I am lucky, but also grateful to all those who honor me with their participation, directly or indirectly.

ALAIN JACOBS: How may I introduce you to French people who still do not know you: a poet, a tarot-reader, a fortune-teller, a magician…?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: The Self is a work of fiction. Now that I have stopped doing tarot readings, I am about to have new business cards made. Business cards are magical objects that operate under the principle of contagion magic. I will leave the cards blank: no name, no phone number, no address, no title; but I will whisper my name on them. That way they will become an extension of myself. I hope to be visible but absent.

ALAIN JACOBS: May I ask you a similar question to the one you once asked Jean-Claude Flornoy: do you remember your first kiss with the tarot?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I wish I could predict the past. That way I could make up a better story! I simply saw tarot cards, for the first time, in a book about print-making. There was nothing extraordinary about the event.

It wasn’t so much about having a revelation the first time I saw the tarots. They key is to understand how I was able go back to these images again and again over a period of years. These images became terra firme. Our culture doesn’t make images like that anymore because now artists simply make whatever image they fancy that day. We are a culture that produces disposable images.

I am very fond of my memories of that moment in my life. I was 17 or 18, studying graphic design. It was the moment in which I found many of the images that made me who I am. At that time the only places to get tarot cards in Caracas, where I come from, were the ‘botánicas’, the stores where people who practices Santería go to get their materials. Those places fascinated me from an aesthetic point of view.

Along with armadillo tails, small tools made out of cast-iron, weird saints, spells and bath salts with crude labels on them; these stores sold Spanish playing cards for divination, and the Marseille tarot.

ALAIN JACOBS: Did you always use a “Marseille” tarot or did you first use the famous Rider-Waite?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: You can look at many things just passing by and be always thrilled by these new sightings, or you can circle the same things over and over and over. Circling never happens in circles but follows a spiral, so the same angle is never actually the same angle, even if the contours look familiar.

Everybody can do pretty much the same things with any tarot deck. I can only do what I do with the tarot de Marseille.

ALAIN JACOBS: It seems to me you are an alien but a real breath of fresh air for your entourage, those who make comments about you… Do you understand that state and is it easy to go beyond that?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Perhaps I am like the Jean Dodal: F·P·LE·TRANGE·  One can’t be oneself without the others.

ALAIN JACOBS: You evoke the poetry of the tarot?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Before working with the tarots I never cared for poetry. As a matter of fact, it is possible that I still don’t care for it. I can’t stand poems that talk about feelings, or poets trying to send me a message through poetry. To me poetry is a potential built in language, poetry is language happening. Poetry is not far from pottery because language is a very malleable material. It can be totally flat, or it can be deep. It can be opaque, reflective or transparent. It can become forms that one recognizes, if one speaks the language, or strange forms that are totally foreign if one doesn’t.

At some point every person who looks at the tarot de Marseille becomes aware of the fact that there is wordplay in the titles of the trumps. Most people accept these wordplays as part of some sort of folklore and that’s the end of it. I decided to take these wordplays as an invitation to explore the connection between tarot and poetry. Thanks to that, I discovered they belong to a very longevous French literary tradition that can be traced back to the Provençal troubadours and that is still alive today. From René Marot to the OuLiPo group, we have people playing with the ambiguities of language, just as it is suggested in names of the tarot de Marseille. I am particularly interested in a few authors who lived in the transition between the 19th and the 20th centuries: Claude Sosthene Grasset d’Orcet, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, René Guénon, and Fulcanelli. All of these authors understood that wordplay (homophony, anagrams, palindromes, rebuses, etc) was a way to access language’s potential to take us beyond our conscious choices. It is of special interest to me that half of them were writers and the other half were esotericists. Guénon and Fulcanelli called this the “language of the birds”. Fulcanelly also called it the “Phonetic Cabala”, not because it had anything to do with the Hebrew  Kabbalah, but because he heard “caballus” (horse) in “cabala”, which lead him to think that every word can be a Trojan horse. Isn’t that a beautiful thought? I am interested in wordplay as a contemplative practice, which means I am looking for the oracular value of language.

ALAIN JACOBS: How can poetry help to read tarot?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Soon enough one realizes that the images of the Marseille tarot can be activated in the same way one plays with words. In a sense, rhyme and rhythm happen when we apply the rules of sympathetic magic to language. Then, if you break a word apart and put it back together with another word, you are practicing contagion magic. The same strategies can be applied, at a visual level, to the trumps. The World’s mandorla is the crown we see in the Ace of swords. Temperance’s water is the fire that we see in The Tower… We could say these things rhyme. These are all operations of visual magic: similia similubus… , the transformation of an element into another one is a transformation of substances, where the resultant form always contains the original element. If the Ace de deniers was originally in Le Bateleur’s hand, then the Ace de Deniers contains Le Bateleur. That way, the visual process becomes a thought-process. As a contemplative practice these visual events have the power to bring us to the present. To me they are a means in themselves. Then of course, one could imagine that these abstract events are addressing practical events in our lives. One trump mirrors another trump. In turn, these trumps could mirror our reality.

Poetry has the virtue of not being the solution for anything. That is why I trust it. People waste too much time trying to see their future in the tarots. I rather use the tarots to deliver me from the fear of the future.

ALAIN JACOBS: On the Tarology DVD, you say we need to be dumb to speak the language of the tarot… what did you mean?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: I mean we could look at the tarots with our eyes instead of our opinions. Rather than trying to “understand” the tarot, we could try to enjoy it.

ALAIN JACOBS: You expressed another interesting idea: we do not need to change the cards but we can update what we think about the cards. Is it possible without any a strong imagination, without being able to deal with abstract ideas?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: The fortune teller of the future will predict the future of fortune telling. A prediction is always a form of creation. Contemporary shamanism shouldn’t be about “going native”. If our landscape is made of billboards, then Helvetica must be as a magical as eagle feathers.

You pose an interesting dilemma: can we update our thinking without a strong imagination and without being able to deal with abstract ideas? I guess not. But if you don’t possess a strong imagination and you are unable to deal with abstract ideas, you probably won’t have the urge to update your thinking in the first place!

I could take you to see a sunset or I could take you to a room without windows and tell you everything I have thought about sunsets. Which one do you prefer? It takes a while to accept that some people prefers the room without windows. To each its own.

ALAIN JACOBS: You have learned that we do not make images but images make us. What can we understand from that?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: We have to find ourselves in the forms of the world. It is essential to find these images -sounds and sightings- we can call “home”. This is, after we are done washing dishes!

ALAIN JACOBS: Some say tarot is the master. How useful are tarot classes and books? What is your purpose when you give lessons (if you do so)?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Initially, the tarot stood for everything I didn’t believe in. It didn’t interest me until I could do it in a different way, and it came from poetry. The issue with language is that it is either poetry or fiction. Either we witness language as a direct, concrete, experience, or we are reading someone else’s fables. Once we are done dealing with survival: food, shelter, etc, the only thing left for us to do is to amuse ourselves. I would write down everything that is not strict survival as amusement, including art, religion, spirituality and philosophy.

I am working with a group of people now. We are in daily conversation among ourselves, and we also are in daily conversation with the forms of images and letters. Through the tarot we witness the life of symbols. For the purpose of our work together these people “forget” they want to do tarot readings and choose instead to carry a tarot in their pockets to keep them warm. Together we find amusement in playing with images as if they were words and playing with words as if they were images. There is nothing grandiose in this. It is just a matter of having a little faith in useless things.

ALAIN JACOBS: Are the people following your lessons waiting for something special? Do you observe and do you have to “fight” divinatory reflexes from them?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Before we start working together, the person and I make clear that we are there to experience the joy of forms. I am very lucky. The people working with me surprise me daily in extraordinary ways. For example, look at the word MAYBE. “Maybe” denotes a possibility, but also a doubt. Then, my friend Paul Nagy noticed something: you can find a BEE in MAYBE. That way a doubt becomes an insect. A bee can be as nagging as a doubt, but here is the thing: once you have a BEE, the bee suggests the idea of FLOWERS. See? Through wordplay we turned a doubt into a flower.

That is the kind of experience we are after. The people who take my lessons want to turn doubts into flowers. That wouldn’t be possible without having the (Marseille) tarot as a furnace, keeping language at its melting temperature by suggesting that the alphabet is also a tarot deck that can be shuffled, rearranged, broken into bits that once put back together become new ideas, new images, new sightings.

So, that is what we do in my lessons. We amuse ourselves.

ALAIN JACOBS:  I have the feeling all card-readers make divination (maybe an obsolete word), because it is always a game in wich the reader tries to guess the “presence in the world” of the querent (feelings / actions) and to deliver it in an answer. What do you think about that idea, that impression?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: A tarot reading is a self-working illusion. Readers tend to take too much credit for what they do. The tongue speaks lead. It is the ear the one that hears gold.

ALAIN JACOBS: Could you give some simple tips and advice to those wanting to read tarot differently … or for the first time?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Simple: at some point some people misread a silly game of cards as an oracle, creating a whole esoteric tradition. So, instead of following the tradition, do your own misreading. Do it AS IF, not AS IS. By that I mean that we ought to keep in mind that our misreading, amusing as it may be, will be as misguided as any of the previous ones. I personally read the tarot AS IF it is poetry, but I don’t claim that IT IS poetry, nor that everybody should do like I do. I am not saying the tarot was invented to answer the needs of the Parnassian poets nor that I found the “truth” about the trumps. I just found a way to play with the tarot that amuses me. Those who are looking for the truth should try gardening, or baking. Outside that, all we have are enchanting mental models. We must own our myths and not  let our myths own us. That also means we must claim responsibility for our metaphors.

ALAIN JACOBS: You made me discover a brand new dimension in tarots: fun! To me, this is probably the most important additional great dimension you bring to tarot. I now know we can play with the cards… in so many ways.For example, few know about tarocchi appropriati…

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Tarocchi appropriati was a game in which a person would improvise poetry about another person, based on the tarot trumps. The use of tarot as a poetic engine started centuries before the tarot was used as a fortunetelling gadget and it extends into the 20th century, in the work of people like Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Victor Coleman, Robert Creeley, John Wieners, Jack Spicer, George Bowering, Frank Davey, John Cage, André Bretón, Italo Calvino… Tanya Joyce has put together a very nice collection of tarot-based poetry made by tarot practitioners from the San Francisco Area. Then of course, the tarots are still used for gambling in many countries. You also have people like Jeaninne Carson, leaving cards around New York city for people to find, which could propitiate a fantastic game of derailments, a Situationist détournement.

Fortunetelling is another game of chance. Even this conversation is a game of tarots!

ALAIN JACOBS: I saw a funny example on how to use the tarot to communicate on the webpage of Bertrand Saint-Guillain. He asked his Facebook friends to find the name of the card-maker… Most important about that example: the Pope is actually leaving!

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: There is a level of direct comprehension in which images speak to us. So, in that example, we see a man dressed as pope, then a man walking away, with all his belongings in a little bag. His acolytes have turned into a stray dog. It is a very clear narrative.

looking at these two trumps I also hear POP FULL, like the cork of a bottle that gets expelled after the pressure builds up.

ALAIN JACOBS: I think you had the feeling the vieville should be read in another way; did you finally find how?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: If you take any tarot de Marseille and compare Le Soleil with Le Diable you will fill find very clear visual affinities. These affinities allow us to group certain elements in these two cards together and detect a pattern, a transformation, or an action: the sun, beatifically absent, becomes a cartoonish but obscene presence interrupting the embrace of two persons that now have become chained beasts. By putting these two trumps together we can experience the transformation of those symbols and assign a narrative quality to it. The entire tarot de Marseille is built in such way. If you take the devil and the sun from the Jacques Vieville you won’t see those affinities. Nothing in the Green devil reminds us of the child riding a horse we see in the sun card. The visual language we detect in the tarot de Marseille doesn’t seem to be present in the Vieville. The names of the trumps are also absent in the Vieville. In exchange, we are given a very intriguing “poem”, a text written on the Ace de Coins and in the two of cups. This is my absolute favorite text about the tarot. That text names some of the trumps while placing them within the context of some sort of lament, prayer, or narrative. That is very close to a tarocchi appropriati as we see them done with the Italian decks. I like to think that mister Vieville left us in that text a suggestion about how to play with these trumps.

ALAIN JACOBS: You have just published two books about your own conversations. Did you have a specific idea about them and what did you take back from them?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: A conversation is an intersection, a crossroad. You and I are meeting in this precise point to conduct an exchange and keep going, hopefully charged, reloaded, or even burdened by our mutual contact. All the conversations I conducted between 2010 and 2012 with several different authors and members of the tarot community have been compiled by Eye Corner Press in a two volume set titled EN TEREX IT and EX ITENT TER.

The sign for a crossroad is the X. The X marks the spot. In New York, all the parking garages have these huge signs that read ENTER / EXIT. I liked how the X, the crossroad, was represented in the word EXIT; but you can’t exit an intersection without entering it first. That is why I chose to name my books with alterations of the words ENTER / EXIT. The two books are twins, an analogy of Le Soleil, which in itself is an analogy of the kind of exchange you and I are having here.

ALAIN JACOBS: As time goes by, I feel more delighted and comforted by just looking at the Tarot’s “profound Beauty”… no question, no answer, no words. Is this the end?

ENRIQUE ENRIQUEZ: Perhaps we need to keep tarot cards with us for the same reason we keep fireplaces: to keep us warm, to counter darkness… there is no need to ask the fire about lottery numbers. We don’t need to interpret a flame to feel its warmth. We simply need to sit close enough to let the fire comfort our bones, but not so close that we will get us burned.

This conversation deserves a compliment (par Mnémosyne):

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