The apocalypse of Alan Moore

How a Tarot-influenced comic book changed minds and ended the world

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

I spoke to Jessa Crispin in the last part of this series on creativity and the Tarot about artists ideally yoking together two forces, à la the Chariot card: the conscious and the unconscious, rational judgement and intuition. But doesn’t most human activity combine these? The point then, especially for artists, is to get the balance right.

For Italo Calvino the surrealists skewed too far one way, surrendering passively to the unconscious, hence textual cut-ups, automatic writing, music composed by the notes that a palm frond strokes on a harp and other such aleatory techniques — a kind of artistic prosthetic.

But Calvino’s own chariot was skew-whiff the other way. In the first part of this series I covered how a Tarot deck helped him write his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies. As the Tarot is supposed to foretell your future, so he used hands of Tarot cards to tell the stories of his characters. His method was meticulous, logical, composed of “ironclad rules”, and he was content with no grand design beyond the one his intersecting storylines made.