Your Weight and Fate

Victoria Regina Tarot – [del.icio.us]

Madinkbeard – Castle of Crossed Destinies: Review – [del.icio.us]

I’ve been thinking a lot about tarot cards recently. Calvino used the tarot as a story-generating machine, which sounds impressive at first mention but, as Derik Badman says in his review of The Castle of Crossed Destinies, “What else is fortune-telling?” A tarot reading is an organizing system for turning one’s reality into a story. It’s also a game, an arena of play circumscribed by ritual, where the activity, shared by reader and querent, is the negotiation of a plausible narrative from the randomly-chosen cards.

All of which is pretty obvious, I guess. But what fascinates me is the idea of the tarot as grand explainer, as the generator not of “play” but of “truth”: a game that functions in part as a discrete activity within the magic circle, but exceeds those boundaries as a system that enforces a structure, a fictional lens, on that outside world.