Literary Tarot Project

When I was young, I loved every silly fortune-telling method: the magic 8 ball, origami

fortune tellers, and especially M.A.S.H. (would I have 2 children or 10?!) When I first encountered tarot cards, I found it exciting how the complex picture cards could paint the future. However, the depth of knowledge needed to fluently interpret the cards was overwhelming—especially since the Rider Waite deck did not evoke emotional or intuitive reactions for me.

In my thirties, I encountered tarot cards again on a trip with a couple of close friends. Instead of using the cards to predict the future, we used them to examine questions and problems we were considering in our lives. Rather than imagining that the cards that came up were an expression of destiny speaking to us, we exercised our creativity to figure out how the cards picked could relate to our questions and lives. Using the cards as a lens allowed us to think about our questions from angles we might not have considered.

Connecting tarot to Literature

 After the trip, I continued engaging with tarot cards, but I found that the individual meanings attached to each card and the iconography of tarot as a whole were difficult to absorb. I began to widen my vision to see the deck as a whole: the depiction of a human (hero’s) journey through life. In this context, I noticed that I would often connect to moments or characters in my favorite books. Compared to the Rider Waite illustrations, these literary connections made it easier for me to absorb and play with the card meanings. It also gave me more insight into tarot because just as the cards exist in the overarching narrative of the deck, the characters or moments from a book exist in the context of the story, including what happened before and what happens later. And this is how my literary tarot project began.

Research and Conceptual Process

To begin with, I made a list of my favorite books.  Then I dedicated a few sketchbook pages to a list of every card in the deck. Rather than beginning with the first card (the Fool), I randomly drew cards from the deck, and for each card I drew, I consulted a Rider Waite tarot guidebook, the Motherpeace Tarot Guidebook, and used the Golden Tarot App. This gave me a range of interpretations, including traditional, modern, and feminist. I took notes on the interpretations that resonated the most. I also noted characters or moments that those interpretations reminded me of.

The first card I pulled was the Page of Cups, who is described as a dreamer who loves company and is highly emotional and intuitive—a person who radiates joy and enjoys the pleasures of nature and beauty. This card often refers to a specific person: a playful, imaginative, sensitive child. Immediately, I knew who this character was: Anne of Green Gables, perhaps my favorite literary character of all time. The description was almost uncanny. Anne is an 11-year-old girl who frequently gets into scrapes because of her daydreaming, and is often caught up in a good book, the beauty around her, or her imagination. Her sensitive nature puts her in conflict with several characters due to her strong emotional response to personal slights; however, her desire to connect with others makes her an ideal role model for friendship, as she brings so much love and joy to the people in her life. I used the figure and composition of the Rider Waite Page of Cups as the structure of my illustration. I replaced the cup in the Page’s hand with a book, representing Anne’s deep connection to reading, and surrounded her with one of the landscapes from the book—the avenue—renamed the White Way of Delight by Anne, who felt that a place of such beauty deserves a name that reflects it. As I developed the position of my figure, I kept imagining a twirling skirt. As I searched for visual references, I found another iconic character: Maria from The Sound of Music. In the opening scene of the film, Maria is twirling and singing with exuberance and gratitude for being surrounded by the beauty of nature. The conceptual connection between the two characters was a delightful surprise. However, as I have continued these illustrations, these connections between characters and stories no longer surprise me; rather, they are just more evidence of the archetypal nature of these literary characters.

Screen shot from Kevin Sullivan's 1985 TV series: Anne of Green Gables

Opening Scene from The Sound of Music

Initial sketch for tarot illustration

Stories help people make sense of their lives

Tarot cards are structured as a narrative, following our main character (the Fool) as they grow through their experiences. Their experiences are represented through the cards and cover an extensive variety of scenarios we as humans face in real life, along with archetypes of people we meet. The Tarot cards generalize their experiences to make them more universal. Stories and literature take these universal experiences and give them life and depth through specificity and characterization. We get to see how a person might respond to their circumstances and how they might be impacted. By pairing moments and characters from literature with Tarot cards, I am connecting these universal human experiences with larger narratives that exist outside the single moment. For me, this makes the wisdom found in these books more apparent and easier to relate to my own life.