Yannick Trapman-O'Brien
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Belated; The October Excerpt
🕑 Added 2023-11-04 17:00:05 +0000 UTCHey All,
Last month I read The Cloisters, by Katy Hay, hoping for a soft and entertaining entry into understanding tarot. I struggled a fair bit with getting an excerpt, because in truth the book did not provide what I was hoping. It's a fun enough read, and if you're into the genre of Dark Academia (which, as I have discovered this month, exists apparently), you may have a good time. There's even an excerpt I've submitted a rights request for to option for The Telelibrary. But overall, I struggled a bit with the depictions of New York City and of Tarot, as both felt to me insubstantial, or so colored by what the author needed them to be for the narrative that I had no direct impression of them as experiences.
But sometimes not getting what you want is instructive towards finding out what you do, and in this case, leaving the book feeling no more informed made me realize that aside from concrete history of the practice, what I was really shopping for a sense of how it feels to do it, and what readings feel like. Careful readers will note that I'm not actually trying to learn how to do a reading, and am instead lurking to see what insights I can nab without having to study a whole distinct practice. In this way I can have some sympathy for the author; the characters in Hay's book have a very narrow, particular relationship to Tarot, which serves the driving arc of the story and the philosophical thread that Hays wanted to follow.
In all cases, this month, I found better answers here:
A Brief History of Tarot - LearnReligions.com (the url alone is a novel unto itself)
Etteilla’s Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789) - Public Domain Review
What Tarot Cards Tell You - Unladylike (Podcast- also includes like 10 research sources)
Using Tarot in Psychotherapy - Psych Central (curious article, with bangers like this:
"research has shown that when used in therapy, metaphors were especially effective when clients were asked to participate in developing and describing them in relation with their circumstances"
—which has an awful lot of overlap with how I think about making participants into co-authors of their experience.
