Author photo by Collier Schorr | Tarot cards created by Florent Giraud
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew . . .
—Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
Probably all poets are mystics. Our work is necessarily not scholarship, but it’s maybe a sibling to it—or at least a cousin. We rely on the precision of scholars: they free us to tell the truth the way we must: slantwise.
For all I know, every poet and every mystic is also “a bit of a Jew.” Which is to say—outside of society somehow, here and also not here, at home and in exile, noble and wretched, scorned and ashamed, and yet—signifying, at all costs.
Why should I pretend that poetry and magic—to say nothing of the Most-High, in all majesty—are not dangerous?
When I was in tenth grade, I spent a weekend in Maine with my most hippieish friend at a retreat center where her chiropractor dad had a gig. At a Tarot workshop one evening, we were all introduced to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, probably still the canonical Tarot in the United States, and instructed to pull two cards. At this point in my adolescence, “occult” things not only failed to attract me—they repulsed me.
My mother had been spiritually inclined, though there were no Tarot cards in our house in Salem, Massachusetts—they were maybe beyond the pale for her, as I somehow remember absorbing the idea, even as a very small child, that fortune telling was forbidden in Judaism.
T. S. Eliot wrote of Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante” with a “wicked pack of cards” in “The Waste Land,” with some derision, not to mention Beckett’s Whoroscope and any number of other semi-disgusted flirtations with divination that show up in the Modernist canon. There is a breathing aura of shame and danger still flickering around the mystical path, around those elements of the feminine upon which creativity still depends . . .
So be it. For as I think Heraclitus said forever ago, Nature loves to hide.
I first encountered Stav Appel’s scholarship a year after my mother’s suicide.
There is a quality, I sometimes feel, about the spiritual: it is like a net. It can ensnare you—but it can also break your fall.
My parents were doctors, generally secular, and more or less rationalist—though, as their marriage dissolved, my mother’s intellectual pursuits became more cosmic, cosmological, and eventually, also, insane.
She began chanting Nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo daily, possibly inspired by Tina Turner, and spent hours at her word processor, a Carlton Menthol hanging from her lips, generating astrological charts and writing out her inventions and speculations in the realm of physics, spectrography, and the substance of light. I can still see her musing like it was 1989, a hard green apple in her hand.
She wanted to divorce my father, she thought she was unlocking the secrets of the universe, she was dieting, she believed she was the target of a men’s rights cabal— in short, she was becoming schizophrenic. Or, to put a different diagnostic spin on things, her mania and paranoia had their roots in Cointelpro, the Holocaust, and—why not—the Salem Witch Trials, the despair of John Dee, even the travails of Sor Juana.
What I didn’t know till I encountered Stav Appel’s groundbreaking work is that the Tarot doesn’t merely syncretize Kabbalah into a host of other knowledge systems. It may in fact be the Book of Books—but even better, because you can play with it like a child.
A scroll you can shuffle. A book that reads you. The Torah for real.
You can’t get very far with any Tarot deck—even the silliest one—without bumping into material rooted in astrology, the Pentateuch, Kabbalah, numerology (as we secularists call the Gematria-inspired fiddling with numbers that we do), ancient and world mythologies, the New Testament, and so on.
To everything, said Solomon, there is a season: a time for syncretism, and perhaps, now, a time to go back to first causes.
Some of us had religion imposed on us. But when it comes to a game—no matter how many wisdom traditions may be woven into it—a game is a matter of attraction, not force.
I sometimes sense that what is new in our time is that if we do return to the wisdom of our ancestors—to any degree—we do so of our own free will.
Stav Appel’s scholarship was a jolt of clarity for me—a beam of sunlight dispelling centuries of innuendo. That the Fool is not only a wanderer and a jester but Adam himself, fallen out of Eden—and what is more, an insane man—LE FOU. Could it be that all human beings must walk the path from insanity to wisdom, till our souls reach their fruition?
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses, yet another mythic and mystic pillar of Modernist poetics.
The Torah in the Tarot represents, it seems to me, the immanence of mystical time that is always alive within the nightmare of history. It is a document and a pedagogical object, but it is also a living book beyond time, and what it has to teach us is both obvious and not—an invitation for us to return to Zero, in all its fecundity, its obviousness, and its beguiling obscurity.
Ariana Reines
Queens
January 2025
Ariana Reines is the author of The Rose (2025), Wave of Blood (2024), A Sand Book (2020), Mercury (2011), the Obie-winning play “Telephone” (2009), Coeur de Lion (2007), and The Cow (2006). She has created performances for Stuart Shave/Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Performance Space NY, and many others. In 2020, while a divinity student at Harvard, she founded Invisible College, a hub for the study of sacred texts and poetry online. She lives in New York, NY.