Jessa Crispin and the Art of Tarot

Writer’s tool? Dowsing the unconscious? Rectangular cardboard muse?

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

In part 1 of this series we looked back at when Italo ‘And for my next trick!’ Calvino used the Tarot to compose a novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. A champion of intellect and mental order (see him on the like-minded Borges), he was nonetheless open to using an occult system like the Tarot and knowledgeable about its history and potential. After all a nice analogy for a novelist’s relation to their characters might be a deck of cards that tells or ordains their future through a mixture of luck and fate…

Yet, as I wrote previously, the novel he generated got only two out of three things right:

First, he featured the Tarot as content in the novel; second, he used only the rows, columns and preordained paths around hands of Tarot cards to construct it. The third thing missing was a point beyond the patterns. For a writer to use magic-inspired creativity effectively, with internal cohesion and not arbitrariness, they have to, maybe not be a full believer, but at least be a make-believer.

Perhaps Calvino’s problem was his M.O. had been avowedly rule-bound and rationalist. He once favourably…