, which Baumann provided in a massive introduction, where he demonstrates an unbroken continuity from the earliest records of Sumerian Babylonian through Western classical, Indian, Buddhist, Central Asian and Tibetan-Chinese cultures of divination. The continuities far outweigh the variations in theory and practice. [See Brian Baumann: Divine Knowledge: Buddhist Mathematics according to the Anonymous Manual of Mongolian Astrology and Divination (Brill’s Inner Asian Library, 20: Brill Academic, 2008)]

The question of divinatory tarot as a necessary adaption of playing cards to address the unknown, usually the future seems to address perennial human need to assuage stress of change and unpredictable developments. Let me note in passing that the majority by far of artistic depictions found by Mary K. Greer of cartomancy show playing cards and not tarot. That tarot is a modern innovation concerns me less now, than when I first encountered the artificial correspondences of esoteric tarot in 1977. I believe other tarotists have touched upon tarot as modern. I also feel that the occult, to which divination is an aspect, represents in our modern science, secular and religious sectarian hegemonic culture, a leaven to dominate forces. As vibrant occultisms manifest in our global cultures, they subsist as parasites. For they need healthy or sickly hegemonic institutions, sciences, religions, ideologies, histories, stories, to which they attach their minority positions. The minority helps facilitate change and greases shifts in routine behavior to new options.

People have the capacity to see many behaviors and practices through the lens of the occult. It is like going around and focusing only on the shadows of things and ignoring the things that make the shadows. If we did this, we would see another world of interpenetrating presences phasing in and out of intensity with one another. A new view of causality would perhaps come to notice, and we might well realize that colors act as distractions and distortions to luminous shadow play. This shadow world exists but our exoteric, thing trained eyes are not sensitive to its layered patterning.

Tarot as a deck of cards with strange images on them is not occult or esoteric. What makes them occult is the way they are understood, approached, and used by people. Some thinkers us the terms, ‘occult’ and ‘esoteric’, to represent significantly different but related phenomena.  Both terms relate to the intimation that the world has an inside like people have an inside with motives and purposes not plainly seen. The occult is this intimation as ‘looking from the outside in’. The occult is interest in and experience of occult phenomena as, for example, telepathy, telekinesis, auditions, visionary experiences, synchronicities, prophet dreams, etc.  The approach of people with this ‘looking from the outside in’ is to want to understand these as we understand the world. It is egoistic and dualistic. It is psyche and soma delimited. It is power and control driven.

The esoteric is this intimation as ‘looking from the inside out.’ The net effect is that for the esoteric, there is no inside or outside, just a world, whole, full, empty, complete and alive.  Here the limit of soul-story and body-history is erased and enlivened endless spirit. It is self as freedom and nondualistic. It is erotic and ludic (play) driven.

I see tarot reading as divination as straddling the divide between the occult and the esoteric, between recognizing the occult’s refreshing news of the world and entering  a genuine esoteric transvaluation of the self and world in freedom. My personal orientation is to encourage people to discover the esoteric sense of knowing themselves and not suffer the occult too long as it may enervate.

I do not agree that the occult tarot is only another game unless we take something like James Carse’s ideas seriously in his little book called Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games )(1987).Here I see Carse offering an orientation to the juncture of Tarot as gaming and as divinization. “The rules of the finite game may not change (during a game); the rules of an infinite game must change.” “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” “A finite player plays to be powerful; an infinite player plays with strength.” “Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.”

Unlike Carse I see tarot practice as fitting into a threefold grid instead of his twofold one. Tarot is a finite game as is any other card game. It has rules and players play to win. “A finite player consumes time; an infinite player generates time.”

Occult tarot divination is both a finite and an infinite game. It is finite as the cards are consulted with a question and there is sought an answer. This fits finite play. However as a student of tarot we may know that the cards also address deeper issues that are not delimited by any one reading or any set of questions. “The finite player aims for eternal life; the infinite player aims for eternal birth.”

To the degree we realize to continue to play with strength as reading tarot, our divination becomes occult and esoteric infinite play. “There is but one infinite game.” The choice is always ours: how we approach tarot or are own life.

In my tarot parlor patter for newbie readees, I have a bit that explains how tarot works: The occult meaning of tarot is that everything is connected and the symbol-images on the cards speak to that ineffable connection that our consciousness perfectly mirrors the world and the world is a perfect mirror to our consciousness and intensions. A scientific explanation of how tarot works is that everything is connected, and by reading tarot, we construct a way of seeing significance in that acausal connectivity of everything, by associating it with whatever story we have in mind at the time we consult the tarot.

This tongue-in-cheek contrast between the occult or mystical explanation and a scientific rationalization for the efficacy of tarot readings is rarely challenged, and usually settles the querent down enough to select cards at random to commence a reading.

Personally I share some investment in both the ‘occult’ and the ‘scientific’ ‘explanations’ of how tarot works. (After all I am only a quasi-Trickster and a quasi-Fool in a Schrödinger’s box of cards that combines a probabilistic interpretation with deterministic dynamics of competing plots.) I may very well posit an ‘ineffable connection that our consciousness perfectly mirrors the world and the world is a perfect mirror to our consciousness and intensions.’  However we are persistently running interference with this seamless whole of consciousness and world. We interfere by monologging stories in our heads that are nonresponsive to the reality of our situation now. These quasi-formulated stories derive from daydreams, distractive desires without release, toxic worry about and incomplete-imitation of semi-perceived others. We ignore our senses, distort perceptions, and warp our being in place, lack a way to settle in and listen to rather than direct our own awareness. We somnambulate through the day, while we wakewalk at night, addicted to an insomniacs’ sleep-cycle. In such a place of inauthenticity, it is easy to see how a set of cards might wake us up or set us straight to notice the flowers and pause to sniff.

The dream tarot section of your question evokes an easy response for me and betrays certain epistemological biases that the waking world of perceptions is real and the whimsical world of sleep and dreams, symbols and desires is less real and contingent upon the waking experience, the true measure of the world and the self as body. Let me be more allusive here.

The loco classicist is the late Mandukya Upanishad (http://www.anandway.com/blog/post/Mandukya-Upanishad-Sanskrit-text-and-English-translation.aspx) that describes four levels to consciousness: Waking, dreaming, deep or dreamless sleep, and the fourth. [To be fair beside my own yogic experience insights from The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi, a book that collects the sages advice to visitors, and the Siva Sutras, a central text of Trika Shaivism, informs my understanding of this phenomenology.]

Everybody experiences waking, dreaming and deep sleep. It is useful as a phenomenology of awareness. Many of us experience them as discreet. Waking gets most of the attention as it seems more real than the others. This bias runs deep. Even the mapping of brain activity on dreams and dreamless sleep is marginalized by those look for measurable energetic correlates to perceptions, conceptions, sensations, memory, and simulation. I think this work is interesting as it goes. Even the postulate that dream-images are a sort of randomness that our waking sense imposes structure and meaning upon as we move to arousal does not invalidate the revaluation of the 3-4 states.

[I do not deal with the nature of the 4th (or 5th) here except in passing. I will offer a tease however that this 3-4 or 5 levels or aspects address deep archetypal enfoldments that speak to primal numbers and the nature of the 4 elements of the pips.]

The practice of meditation may well awaken one to a fuller view of the nature of consciousness and oneself. Rather than being a servant to our waking sense perceptions and our commonsense, commingling  of it in our inchoate sensations, emotions, images, words, and story, attention or awareness has qualities of its own that our exterior-oriented, waking culture has assiduously ignored and neglected. As we awaken to the qualities of awareness by paying attention to awareness (the royal road of meditation and contemplation, realization) we become more aware of what dreams are. We likewise become aware that the seeming blank of no-time, no-memory, no-self, no-experience of deep sleep opens to qualities of awareness that [among other possibilities] releases the seamless oneness of deep sleep. This unity [‘activated’ as the 4th, ‘persistent’ as the 5th] does nothing, but it appears in awareness to unify all parts of waking dreaming and deep sleep.

Even without this radical refocusing of experience released by realization, we can recognize all three states of awareness while awake. Being awake we are aware of the world. Close our eyes (senses generally), and we are more aware of our inner senses which is the sum and substance of daydreams and dreams. Open our eyes and we can see that we can locate our dreaming capacity, eclipsed by the loudness and our attending to our sensation. Likewise we can feel sense a blank back drop, a silence listening, a unmoved witness, of dreamless sleep as abysmal silence and nothingness. It this in the far and much ignored background to hold without holding, acts without moving and never asserts itself, is natural egolessness, and is ever peaceful, blissful (usually seen as the sunrise of dream), the true womb of unconditional love.

So we have in waking wonderful capacities that we do not know how to pay attention to because it is refocusing awareness to levels of experience we have been taught by our cultures to ignore. Dreaming and understanding dreams is the natural genetrix of symbols, images, the stuff of significance that may be the commentary, story of our self in the world. (Here I mean world to be inclusive of of waking, dreaming, deep sleep and the 4th).

The issue of meaning as dichotomy between ‘Higher Wisdom vs. Chance’ boils down to insisting that the analytic trumps the synthetic. The classic law of identity, as Aristotle put it, A=A, or logical identity axiom that asserts an object’s uniqueness with itself, is so close to tautology as to appear unassailable.  Of course, this initial axiom makes sense if we invest in the stuff of the world as timeless. However the world is never without time, change or process. Heraclitus of Ephesus observed ‘you cannot step into the same river once’. One Alexandrian wag noted in comment to this insight that ‘you cannot step into the same river once!’ Analytic subjects are often the results of previous synthetic processes and the assumption of static axiomatic analytic is swallowed in change. Even change changes change, perhaps a good definition chance.  Can you take a chance?

If I have been clear enough you can see that your dream questions do not arise as problematic because tarot reading is a sort of waking dream for any active reader.  It is this possibility in the community of tarot readers that we can use the cards as prompts to real dreams and actual divining. My hope is to challenge some in this community to move beyond the occult and more toward the esoteric in their tarot contemplations. I see the esoteric as quickening not only the soulful symbols of individual experience and dreams and myths (group-dreams) but the spirit hearkening promise of abysmal deep dreamless sleep and its treasure trove of riches beyond number or speech or image, love divine.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I agree with you about the similarities between gaming and fortunetelling. I often think that even the suggestions a pack of tarot carries within itself come from the tarot’s origin as a game of chance. After all, both on the card-shark and the diviner’s table, “the cards you got define your fate”.

But I often wonder about that relationship between cartomancy and what you define as ‘primordial divination’. I agree in that there is a common primal impulse there. The cards lend themselves very well for divination. But I wonder if there is really a continuum, as in “I am done with goat’s entrails, let me grab a pack of cards instead!” or if cartomancy can be seen as a lighter, tamed, manifestation of the same impulse that came to be in a non-religious context. By this I don’t mean it appeared in non-religious cultures, but that it came to be in what can still be seen as a recreational setting. While helping Ross Caldwell with the translation of Fernando De La Torre’s manual for cartomancy -the oldest manual we know, if I recall correctly- the amusing tone of the text soon became evident. When we compare this manual with other early texts on cartomancy, we notice a common denominator: most of them seem to deal with the problem of ‘love’. In other words, most of these manuals are aimed at telling people -women, really- if and when would they find a man. There is also a whole “amuse your friends and be the light of the party” kind of feeling in these manuals that is contrary to the grave tone of divination. At the risk of sounding sacrilegous, I wonder if we could see cartomancy as something closer to a parlor game than to divination. For once, in all these countries were it is still relevant or socially accepted, divination is associated with a more complex body of religious practices. You don’t toy with it, you don’t do it yourself. In these settings, oracles are the voice of the gods. I wonder if we could see cartomancy as a more ‘secular’ practice. I also wonder: which god, gods, or goddesses do you think speak through the tarot?

Now, I would like to take this conversation in a different direction. You wrote a fascinating account of your experiences becoming a reader. In that account you mention an episode, early on, when this woman you knew read the cards for you, and kept ‘seeing’ your partner having an affair with another man. You were quite skeptic about the whole thing, and even so, the reader’s insistency over several sessions ended up eroding your confidence a little bit. Your actually started to look for the ‘blond man’ crossing paths with your woman. In which way would you say that this experience informed the work you did as a reader later on?

PAUL NAGY: The gods and goddesses are always speaking. It is we who have forgotten how to listen. And we have also forgotten who to consult when we cannot hear them for ourselves.

I would rather have people learn how to hear the gods for themselves than trust the word of someone who says they can consult the gods for us.

I agree that the modern world has cleaned up the act of divination. Official divination in the modern world has become the province of science. Religious divination is profoundly connected with sacrifice. The purpose of modernity is the hegemony of a secular understanding of the world. Part of that hegemonic entitlement is the trivialization of sacred practices and ideologies.

The need for divination and perhaps the need for gaming run deep in our human nature. There are no peoples who do not have various forms of both gambling and divination. I think that taking up cards as a form of divination was really adapting what was at hand. I think if I were a chicken farmer I might still be reading the entrails of chickens. But it is easier and neater to shuffle a pack of cards than to disembowel a living chicken over the kitchen sink. I do not think I would ingratiate myself to my clients with such bloody goings-on.

I believe early cartomancy, the use of playing cards for light divining, especially as concerned with the game of love, is a gender social class transformation of the gaming-room into the salon. I am not familiar with the various social customs that extend to gambling and the role of women in the gaming-room. But love is a kind of bet. I think that there are also important variants related to class and marriage. Most of these issues are handled differently at different historic times depending upon your social station. The degree that the sexes interacted was under public and formal scrutiny. Otherwise in the upper and middle classes women and men led the gender separated lives and activities. Of course this does not fully apply to the underclasses and serving classes, but our records are of the upper classes when it comes to the early history of cartomancy and the origins of tarot.

I am glad you have so thoroughly investigated my website, but I must confess that you misread the attribution of the piece on becoming a tarot reader. It is taken from one of the few dissertations on the nature of the occult tarot. The name of the book is The Esoteric Scene, Cultic Milieu, And Occult Tarot by Danny L. Jorgensen (Garland Publishing, 1992). This is the Danny’s account of becoming a tarot reader in the late 1970s.

However this does remind me of an antidote from the other night. I was at a party, and, as I often do, I offer to do short readings for people. One fellow told me that when he was in college his grandmother would write him long letters that were based on her tarot readings of what he was up to. He especially remembered how insistent his grandmother was about him dating a blonde woman. When he said that he wasn’t dating anyone, she dismissed his denials saying that the tarot is not wrong! Needless to say this fellow wasn’t interested in having his tarot read!

In the late 60s, when I was still active in the esoteric Buddhist shamanic cult, a professional tarot reader and trance medium from Columbus Ohio came out to visit to get an initiation into certain sadhanas of cult. Elizabeth Valentine Bacon was a woman about the same age as my mother who had spent her life studying and practicing the occult, or as we said then the ‘metaphysical.’ While she was visiting I took her out to visit my mother and she read her tarot cards. I also remember that she read mine, but what she said did not interest me much as it was about my particular dharma in the metaphysical arts and not about some fetching woman I was going to hook up with!

Some for five years later I visited her in Columbus where I met some of her clients; many of them were lab technicians who had the rudiments of a technical scientific education. Her main way of working with them was to go into trance, and have her spirit guides consult about issues.

I did have an opportunity to see what her spirit guides looked like. What I saw were strange hybrid entities, not human nor any definite kind of animal. They were not so monstrous as weirdly configured. By paying attention to these strange apparitions that occurred in my mind’s eye, I did realize that they carried with them some fascinating energies that awakened in me  a kind of symbolic dance of images, a mishmash of colors, music, emotional revving, and fragmented insights. For Elizabeth, these weird creatures had names and spoke in ways to betray quite distinct personalities. One of the personalities only spoke in singsong rhyme and was often the author of Elizabeth’s annual Christmas greetings. Another personality, claiming to be an Oriental Sage of some long distance disincarnate pedigree of Taoist background, had a long conversation with me about the nature of psychic geography, and the real meaning of the Theosophical root races.

I feel that Elizabeth Valentine Bacon is an important personal link in my appreciation of tarot reading. She did tell me, though I would have a rich and varied career in the occult arts and that my life was not going to be as conventional as I may have wanted to be. Unfortunately she also turned out to be reasonably right about my rocky road with women.

Of course I have had many readings by many tarot readers over the years, and every now and then, I will find one that insists upon certain things that do not at the time makes sense and later even make less sense. I usually just dismiss it as new readers trusting to remembered associations than in actually reading this symbolic flow of the cards. Likewise I have had some readings, where some things were predicted, that I had no reason to think would occur, and they did! These ,of course, are the ones that I find worthy of comment and am sure to tell the reader that their predictions worked out in ways that I could not and did not expect.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I thought that sociological account was yours! Sorry for the misunderstanding.

That essay makes reference to Jason Lotterhand’s ‘Thursday Night Tarot’, which I believe is still on. I confess that a few years back I had a book on these lectures on my hands and I couldn’t make too much of it. I liked the idea of these lectures more than its contents. Something similar happened when I read ‘Cabaret Místico’, by Alejandro Jodorowsky. The book is a transcript of some of the free lectures he gave, every Wednesday, in Paris, for about 20 years. I sympathize with these sustained efforts. Specially with Jodorowsky’s custom of sitting at a coffee shop every Wednesday to read the tarot for free. I am told he doesn’t do that anymore, but he did it for about 20 years. People who had been there says they had to take a number, and there was a little lotto to see if you got your reading with Jodorowsky or with one of his assistants. I also met a filmmaker to whom Jodorowsky read the tarot in private. He regards the event as one of the key moments of his life.

I am mentioning all this because you said you were interested in Jodorowsky’s work. I went to see him here in New York when he came to give a lecture on the tarot. The event was mesmerizing due to Jodorowsky’s great showmanship, but also, because of the mix of irony and reverence he had while working with the tarot. After that I read everything the guy wrote. I was specially interested in his work with ‘Psicomagia’, which is his secular form of shamanism in which he prescribes metaphorical actions to heal people from their problems. Two things that interest me about Jodorowsky’s approach are his focus on a magical experience where belief isn’t necessary, and his idea of redefining magic to appeal to a contemporary audience. Recently, I watched a short video of a talk he gave in Italy. Here is a passage I would like to share with you:

“For me, to go out and do a gratuitous act every Wednesday… to read the tarot to anybody… It has changed my life; because every Wednesday I give advise to heal people, and by healing them I heal myself”.

What do you think about Jodorowsky’s practice in regard of only reading the tarot for free? As a matter of fact, he bases his practice on never charging and never predicting the future. Then there is this idea of healing yourself by healing others. I have give my fair share of readings to all kinds of therapists, and I am often terrified about how screwed are those we trust our mental health, but still, I understand the idea of being bread instead of being hungry. What do you think?

PAUL NAGY: I must confess that I am limited to only what I can read in English. But I am happy that our conversation is turning toward topics that are keener to address. I already shared my disdain for Jason’s approach to tarot. In retrospect I think it more my own youthful arrogance and a preoccupation with other aspects of the occult.

A devotional understanding of the symbols of tarot as missives from of the gods to remind us of their power and wisdom, may well bring us to a measured appreciation of the archetypes of the major Arcana as icons. And I am willing to recognize in some cases an almost hypnotic connection between works of art and the ineffable relations they intimate.

I have in the past spent time in local coffeehouses reading the tarot for free to anyone I could interest. I found I tended to spend more time shuffling by cards than actually reading for anybody. (My counter-charisma at-work, no doubt) I read for free and for a fee depending upon how the invitation is broached.

Soul work tarot is usually gratis. As a spiritual exercise I feel that the reading of tarot is a way of doing soul work with someone. It means I should be careful what I say and also truthful. I notice that when I do not know a person very well, and I read their cards getting indications of difficulties and major stresses and their life, I will interpret the cards in a gentle way, almost protecting them from the more stark possibilities the cards portend. However if I know someone better and have a sense of their own story and how they manage their affairs, I tend to be more direct in telling of difficult news.

My experience as a reader is the way a reading is accepted, as an alternative story, as heartfelt advice, as revelations of the secrets of the heart, as healing old wounds and offering new insight in areas of incomprehension, depends upon the psychic predisposition of the client and not my intention as a reader. The symbols heal, I do not heal. I may help activate the symbol in someone’s psyche but they need to have the receptivity to accept the consequences.

Unlike Jodorowsky, I do not make a fetish out of one’s position in time and will speak of future outcomes in probable terms. If someone wants to know an outcome of something that they are worried about, I will look into the cards and see what they say. However I do not claim to foretell the future so much as saying that according to these cards the outcome looks one way or another, or that the way the cards are configured I cannot say for sure either way.

Jodorowsky’s book on ‘Psicomagia’ is scheduled to be published in English at the end of this year. I read his spiritual autobiography, which read like a mixture of humble self-confession and braggadocio. But perhaps this is a mere envy in that my own escapades in self-knowledge were not so pleasantly enthralled with erotic adventures. I still have not studied with the thoroughness that I want his views on tarot. But like yourself, I find his ‘mix of irony and reverence’ a refreshing view of the cards.

I am also be inclined to agree that magical experience does not rely upon belief. Several of my visionary experiences, including my visual take on the astral entities that were the companions to Elizabeth Valentine Bacon, occurred spontaneously and without any effort on my part. Likewise other visionary experiences happened well before I became aware of ritual and magical practices that supported them. I think even Lakeoff recognizes that metaphors have the power of magic especially ones seemingly newly minted in the experience of the speaker or listener.

I don’t think we could communicate with each other at all without some active participation in magical thinking that allows us to make the truth lies and lies of the truth. This brings me round to aspects of my own tarot investigations that are still in the works, still undiscovered, still in potential.

If I assume that the current core of what I call tarot hermeneutics is the reflexive meaning of tarot cards and patterns as read by the community of tarot readers. First off then is I wish to have some of my fellow tarot readers understand what this means and how it is of crucial significance to the creative practice of tarot. I do not mean that my work in particular is crucial to the future of tarot, but that this insight is important to keep the magic alive.

Beginning with dream work, tarot icons are a stylized form of natural symbols. Natural symbols are those spontaneous images that occurred to us in our dreams. If we attempt to understand of these images we find that they open us up to a panorama of interconnecting experiences that have significance to us. Our ability to speak is one of the ways that we have formalized natural symbols. One aspect of natural symbols is that there is associative significance is additive without limit. Languages & systems are formalized by imposing limits. When I speak of the language of the birds I speak of the natural symbols before we have formalized them with artificial limits.

Now the images on tarot cards are derivative of mythical and iconic stories and assumptions which does frame them in ways to make them limited. But the images in themselves never lose hold of their natural propensity to escape into the wild. The active imagination developed by Carl Jung and his school is a form of running wild with the symbols. Needless to say I want to encourage tarot readers to run wild with the symbols while at the same time learning their historical and mythical antecedents.

Even natural symbols exist within a context of experience which is ever in the process of correcting itself. This process is recursive. This means that it is self-referential and may learn from repetition and unusual circumstances. The reflexive meaning of tarot cards and patterns means that as we read them we continue to learn that the symbols can do more than what we thought they could. Every time we read the cards with a different situation in mind the cards offer us new understandings not only about that situation, but about the significance and potential of the cards themselves to tell us things that are new as well as things that we already knew.

I think that this perhaps even self-evident recognition these to be more highly understood. In the day to day practice of tarot reading most tarot readers are reading for people who have issues about their life they wish to have commentary on. Yes plenty of this has to do with affairs of the heart, with the outcome of business deals, with the understanding of interpersonal dynamics and behaviors.

Given how powerful this tool is as a potential source of deeper understanding, it seems like a waste of time when we could be attempting to understand the dynamics of quantum mechanics in our everyday life by closely questioning the tarot cards.

Let’s take a far-fetched analogy. I am a plumber. I know how to plumb very well and have all the expected skill and knowledge of any competent plumber. I’m faced with a job of plumbing. I look at the job and see what needs to be done. Okay now I consulted tarot cards to see what they say about this plumbing job. Because I am a plumber I will read the tarot cards in a way that can make the symbolic content of the cards relevant to the plumbing job. Will my consultation of the tarot cards help me do a better job? Will the cards perhaps alert me to aspects of things that I did not already see? I cannot answer these questions because this is not the context in which I consult tarot.

Let me know if you know any plumbers or other trades people who might be willing to learn tarot to see if it can affect the way they ply their trades.

Applying my tarot hermeneutics I want to know how the cards selected addresses the issue. Next I want to know how this situation affects how I understand the cards, for each new context gives rise to new possibilities of the way the card may be understood. I would like to open up this reflexive insight some, but I have not yet discovered ways to do it that do not close down the open-ended possibility I am trying to entertain and remain in creative tension with.

Since my own interests are clearly concerned with literary aspects of the esoteric I can easily see how I may proceed using the tarot as a way to interrogate about the tradition. However the way tarot could be developed as a useful tool of inquiry has not yet been breached in any of it would-be possibility.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Jodorowsky is great at recounting his dealings with famous people, from André Bretón to Marilyn Manson. That’s a self-promotional gimmick the Amazing Kreskin also uses very well. Perhaps that is what I both admire, and criticize most about him: he is great at playing for the effect. Reading for free accomplishes two important things: it separates him from all the professional fortunetellers, and frees him from having to deal with questions he doesn’t find interesting. In a way, he accomplishes what you call ‘soul work’ by making people feel the reading is a privilege, not a service. You are there, after waiting for a week, maybe more, you draw your number, you go to sit with him, and he actually won’t see you if you don’t have a question, but he will rephrase your question to make the whole conversation more transcendent. A great example of this would be: “I can’t tell you when you are going to find a man, but I could tell you why you haven’t found it yet”.

I do free readings on Friday mornings, and I do think those are my best readings. By letting the tarot speak, and accepting what it says, one gets to experience its true magic. I think the tarot invite us to a receiver-oriented form of communication, in which things are hinted at us, instead of an sender-oriented communication, in which things are impressed upon us. What do you think?

Now, you are touching a couple of fascinating ideas here. The language of the birds is about finding wonder in the finger that points at the moon. There is that idea from painter Francesco Clemente, who said he paints to help images recover their memory. I like it in poetic terms. I like it as a way of making poiesis. But I suspect sometimes we get too caught up in the magic of the process, and we forget that the finger was originally pointing at something else. It had an original purpose. There is this idea, for example, that if you look at the pips for dais or years you will uncover their secrets. I don’t think that is true. If you look at the pips for dais or years you uncover your secrets, but you may still have no clue about what these images are about. You may still have no clue that these images are about nothing!

I wonder to what extent a symbol can be natural, as you suggest. Symbols are representational limits we impose to an image, element, or shape, turning them into some common ground where we can meet with other people. Wherever we mark the ground, we create boundaries. It seems to me that all symbols are artificial. I mean that the idea of one thing standing for another one is a convention we all agree upon, but it is not objectively true. Nothing is intrinsically symbolic, but we use things as symbols. Could you expand on that, please?

PAUL NAGY: First let me acknowledge, that I am enjoying this opportunity in conversation with you to attempt to express the directions of my thinking about tarot, its future significance and possibility.

I am happy that you recognize the necessity of successful artists in our commodity saturated global culture, must court Dame Fame, with the ravenous attention of a possessive pimp or an obsessive, penniless lover. I really cannot fault the success of artists who must cater to the fleeting attentions of the nouveau rich.

Still this recognition of the necessity of linking creative work with publicity gimmicks in order to succeed as an artist in our culture, gives me a moment to further reflect on the nature of tarot reading as an art form.

One of the things that is central to tarot is that there are 78 blank panels which may be populated with various forms of abstract and mostly stylized representational images. It is a popular art form, because potentially it can be mass-produced and owned for a fraction of the cost of the incredible amount of creativity and time it can take to populate those 78 panels.

When I spoke before about my spontaneous visions of the astral entities of Elizabeth Valentine Bacon, I was somewhat tutored in Surrealism by a college friend who had grown up in the backdrop of the San Francisco Renaissance. The San Francisco Renaissance is most notably known as the poetic announcement of the beat generation by Allen Ginsberg reading of the first part of Howl for Carl Solomon. My friend introduced me to the writings of André Bretón and the general ethos of the surrealists, especially in its poetic, rather than representational, pictorial emphasis. Eventually this association, I resolutely sticking to my metaphysical obsessions, though finding the parlor games of the surrealists, their materialistic obsession with the occult as a demonstration of the autonomous imagination, an important ongoing critique of my own more traditional unconscious strivings; gave rise to my introduction to and long-term friendship with the San Francisco poet, Phillip Lamantia.

Philip died a few years ago, and I had not had a good conversation with him for almost 20 years, even when I met him in my late 20s, he being  20 years older than myself, meant that he was in his late 40s, he was an obsessively private individual known for his mantic autodidactic rants on alchemy and  mystical and hermetic topics. I had met a fellow traveler.

I believe that I had a formal and somewhat limited friendship with him which lasted from my point of view the rest of our lives, but I do not wish to exaggerate the intimacy of it, but rather emphasize that what we shared was not at an interest in poetry per se, but we were both self read in the occult classics. And it was discussing these and their implications that we spent many carefully crafted hours discussing in private, during the heyday of our association, when I was in my late 30s and Philip in his 50s, I would call him and we would arrange an appointment for me to meet at his apartment and we would talk about whatever we wanted to. I very much appreciated the things Philip knew about as they were things that I had not necessarily strayed across in my readings. So I have to admit that I did learn much from these conversations.

After calling Philip we would arrange a time to meet at his place on Union Street usually on a weekday afternoon. We would sit in a small room of his flat, windows facing north, a soft light streaming in. We would exchange pleasantries and a bit of gossip usually allowing some point to illustrate principle and from that we would begin to move… Thomas Vaughan in his Magia Adamica, discussing the Three Mothers as the mediation between word and thing. The Three Mothers or Aleph, Mem and Shin, their elements corresponding to air, water and fire as precreate propensities of unseparated or undifferentiated motions. Shakti, if you will, before the threefold supernal field is laid out as love/will, awareness/knowing, act/motion after the Trika’s tattva list. God weighed Aleph with all and all with Aleph, and so with the other Mothers. This shows how Adam as cosmos is both agent and patient. Jacob’s ladder cited because as Waite’s note directs to the hermetic maxim as above, so below signifies the bond of union, a union occluded however in the measure, the weighing, represents the secret intending toward creation, the word about to be uttered.  So Goethe’s word is deed of Faust’s bargain, and pausing at the yawning chasm of abysmal three mothers in the heart of the athanor. The inverted tower or the hanged man.

Begin again: On our afternoon visits, sitting quietly surrounded by Philip’s books, the conversation would begin with a sharing of topical concern and eventually turn toward some shared hermetic symbology or substance. There we might delve into its purport and family resemblances to Kabbalah, Masonic, Taoist, Sufi, Egyptian, alchemical, Trika, Hegelian, shamanic, Swedenborgian concatenation of correspondences and transmogrifications that tended to astound with scintillating insight and bafflement, perplexity and awe. With mystagogic disclosures jolting ideas out of their customary associations of habit we would rape words into immediate lived images that suspend the ordinary and provoke the extraordinary senses, the laws of space and time suddenly suspended and revealed novel dimensions that enfold into new pristine syntaxes and heretofore unsuspected causal nexuses in onomatopoetic juxtapositions of sound, word, affect, sensation, image and cognitive accident, disembodied sensate.  During the talkfest, this world slipped from its routine moorings into the ever fresh, living shoreless ocean of the mundus imaginalis. I believe Philip and I shared this dedication to the occult or surreal, if you will, moment evoked than any literary concerns.

It was a rare friend who can share and be trusted to navigate these subtle waters that by degrees float and plunge the self in each moment into stark raw vulnerabilities that blink and blaze flashes, wordful and wordless, brinking toward cognitive annihilation and simultaneous apotheosis.

Such were the results of a good day of talk with Philip, but like any act of improvisation we could stutter, and slip into routine riffs and often told tales and allusions. Perhaps something of the scaffolding these conversations can be recalled or reinvented to offer a taste or at least the scent of this special friendship in discourse.

I am sympathetic with your hesitation of accepting my view of natural symbols whole cloth. Language is an idiosyncratic development of natural symbols within the living social contexts of speakers who share it. The custom of sharing creates degrees of closure. For me natural symbols are only incidentally closed, and that they are always wild and willing to become transformed by newly discovered metaphors in their expression and juxtaposition.

None of this thinking is particularly unique with me as anyone who is reasonably well read in postmodern thinking, there is almost an obsession with issues of identity and difference and the meaning of symbols and their integrity. All of which goes back to the dawn of philosophy and in the father of philosophy, Socrates and his exaltater, Plato.  For Plato to come to an understanding of resemblance in his idea of the forms we need to understand eidolon as a deformation, so that representation, or art must be a deformation of the originating eidos. As Cassirer notes in reference to the difference between eidos and eidolon, ‘it is a testimony to Plato’s extreme a linguistic power that he was able, in a single variation, and with subtle nuance of expression, to fix a difference of meaning which is unrivaled in its systematic incisiveness in pregnancy.’

Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968, translated 1994) attempts to revisit these distinctions with renewed vigor by indicating a ‘model of recognition’, as one of the four postulates supplied in that ‘image of thought’ which, in his opinion, philosophy uses as its own implicit presupposition, deduced from common sense. According to Deleuze, to the two postulates that consist in hypothesizing a ‘goodwill on the part of the thinker’ and an ‘upright nature on the part of the thought’, to others it should be added. These are the two postulates that relate to the method that can guarantee the correct nature of thought: Deleuze designates these postulates as ‘a model of recognition’ and the ‘form of representation’.

With us in his view, recognition constitutes the model of natural and free philosophical thought, implied by the image of thought that philosophy assumes as its own implicit presupposition. This model may be characterized as transcendental. I would characterize these distinctions as having some family resemblance to my natural symbols especially as generative in dream images as the biological basis for the building of semantic vocabularies. ‘Recognition’, Deleuze explains, ‘may be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remember, a match and or conceived.” By making this assumption, Deleuze confirms that recognition — with regard to its own object –‘ aligns with the form of the Same’, which is the form of representation insofar as it is defined on the basis of ‘an intrinsic relation to the model or foundation.’ Here I would be less tautological and recognize that the form of the same may very well be generated in the sensate combining of sensation imagination in memory.

On the other hand — that which relates to the subject of recognition — the model in question, Deleuze continues, ‘relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties for “everybody”– in other words, a common sense as a concordia faultatum.’

According to Deleuze, that paradigm and this model is also recognizable in the conception of ‘sensibility as a passive synthesis’–, that is, as the originary correlation between the body as sentient and the world as sensible — which has been developed by phenomenology.

Here I move away from Deleuze’s fine mesh of distinctions because I do not hold, on the level of the esoteric, the valid distinction between the self as sentient and in the world as sensible. Esoterically I see the world and the self as equally sentient. However from the level of the occult one might maintain the phenomenological duality of sentient-sensible.

The idea that drives Deleuze to affirm, in Difference and Representation, that recognition cannot be ‘a model for what it means to think’ since, on the basis of such a model, ‘thought is thereby filled with no more than an image of itself, one in which it recognizes itself the more it recognizes things.’ Yet Deleuze limits himself to a characterization of recognition which one is forced to admit, is tautological, on the basis of which it would tend to reproduce and reaffirm that only previously acquired knowledge, but, together with it, and inevitable also the ‘values’ that come to be ‘attached to an object’ when it becomes an object of knowledge; values that end up remaining, ‘established values.’ On the contrary, Deleuze replies, ‘the new — in other words, difference — calls for forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita.’ For me, differences never actual difference, so much as it is metamorphosis, or transformation that allows something to be itself and not itself simultaneously, seeing in the shifting perspective images of an old woman and a stylish model in the same perceptible image based on shifts of perspective. I do not know if this is just another way of claiming that terra incognita is really the world recognized anew as something other than what it seemed before. Difference then does not stand by itself but stands with connection.

Yet this contrast of new and same proves difficult to sustain for one who is attempting to think the image of difference and repetition together. More than the conception of recognition developed by Deleuze, it is rather the one proposed by Gadamer — to recognize is to know more than is already familiar — which seems more consistent with such an attempt if this conception is understood according to the double formulation of Freud’s unconscious: ‘I did not know and “I have always known it.”’ Rather than opposing itself artificially to the Deleuzian concept of the encounter, Gadamer’s definition refers precisely to an eidetic recognition.

This recognition of image is, after all, only an apparent paradox of art and literature. By paying attention to the virtues of resemblance by perpetual exercises of deformation, we have come to explore the mystery of this recognition. It is this paradox that is the play for the tarot reader. We are in some degree poised in questions that are addressed by a random draw of cards, which scrambles us to reframe by drawing on the interconnections of natural symbols to make sense for ourselves and the querent.

To returned to Plato’s understanding of the verbal slip that unites and joins primal formation with the deformation as a symbol. I guess it makes sense to reiterate that a deformation without preliminary form, namely an unprecedented deformation, may be the basis of that creative image. Indeed, if all art is, in its essence a deformation, then the peculiarity of the deformation that characterizes artistic-literary investigations, and investigations of the meaning of tarot, is more than just a critique aimed at the principle of representation. Insofar as a mere ‘frontal-positioning’ toward the world turns around upon itself to become simultaneously less and more of what it can be or what it has been. So tarot if properly winnowed of the wild utterance and the sterile abstraction, may offer seeds of hermeneutical power not yet discovered/invented.

So for me symbols are middle terms that hold incompatibles as one and unique in the same, implosive/explosive mix that opens things as meaning and meaning as things. A classic poiesis that makes and remakes by saying, what no craftsman could do or would want to do.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Lately, I have been wondering about a difference of appreciation I perceive between the French and the American in regards of the tarot. Around here, where I live, surrounded by art galleries, a person would happily send a thousand dollars in a white shirt, because of it’s label, but they will shudder at the sole mention of the tarot. We are talking about a whole different set of superstitions! For these high-end customers, the tarot is associated with bad taste. Is that simple. In France, people may believe in the tarot or not, yet the is a certain sense of pride in the Marselle tarot being some sort of vernacular tradition. I suspect the French are in debt with the surrealist for that. Breton and his group loved magic, and they were fond of the tarot. Even their exquisite corpses can be seen as a game whose logic mirrors the workings of the tarot. One often finds people who would say “there has to be something about the tarot if Breton was interested in it”. Jodorowsky has profited from that connection, wisely, not only because he is the first to tell you that Breton himself threw is copy of the RWS in the garbage, while saying that the only true tarot was the Marseilles tarot; but because of his own artistic merits. Once and again i find people who would say “if a great filmmaker like Jodorowsky, who is also a great comic author, cares for the tarot, maybe there is something to it”. Both Breton and Jodorowsky are artists high-end costumers feel no shame on being associated with, who lend their prestige to the tarot. I am not sure America has an equivalent.

PAUL NAGY: Lamantia must have been parroting Breton too, when he told me the Marseille tarot was the only non-bogus esoteric tarot.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Do you recall in which context did Lamantia tell you that the only ‘serious’ tarot was the Marseilles?

PAUL NAGY: This one is pretty clear. We never talked Tarot or did divination. I saw he had a Marseilles style decks around. We talked a little about the Trumps and the symbolism. I may have brought up the RWS or some GD stuff. As I recall he was not too interested. When I first began reading in the occult AE Waite’s stuff littered the remainder tables at bookstores. (That would have been when I was a teenager. Middle 60s). Philip never used the cards. We never read the cards. He may have in other contexts that I am unaware of.

Philip was interested in a European occultist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, (a fascist, with strange elitist ideas). At the time late 1970s I did not know about his questionable political views but found his take on symbols interesting. Philip had the French Edition of The Temple of Man; I waited years for the translation to make its way into English. Neither Philip nor myself were too terribly political. We held for San Franciscans, strong liberal populist, leftist views. I eventually became an situationist anarchist  Of course we were well aware of the Marxian views of Breton.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: The thing with surrealism is that it was a technique to discover things without creating them. When I was at graphic design school, we were told that art history swings between two poles: on one side are those historical moments in which aesthetic breakthroughs are made and new things are proposed. On the other hand there are those historical moments in which all creative endeavor is a recombination of what was already there. Surrealism was like that. It was about rubbing two objects against each other to get a spark. Again, this is very close to what we do with the tarot. I often wonder if that isn’t a limitation of the tarot as an expressive medium. In a conversation with Balkan writer and fellow tarot lover Lena Stefanovic, I mentioned that I like to think of tarot readings in terms of anagramming. We have either 22 or 78 images which existed in a specific order and had a specific meaning, and we rearrange them over and over to create new orders and new meanings. ‘Paul Nagy’ is anagrams for ‘play a gun’. The same letters, yet we are pulled into a whole different semantic field by them. Le Pendu, card number XIII and Temperance, in that order, may be saying “only moderation triumphs over treason and Death”; but Temperance followed by Le Pendu and XIII may be saying “if moderation has you stuck, defy Death!” I am not suggesting these are the only possible interpretations for these sequences, of course. My point is, event if we take each image as a constant units of meaning, anagramming them creates new, unexpected messages. Nothing new there. Something I remember fondly about my first encounter with Vito Acconci was precisely when I told him I use the tarot to find new words outside the verbal world, and he told me you can also find new words inside the old words. That is what an anagrams is. That is something we do with the tarot: we find new images inside the old ones.

I guess I get what you are saying, but let me use the alphabet to further illustrate my point. In itself, the letter A has no meaning. But here and now I see it as a suggestion to “spread my legs wide”. I do so by mapping an analogy between the letter A and my body. That is a rather primal kind of analogy. Kids do it from a very early stage. It is called personification. Since you can verify the the letter A looks like a guy standing with his legs spread open, we can ‘meet’ in that analogy. But if I tell you the letter A is a sawhorse, I would be inviting you to Map another analogy where the letter A is compared to an object. Again, you can visually verify the analogy. This second analogy doesn’t invalidate the first one. Letters, images, they are all like Necker’s Cube. They never change, yet they shows us different angles.

After I sent you my last comment I thought: “Paul seems to be talking about analogical thinking!”

Speaking of the letter A as a man standing, or as a sawhorse, has us meeting at the level in which forms prompt a direct realization in us. That is what I understand as the ‘language of the birds’. All other languages are cages. When I say “manzana” I am kidnapping all these forms to create something incomprehensible for you, unless you speak Spanish. I would starve if I go around asking for an “apple” in Madrid! The thing is, occultism is another language, another cage. I tend to privilege a historical understanding of the tarot that has it as a game, product of late medieval Christian Europe, later misread as a repository of occult knowledge. That’s another cage. I am not saying it is not historically verifiable. I am saying it may limit the possibilities for poiesis the tarot offers when taken at the fundamental level in which form is meaning.

My suspicion, at the moment, is that to take tarot readings up the the level of an art form, we must get rid of the cages. There is some peril in that, as art often transcends the original use of the objects it touches. Any doctrine that has incorporated the tarot into it has some ideas to foster, and these ideas define the social responsibility of its readers. If we take the tarot as an expressive medium, how far can we push it beyond what a client, or ourselves, expects from a reading? I hate the idea of the tarot becoming a Rorschach test. That is why I am so interested in tarocchi appropriate. There seems to be a happy middle point there between formal expansion and edifying message. But I wonder, in your view, how and when is tarot reading an art form?

PAUL NAGY: Yes you have stumbled over the Achilles’ heel of the self-taught, our constant rediscovery of the obvious which we belabor as the hidden insight of the ages! Of course I’m talking about analogical thinking! I have sort of known that all along. I am very clear about it once in a while and then it all goes back into the fog. Praise fog! What other excuse do I have for tripping over my own heel?

I discussed the axiom of identity, which for Aristotle was the initial base of material logic. However the recognition of analogy which is A=B C D…, from the point of view of a representation, or initial presentation, is primary for metaphors to work: the interlinking of them. The axiom of identity works for stuff, things as things. But for things to mean something the analogic process is primary. I am sure somebody has talked up this view more elegantly than myself at this time. Still analogy, as you say, is just another cage, whereas if my posited natural symbols obtain, it is in their propensity to escape cages, or to inhabit unexpected cages.

I do agree that recognizing the historic context of tarot emblems, with their fabled or mythical relatives tends to put some serious constraints upon free ranging natural symbols. Yes the Exquisite Corpse does open us to surprises, very much like tarot cards layout responds to questions.

I like the idea of art being locked between the poles of technical innovation as one-sided creativity and re-amalgamation of the previously created as the other side. Given the nature of the 20th century and the drift towards collective major art forms that as they evolve eventually filter into the repertoire of the individual. I’m thinking of children today more easily composing moving image videos than in writing an essay. One can see the rise of the digital reinvention of all the arts as a mass movement of surrealism, while at the same time we have intensification’s of art forms such as 3-D imaging and other stuff I probably haven’t paid any attention to that is creating a digital holism that has the stench of primitive, tribal, individual craftsmanship potential. In other words, poets are now performers, who are actors, who sing and dance and otherwise acted out as far as the imagination lets them a variety of selves, involving scenarios that can bend time and space, displace class, and if anything is a product of the available technologies and styles of the time. Specialization has become universal. We are all Jack of all trades.

This brings up the shadow of the analog, which is the empty space between metaphors. Or perhaps another way of putting it, it is the context between cages. Perhaps another word is incongruity. There seems to be several ways that tarot deals with its limited random set field of 78 boxes, no matter how diverse the potential meaning of each box is.

One of them is to invent spreads. Spreads are developed to create semantic units in which we place the random tarot card. They are preset. One card spread, two card spread, three card spread, etc. each of them reproducing elements of place time and condition that may be present in the structure of the tarot deck or extraneous to it. Anyway what we have is a way to deal a few cards to get a desired result.

I have a tendency to see them as a way of pre-focusing a reading to give a certain kind of result. When I read tarot sometimes I work with a preestablished spread and provide people with the frame of each card’s potential significance within that focus area.

Sometimes I feel this is very artificial and I just read the cards as they appear without wanting to know the question or wanting to predefine how the card may address an issue that I do not know anything about. If I am reading in this intuitive way I will pull two or three cards and I will discuss them with the querent. I will say something like so far does any of this have any relationship to the question you have in mind? I say you don’t have to tell me your question, if you do not want to, but does anything I’m saying about the cards seem to relate to it? Generally there are three types of responses: an emphatic yes, an equivocal yes or no, and most rarely, and emphatic no. Sometimes the emphatic yes means that the reading is done. I have given them something and I don’t know what it is or what its significance is because their question is still only spoken within themselves. If I get the equivocal yes or no I may then ask them to tell me about their question, or even state the question forthright. Usually an unequivocal yes or no means that the person had formulated their question as a yes or no question, I know most tarot readers tend to shy away from yes and no formulations. Personally I also do, because the cards are usually addressing what is between the cages. In other words, context. I don’t think that spreads themselves are an answer to how we get around the context, or how we bring it into the conversation. Spreads seem to be developed as a pre-formulated semantic units a kind of cookie-cutter sentence into which we plug of the words, here the words being that tarot card images. Also it is a simple way to limit the number of cards we will interpret.

All of this is foreplay to the big question of whether tarot reading can ever approach a real art form. For artists who produce series of paintings of 22 or 78 interrelated images in various ways acknowledging and ignoring the icons of the historic tarot, we definitely have a representational art form with many variants. Of course what is also true is that very few of these artist’s decks are taken up by mainstream tarot readers and discussed seriously in the literature. However, I have to acknowledge that it is in the artist rather than in the tarot reader that one can argue for some degree of art form.

Perhaps the tarot reader is the critic. As critics interpret works of art for the viewing public or potential patron, tarot readers act as docents to the idle curious somnambulate through galleries of self-unknowing knowledge. Tarot readers as critics and as interpreters of people’s life stories as reflected in the mirrors of their art and questions. It used to be that the artist was the shaman whose ritual became an artifact that intimated the transcendent. As the transcendent has become embroiled in the immanence of experience, one may very well need a shaman-critic to ferret out the transcendence and immanence blur through the adroit interpretation of a tarot spread. I think the art form for the tarot reader then is not in the creation of art as it is in the display of art through spreads and contexts of interpretation that interweave a person’s life story into the universal ur-story of the mysteries of ancient initiation. Ultimately in the tarot-reader as artist is in the erasure of death in life and life and death.

To continue with the problem of contexts outside of the cards themselves and the spreads that we invent to limit them or to give them semantic form, I know that Walt Amberstone has a tendency to read the cards when he is inventing deeper meanings for them as a embrace of abstraction. Personally I avoid abstraction. I see abstraction as one of the ways we build cages around wild natural symbols. Like the surrealists, I want to subtract the abstract into the image, or sub-sound morsel of old words with new meanings and new sounds with haunting allusions. So I guess, as much as I like analogy, the real cutting edge for tarot interpretation, is not the work of art hanging on the wall, nor is it the knowledgeable docent proudly on about the craftsmanship and historic contexts of the piece, nor the vacant eyed crowds who drink in unknowing visions into labyrinths of layered possibility, nor is it the building in which all this is taking place. No for me the art of tarot must be on the wall that holds all this together. When all the walls are transparent, transcendent, perhaps the cards will flutter away as doves become butterflies and butterflies poppies.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ:  I guess cognition is the ultimate cage, and under the light of current cognitive research, perhaps the body is the ultimate cage, since -as has been argued by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson- all the metaphors that compose our thoughts, both literal and abstract, seems to arise from our bodily experience of the world. Whatever we think the world is has been defined by the way the limits of our physical bodies delineate the kind of relationship we have with the world.

Lets say we have two cards: The Tower and La Papesse. We could say that The Tower is in front of La Papesse. In fact, if I tell you “here is La Papesse, sitting, with The Tower standing right in front of her” you can verify that statement with a single glance, yet it is not objectively true. Not only these two pieces of cardboard are not placed one on top of the other, but the whole idea of La Papesse having The Tower in front of her is the product of our embodied understanding of the world, elicited from the fact that we think of ourselves as having a front and a back. Since we understand space in terms of both what is in front and what is behind us, we project backs and fronts into all the objects in the world. We also project a spacial relationship between them based in the terms ‘back’ and ‘front’. There is no objective ‘frontness’ or ‘backness’ existing separated from our experience of the world. In fact, if we had the same body and spatial orientation of a tree, notions like ‘back’ and ‘front’ would be incomprehensible. If we had the same body and spatial orientation of a planet, notions like ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ would be unfathomable.

We usually speak of the “images in the cards” there we have another verifiable statement that isn’t objectively true. We experience our body as a container: we put stuff in it, we take stuff out of it. We travel through space as if space were a container: we enter in and out of rooms, halls, buildings or caves; and therefore we map the notions of ‘in’ and  ’out’ into everything. We see the card’s surface, the space inside the external frame, as a container. In truth, it isn’t. We don’t put the image inside of the card. We print them on top of it. We don’t even print images! We print dots of magenta, cyan and yellow whose different density across the surface of the card make us see all the other colors. But even when I tell you: “the Hermit’s cane is red” and you can visually verify that fact, we are talking of something that is not objectively true. There is no red, nor blue, nor magenta nor cyan existing separate from our experience of the world. What we have is the wavelength of light being reflected under certain lighting conditions, that is absorbed by the color cones in our retinas and processed by the neural circuitry of our brains. Perhaps, neural synapse is the ultimate cage!

In those graphics that illustrate a chemical synapse, the synapse in itself seems like a gap. Perhaps, this is that “space between metaphors” you so beautifully described. There is indeed something called the ‘synaptic cleft’ that seems to bridge two neurons. Perhaps, the neurotransmitters released into these synapses are the only objective truth, and even so, I am only saying that for poetic purposes!

But neural synapse can also be seen as a relationship, an exchange, which takes me back to art. We live now in a culture that manages an extended notion of art. That extended notion surpasses the traditional definition of artwork as an specific kind of medium, like painting, sculpture, drawing or photography. Given that now image-makers have a whole new range of (mass)media at their disposal, contemporary artists base their practice in ways of imparting any activity they do with an aesthetic intention. As a result of that, contemporary art is often about the relationship between the artists and the audience, through the artwork, and not about the objects themselves. Marcel Duchamp was the first to tackle the importance of context in our appreciation of art. By doing so, he put art back in the realm of magic. I am not saying he did so consciously, nor that he thought of art as magic. What I am saying is that his work made evident to which extent art is a system of superstitions based on evocation, as in sympathetic magic, and proximity, as in contagious magic. A couple of decades later, Joseph Beuys challenge Duchamp’s crypticism with a whole body of work that was shamanic in nature. One interesting aspect of Beuys’s work is that, while being shamanic, it was  also absolutely contemporary. No one felt that Beuys was going ‘native’. He wasn’t. He was pushing the boundaries of what was possible in art.

Beuys’s main tenet was “every man is an artist” by this he meant that the creative impulse is natural in man, and it can be, should be, expressed in all realms of human creation, from plumbing to dentistry, no only through what we understand as beaux arts. He also used to say that, if you want to become an artist, your first mistake would be to go out and buy a canvas and some paintings. If we fast forward a little to find Marina Abramovic saying the the art of the future will consist on the artist sending images from his mind directly to the audience’s mind, we can get a sense of the whole scope of what Beuys started. He worked through performance art and sculpture, but not our average joe’s kind of sculpture. Beuys’s theory of sculpture, which I find very useful to understand he Marseille tarot’s pips, is based on understanding the natural transition of materials, from a contracted to an expanded state, or viceversa. For Beuys, as for any shaman, the symbolic power of a substances was more important than the objects you create with them. After all, his pieces are still decomposing, traveling back and forward from contraction to expansion.

People like Duchamp or Beuys opened the possibility to see the artist’s practice as an attitude, a way of facing life, inside and outside the artist’s studio.

All this long-winded trip is my way of saying I am not really interested on limiting the artistic aspect of the tarot to its images, even when my only faith goes to the images. To me, the expressive medium is the relationship we engage in through the use of the tarot. Here, I feel the need to go back to the early uses of tarot in poetry via tarocchi appropriati. Tarocchi appropriati was a whole literary genre whose popularity survived for a couple of centuries. I even see Calvino’s ‘Castle of Crossed Destinies’ as a late example of it. Ross Caldwell’s working definition of tarocchi appropriati is: “using the trumps to describe something else”. It is quite open. I see lots of freedom in there. The person who gives one trump to each lady in a room, and improvises a small poem comparing each lady to the card he gave her, is mapping analogies between these women and their respective images. The fact that this process is almost indistinguishable from reading the tarot is what makes me suspect there is a relationship between the tarot and poetry that predates the relationship between the tarot and divination, always within the context of parlor games. Obviously, the expectations a lady would have about such poetic usage of the tarot aren’t the same she would have about fortunetelling. Such a poet doesn’t really run the risk of being told afterwards: ” Oh! But you didn’t say anything about Johnny. He left me seven years ago. He told me he despised me. But I want to know if there is any hope of getting back together with him”. Telling someone “you are like The Tower” could be just amusing, but it can also be edifying. It is all in the telling. Artistry is in the telling.

That seems the real ‘material’ on which we could erect the ‘art’ of tarot. That seems to be the trampoline from where to jump forward. The problem with trampolines is that you have to find the right point of inflection if you really want to jump. Otherwise it won’t take you were you need to go. I don’t think I have found that point of inflection yet.

Now, allow me to contradict myself. Although I don’t want to reduce the art of tarot to the crafting of tarot-like images, my love for the tarot begins, and ends, with the images. Along all these conversations I have had, a question has unexpectedly emerged to become somehow fundamental. I am going to ask that question to you now:

What -if anything- do you expect from images?

PAUL NAGY: Cognitive psychology became au-courant after I had done my survey studies of psychology. What I cut my cognitive teeth on was the language of psychoanalysis, and of course, analytical psychology. I also came of age, and I was studying cultural anthropology, when Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism was all the rage. In fact I met the taciturn anthropologist when he visited San Francisco. I remember a lecture he gave in which he tried to give a learned general audience an overview of structuralism. What I remember most from that talk was his extended analogy of his structuralism (‘it’s good to think’) with music. It was an ornate comparison that showed that for Lévi-Strauss there is a natural movement, with repetitions, and other forms of self-referential architecture, that makes up his attempt to map the unconscious of the collective dreams of peoples in their myths and folk stories.

Part of the reason for this remembrance is that I never became fully or deeply fascinated with the results of cognitive psychology. But I do agree with you, on general evidence, our experience as bodies in the world sets the universal metaphors in our languages. One of my favorite reference books, still in print, is by Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History of Ideas, (1950). Here a number of simple words are shown in their variety of stems- to reveal certain general categories of human experience. Another work by a Hungarian psychoanalyst, Theodore Thass-Thienemann,  The Interpretation of Language: Volume 1 Understanding the Symbolic Meaning of Language and The Interpretation of Language: Volume 2 Understanding the Unconscious Meaning of Language. Thass-Thienemann is drunk on the secret meanings of words and their primitive and infantile associations. For instance, secret, as to not divulge, is related to the bodily process of secrete, that the effuse and effluvia of the body, are not to be spoken of. That they carry with them energies, or effigies of the person who produced them.

I think cognition is not the pivotal point of symbol as you suggest. I tend to want to look a little more into the brain stem, the language of the id, unconscious processes that only thrive in the twilight of semi-cognitive ignitions. Something that is energetic, the throb of sensation that synthesizes into lived feelings and forms. In other words, the higher functions of discrimination, especially as refined through institutional learning and guilds of knowledge may obscure of their messy antecedents. Still the body is the seat of natural magic.

Once at a Wiccan summercamp I gave a workshop on minimalist magic. Basically I said that witches have become too preoccupied with magical implements, herbs, stones and other elements. But it is important to recognize that our body carries with it all the magical properties we actually need. I went through the senses showing how each is a body and an element that is already empowered with profound charisma. I showed how the fingers and arms, hands and feet and legs, all represent magical relations with the earth and the air. That our spit, tears, and piss is water, our snot, mud, our skin, dirt. Our bones are stones. Our voice, the wind, our mouth, origin of the winds, etc. Our ears are wings. Sound is flight. Our eyes open the light. Eyes are globes like sun and moon. Smell is eating wind. Divination as minimalist magic, with an ‘anal log’ to the body alone, might very well be shit. And it may also be the light of the imagination. The fire is in the hearth of our skull.

And in minimalist magic, the imagination impregnates all elements of the body with the mana of magic. Even in this rankly materialistic view of magic, I am a Platonist at heart, which means that it is consciousness that consecrates; awareness that makes the wary quick; attention that touches our intentions into acts. That it is important to recognize that we should consecrate the unadorned body and even connect our ritual artifacts with the primal magic of the body rather than the other way around.

Thinking of the tarot and the example of the structural way you suggested one read The Tower and La Papesse. I do not think of tarot so much as some element of our body; say patches of skin, as perhaps, one removed from the body, an aspect of clothing. The naked body is not the social body, except in the intimacy of lovers or family or in the anonymity of orgy. (An orgy is a suspension of the usual decorum related to sexual congress.) Tarot cards are civilized in the way that clothing is. In the hand you asked me what I expect of the image, to me the image is the end product of the imagination which is the process of blending sensations into forms remembered and conjectured.

Unlike the entrails of chickens, the ripped open body of another, that tarot cards are a nice accoutrement to our clothing. Of course clothing is an extension of our skin. But here our skin is hidden by the symbols of our gender, social class, occupation, and other advertisements and messages are clothing broadcasts. Perhaps we should consider the divination of tarot cards one remove from the primordial gist of the naked body. Here we are civilizing the sacrifice of the chicken into a shuffle of cards. The game of a flight or fight becomes the gaming analogy, which you are so fond of, where the risk of tooth and claw is tamed and reproduced in bet of risk in high or low draw. Likewise the tarocchi appropriati, where persons become cards and cards that personas of people. This is storytelling as make-believe. However make-believe is more thrilling one it seems real. Hence the gambling analogy holds the make-believe at bay by the gambler’s honor to pay his debts. Gambling then is a sort of form of hunting, a ritualized style of hunting when game has become livestock.

As much as our experiences ever wed to the basic infantile aspects of experience, slowly extended to the world, but always at core, our bodily experience at base, then the image is the reduction of all the extensions and possibilities back to the moment of inception, where it connects us with the first inklings of awareness that wrinkles out of our brow and sucking instinct.

In the tarot images, we have their historic purport and we have our idiosyncratic projections of what the images seem at any particular reading. There are many levels that one can read some of the classic tarots. At this year’s Readers Studio, Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone demonstrated reading cards with only a few associative elements. In one case we were given the Golden Dawn official color designations and we related them to the RWS background colors. We were also asked to focus on the functional meaning of the clothes worn by the images in the RWS cards. Once we had our chart of range of elements of clothing, we could offer an easy reading of the cards just referencing those associations and none other.

In another exercise, a sort of elaborate gestalt dialogue with the card images, where we isolate the various images in their individuality and have them speak to us and to one another in a free associating conversation. I, through the nine of swords, had the palms of the hands on the face of the sitting up figure speak to the eyes that it was comforting in its shame and fear. The swords became Venetian blinds that were steps on Jacob’s ladder and the quilt comforter was the Milky Way showing us our afterlife destination. The Satyr carved on the bench emphasize that this shame was not personal but  recognition of the soul that it does not know the extent of either its sublimity or its depravity. Sure I think that it makes sense to discover the formal meanings of the card images but I also think that it makes sense to allow them to become alive and tell us what they mean a new each time we see them. Because for me ultimately, the images are not the fixed forms on the cards, but are rather vivid originals that are ever transmogrifying in our imagination.

Therefore I forgive images there fixity in the cards, because I know that they are there merely to remind and stimulate the ur-image in my mind-heart. And this mind and heart is full of learned nonsense and innocent wonder that will always seek to see the new in the image, not only on the card but in my mind, for it is in that linking that the real tarot reading thinking takes place to reveal things that I might not otherwise know and perhaps to revile knowledge into its unknowing…

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I would like to know more about you meeting Ginsberg, and about the feeling of that San Francisco.

Jodorowsky tells a story that may or may not be real, of him meeting Ginsberg twice. The second time was in San Francisco. Jodoroswky boarded a cable card and thee he was: Allen Ginsber sitting on the last row, playing some sort of small piano and saying poems. The driver told Jodorowsky that Ginsberg did that evey afternoon to “heal the city”. Jodorowsky links that event with his own desire of giving readings for free.

PAUL NAGY: Let me remind you, that my relationship was with the surrealist poet Philip Lamantia, and not in any way, Allen Ginsberg. And I do not wish to exaggerate my friendship with Lamantia. It was a semblance as I eulogized it.

However because I hung out as a adolescent in North Beach and parts of Skid Row, then around Third St. and Howard, and where my friends live was near Six Street and Folsom, not too many blocks from where my father was born and where he worked for many years as an accountant at a tire company. How I ended up there is a complex story that might seem deservedly unique, if I did not know how intensely other adolescents discover their lives.

At the dawn of adolescence and the end of childhood came from the during the turning years of the seventh and eighth grades, junior high school. I had had a stormy childhood that was haunted by below are academic performance and serious failures to socialize. One way I addressed this deficit was developing the dyadic, alter-ego friendship with another disturbed use, and together we sailed through adolescence into young adulthood. My friend, Mike and I discovered the necessity of creating a persona. Neither of us had fathers in our lives and we knew we needed the direction of men to help us grow into men ourselves. We were both precocious and read books well beyond our years. We discovered Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis and knew that we needed a ‘father-image’. We also discovered the beats. This is about 1962, just before a North Beach went topless. My own father had spent a year in county jail and had some friends from jail that ran some of the nightclubs in North Beach. With my friend Mike I found a way to connect to the street people that hung out in the North Beach neighborhoods. For Mike it was finding a connection for marijuana. For me I discovered City Lights Bookstore, and both Mike and myself read the beats, Howel, I read many times to myself when I was around 13-14 years old. I thought of Allen Ginsberg as the ‘conscience of America’. I would occasionally wait tables, at a little dive called, The Coffee and Confusion, which in the evenings served up a rag-tag selection of folk music. There was pre-Beatles, a slight wave of new folk music. I even stood up a few afternoons and read my exceptionally horrendous poetry. From some of the people that hung out at the Trieste, we met some people who lived on Six Street, which if you know San Francisco geography, is quite a ways from North Beach. Also I did not grow up anywhere near North Beach, and it took a good 45 minutes on streetcar and bus to get to that part of the town. My friend Mike was the outgoing one. And I was profoundly shy and self-defended. The emphasis here is that as adolescence we were in a bric-a-brac way creating the legend of who we were to be as adults. We were going to be beatniks.

During that time in North Beach, there were not too many beatniks around. Bob Kaufman, very much a meth- head, was there. The first poetry reading I went to had Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patton, Michael McClure, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti as principal readers for the residents of Marin City. Mike and I met many street people in those days, winos, whores, hustlers, junkies, bluesmen, pimps, queers. Mike was always chasing down the drug. First it was pot, and then other drugs, which were his talisman to charisma. I hung around as a shadow. An oracular voice, that announced the Emperor had no clothes. I listened closely and watched fervently and thought deeply about what I saw and heard. And yet I was only there on the actions of my friend. Myself, that was a mystery I knew I would dance with for the rest of my life. The Haight-Ashbury was a neighborhood that we also visited many times, and even were in a street gang there, that you still like to attack hippies. When the Haight-Ashbury exploded upon the consciousness of America, I was already living in an ashram in Nevada. My friend Mike and I were drifting apart. He became a petty criminal and drug addict, not living past age of 25. I think I saw him for the last time when he was 23. He had been imprisoned several times. And his body was much broken from drug abuse and beatings he had received in his criminal life. In fact most of the cohorts I hung out with did not survive the heyday of the Haight.

I cannot say that I made any inroads into beatnik San Francisco. By the time the hippie ethos arose, I was ready to leave the beat behind for a cloistered seeking of ultimate reality. By that time I was clearly a mystic, which is still the best adjective to describe myself. Of course I am a mystic without religion, a mystic without a personal God, a mystic without fellow travelers, on a road of uncertain demarcations. After almost 2 years as a yogi, I set myself free from another myth, I was the myth of a baby beatnik, then the myth of a renunciation yogi, later after I met a mentor, I was involved for three years in a cult of Tantric Buddhist shamanic mountain climbing and fire walking, officially known as Kailash Shugendo. During which time I attended junior-college and as I ended my exclusive cultic Association with Kailash Shugendo, I met my college friend*, about 1972, who introduced me to surrealism and who had grown up on the edges of the San Francisco Renaissance poetry scene. His father was a friend of Kenneth Rexroth. Friend enough, to be able to use Rexroth’s name on a Union Street used bookstore called Kenneth Rexroth books. My friend acted as a bridge for me into my early adolescence and legendary self-making as beatnik. I now have some initiations and a more solid sense of self direction in terms of interests. I was studying cultural anthropology and going to apply it to the study of the new religions that I had been so involved with in my post adolescence. My friend introduced me to Lamantia. He also introduced me to other people in and around North Beach in the early 70s.

Now my friend knew Allen Ginsberg quite well as he had occasionally attended parties that my friend’s parents had thrown in the 1960s. So over the years I heard many stories about Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and was given an oral history of the San Francisco literary scene, especially seen from the ghetto of North Beach. I had then no pretenses to being a poet or a writer, so I would listen to other people pontificate in that area. In the late 70s I lived in North Beach myself for about two years, just before I went to Scotland to study the mysticism of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi.

In the middle 80s, I believe, I was at a poetry reading where Philip Lamantia was reading, and Allen Ginsberg, came up to introduce Philip to some aspiring young poets. I was introduced to Allen, who I had met several times before in noncommittal ways. I said to him something like “Nice seeing you again, Allen!” to which Allen replied, “I don’t know you! I have never seen you before! I’m not going to let this pass. I despise people like you who claim to know me when I know that I do not know you!”

So my last and only memorable encounter with Allen Ginsberg is his insisting that he had never met me before and that I was a poseur! I was humiliated in front of Nancy and Philip. And I could read Philip well enough to know that he was embarrassed for me.  Of course, I offered no defense. I did laugh the other day, when I read one scholar of the beat generation who said that one was a beatnik or not was whether Allen Ginsberg said you were a beatnik or not!

In my youthful, self-making, I embraced becoming a beatnik. Only in middle-age, to be denounced by the Pope of Beatitude himself, I am nothing, a mere poseur. Now as a mystic, being a mere nothing is quite a comfort.

What does the tarot say? One card draw: Ace of Discs (Thoth Tarot). Allen was unknowingly releasing me from my youthful dream of beatnik becoming!

Now I may well become a Tarot reader, a poseur, perhaps, definitely, a know-it-all! Of course I am not a true know-it-all, just an omnivorous hermeneut.

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Before I ask you my final question, I want to thank you for what has been one of the most delightful dialogues I have had so far.

These days I am struggling at explaining certain idea: I suspect that the magician’s craft is founded in developing an ‘epistemological humility’ (To borrow a term from Michael Hurst). This is achieved by understanding, and accepting, the limits of cognition and the way cognition fails prey of a series of daily illusions we often cannot consciously control. To guard the boundary between reality and the other-world is to remain alert at the limits of perception. But the magician’s craft would be incomplete, his aim would fail short, if he would devote himself to unmask our senses alone. For the magician to go around saying: “Don’t trust your senses, they can be fooled. Half of what you remember, you made it up”. Is important, but it is also contractive and a little ungiving. The magician’s craft becomes whole if he can use these cognitive illusions to create something with them. Something better than disenchantment. Otherwise one runs the risk of ending, as Serbian poet Milorad Pavic would say: “Neither a magus to yourself nor to us a prophet”

What do you want to be when you grow up?

PAUL NAGY: You began our exchange with a simple but directive question: what did I want from Tarot? My first reaction was that I did not want anything of Tarot. I did not desire tarot to liberate me from the quagmire of myself or the marginality of my circumstance. I did not want to win friends or influence people by tarot reading, though I do enjoy the reading of tarot as a way to escape from incessant small talk.

Nor did tarot’s effect of generating impending discernment into people’s lives and problems that seems like magic and invoke creditable sensations that demonstrate an almost proof of uncanny percipience for people who eschew the mystic, because for me mystery is matter-of-fact and a habit-of-understanding.

I want to see if I can find a way to let tarot speak on many levels at once so that the reader is challenged with every moment as unique and unlike any other. Perhaps like the phenomenologist, I want to teach myself and perhaps some other tarotists to read cards by bracketing the rote associations and opening to the effulgent symbolic in unique circumstances. I plan to explore the evolving significance of card readings as I apply it to the wisdom tradition from which tarot emerged. So far I claim no method for this inquiry, and I am not certain I am in search of one. I may perhaps discover or invent or borrow workable protocols to proceed with this project, but as of now it is just a pipe scheme.

Metaphors to Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff are remarkably successful expositions of how our language derives out of the fundamentals of universal experience based on living in the world through our senses. In many ways they do with modern linguistic theory integrated with behavioral and cognitive science what a previous generation attempted to do through phenomenology, psychoanalysis and logical positivism. Theodore Thass-Thienemann is now remembered for his two volume work, The Interpretation of Language that explores the cornucopia words as betrayed in semantic ambivalences and transmogrifications. The two volumes were composed to understand the etymologies of words as reflective of the development of the psyche and aspects of universal experience. The first volume is based on the conviction that understanding herbal symbolism is a basic form of knowledge. Understanding the roots of words, sort of like understanding images, opens us to linguistic symbolism, verbal representations that the author says is analogous to arithmetic that is the basis of the mathematics of the sciences. Thass-Thienemann claimed his etymologies and verbal symbols explore the root concepts and language. Experience of the human body represents the bed rock not only of human development individually, but also sets up the warp and woof by which words evolve their extended meaning. In his second volume, the author explores fundamental elements of human experience, again as reflected in core words that deal with the universals of culture, of course in this case the culture is psychoanalytically informed. The reason I am alluding to Thass-Thienemann’s work is that he brings in elements of introspection and dream analysis that are more reductively dealt with by Lakoff and Johnson.

I do enjoy a good magic show. The stage illusionist, even the three-card-monty hustle, plays with my perceptions, as I daily demonstrate to myself if no one other, the passive attention that can be easily misdirected by the distracting movements and the false constructions of my own mind. Even being shown how the illusion works, my mind will not necessarily liberate me from the habits of my misperceptions. Am I so much addicted to the illusion? It must be a seductive delight. Beside myself, how many of us share this lemming-like inclination?

Some neuroscientists claim that our connecting things causally because of their near contiguous appearance are a false creation of perception that constructs continuity to our perceptions when reality may have no such causal connection. Much persistent prejudice is based on this. The belief that skin pigment says something about the character of people is false though it is true people behave differently to one another based on perceived race, even when such people would not want to be racist.

One approach to the meaning of nirvana is explained as the ability to see how the magic lantern show of our misperceptions can be broken so we just see what is and do not chase false associative stories or causes by linking discreet instants as a flow.

Every instant is it own discreet universe which is complete as is, without being joined, attached, and entrained to its antecedent or subsequent instants. Even the great wheel of samsara suffering (meaning ‘continuous movement’ or ‘incessant flowing’) never stops until we recognize it never moves and never has moved and nothing has ever arisen or ceased arising because such a story is told by the barren woman’s child who is blind and mute.

It is also true that the images on tarot cards may well be blind and mute yet they speak to some of us of universes of significance and possibility, hope and love. Perhaps somewhere between the flame and the wind that snuffs it out. A wind so still it never blew and always promises to quench a flame indistinguishable from dark.

When I grow up? I want tarot to blow out the flame.

Thank you for engaging me in this conversation. I think through this process I have come to a better understanding of what I am trying to do. And I do not think, I would have this, if it hadn’t been for our exchange of ideas.

I have tried to clarify my understanding of how tarot may become a valid way for people to recognize occult phenomena in their life. Another less arcane way of putting this is to say that recognition of the occult can be awakening to the effects of the unconscious in our life. As we awaken, to the possibility that there are aspects of our selves that are permanently never seen directly, and yet whose effects are felt and manifest in our everyday life, we may come to an appreciation that are consciousness is much more than directed ego awareness. Furthermore I hope that awakening to the unconscious, through learning how to interact with natural symbols, which are fundamentally imaginative interjects of our sensate life recombined in our reflective life of memory and experience, I hope some tarot readers will become aware of how the occult can evolve into a profoundly transforming experience of the unity of the self and the world through the esoteric. The esoteric is fundamentally a holistic grasp of awareness as it is in itself. This awareness is transcendent and immanent beyond any duality. One could say that the human mind and reason are but shadows to esoteric realization. No set of tarot cards can in themselves awaken us to our own root mind, much less the root of the root of pure awareness without a second and without qualification. Even with this obvious point, study of the tarot when done in conjunction with other hermetic exercises can offer some of us the liberating possibility of being transformed by the esoteric.

When I grow up? Tarot will blow out the flame.

The flame blows out.

There is no flame.

No flame ever was or ever will be.

There never was a flame.

Nor tarot.

New York - North Carolina, June 2010.

Paul Nagy’s web site is: www.tarothermeneutics.com

* In the course of the above conversation, Stephen Schwartz was kind enough to make the following precision about some of Paul Nagy’s comments: Hello Mr. Enriquez I am the person mentioned by Paul whose father was involved in a bookselling enterprise with Kenneth Rexroth.  Rexroth and my father, Horace Schwartz, had been friends for a long time my father published the first edition of R’s long poem THOU SHALT NOT KILL of which I always believed Gins’s HOWL was imitative.  My father also knew Lamantia well and in 1968 or 1969 I was introduced to Lamantia, with whom I was close for some years. Kenneth Patton should be Patchen.  I had grown up closer to the midst of the SF poetry scene than to its edges — my father also published Ferlinghetti’s first poems to appear in print.  Ginsberg did not attend parties held by my parents — rather, my parents attended dinners hosted by Rexroth at which Ginsberg and all the rest were guests.  I met Ginsberg in the company of Ferlinghetti around 1966. I did not consider myself a beatnik.  I would say that given his publication enterprise through City Lights Ferlinghetti had more authority to decided who was or was not a beatnik but I don’t remember anybody competing for the title who was in the original circle.  Rexroth’s group, Robert Duncan’s circle, and the friends of Jack Spicer were influential but did not consider themselves beatniks. The small instrument Allen G. carried around with him was a harmonium, which as I understand it he had picked up in India. Best wishes Stephen Schwartz