The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life - Softcover

Crispin, Jessa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501120239 ISBN 13: 9781501120237

Verlag: Atria Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A hip, accessible, and practical guide for artists and creative people looking to tarot for guidance and inspiration in the tradition of The Secret Language of Birthdays and Steal Like an Artist.

What if the path to creativity was not as challenging as everyone thinks? What if you could find that spark, plot twist, or next project by simply looking at your life and your art through a different lens?

Written for novices and seasoned readers alike, The Creative Tarot is a unique guidebook that reimagines tarot cards and the ways they can boost the creative process. Jessa Crispin guides you through the intuitive world of the tarot to get those creative juices flowing again. Thought to be esoteric and mystical, tarot cards are approachable and endlessly helpful to overcoming creative blocks. Crispin offers spiritual readings of the cards, practical information for the uninspired artist, and a wealth of fascinating anecdotes about famous artists including Virginia Woolf, Rembrandt, and David Bowie, and how they found inspiration.

With five original tarot spreads and beautiful illustrations throughout, The Creative Tarot is an accessible, colorful guide that demystifies both the tarot and the creative process.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessa Crispin is the editor and founder of Bookslut.com and Spoliamag.com. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Architect Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and other publications. Her first book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exile, Expats and Ex-Countries is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She has lived in Ireland, Chicago, Texas, Kansas, and Germany. She currently lives nowhere in particular.

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The Creative Tarot

INTRODUCTION

Like a lot of teenagers who wore too much black and had an extensive incense collection, I used to fool around with a tarot deck. I can’t remember where I picked it up—some bookstore somewhere. It was exciting to look at all of the images, all of the mysterious men and women fighting with swords or juggling coins or drinking from cups.

But after a few aborted attempts to teach myself to read the cards, I gave up. The manual that came with the cards gave inadequate and confusing definitions—“the Empress: wife, mother, companion”—that detracted from what I was seeing. Unsure of what to do with the cards, I put them away, and they were lost in one move or another.

Ten years later, I came back to the tarot during a particularly difficult time in my life. With the help of a skilled reader, I was able to see my circumstances differently. She helped me find the narrative inside all the muddle. In short, she told me a new story about my life and what I was experiencing. A story I could move through; a story in which I could see how all of the other characters and situations were operating.

After that, I was hooked. I began the slow process of studying the meaning of the tarot and understanding its uses. At the time I worked mostly as a book critic, and I was intrigued by the way the cards could be used as a tool for storytelling. Each reading is, essentially, a story. It begins here, at the center. One card represents you and tells you who you are as the protagonist; others say what’s happening to you, what did happen to you, what will happen. Other cards show up as people wandering into your story; others create plot and action.

You lay out the cards, and there on the table you have the outline. You have the who, what, where, and when. You then flesh out that skeleton with your own circumstances, you populate it with the people in your life, and, using the intuitive cues provided by the cards’ images, you fit your story onto the story in the cards.

It is not necessarily about telling the future. It is about retelling the present.

After noticing the way the cards hook into your intuition and imagination, I realized that they could easily be used to assist in the creative process. When stuck on a piece, I’d pull some cards to find clarity, or I’d use them to figure out how to structure it. When friends struggled with their book or visual art projects, I’d pull out my deck, and we’d take a look. Soon most of my tarot clients were artists, looking for a little guidance on what to work on next or how to overcome a block.

WHAT IS THE TAROT?

The tarot is a deck of cards designed during the Renaissance. There is debate about whether the cards’ origins stretch back further, but for our purposes, we’ll stick with what we know for sure.

The deck consists of two parts: the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana is made up of what you can consider archetypes: the Hermit, Death, the High Priestess, and so on. The Minor Arcana cards illustrate circumstances and conflicts—the kinds of things that add action to a story. The Minor Arcana comes in four suits that correspond with the four elements: Cups (water), Wands (fire), Swords (air), and Coins or Pentacles (earth). Each suit has cards numbering one through ten, and then four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King.

The cards depict the whole realm of human experience, from love to death, from joy to sorrow, from loneliness to friendship. Some cards are particularly nasty; others easily cheer a reader up. But either way, you have to take the dark with the light, just like in life.

The interpretations of the cards change as society changes. The Lovers card, of course, does not require a man and a woman to fulfill its meaning. And at one point, I read in an old tarot book that the Three of Wands indicated that a family member was going to die and leave me a chateau in his or her will. But the Three of Wands no longer means “free chateau”; now it means exploration and adventure. You will experience the cards differently than I will, because they are based on your own experiences and your own philosophy and values. Just because we may have different takes on a card doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from your interpretations, and I hope you can learn something from mine.

HOW DO I USE THIS BOOK?

As a starting point. Each card has its own thorough interpretation and guidance on how it relates specifically to creativity. I’ve designed a few new ways to organize the cards for reading what are called “spreads” for different creative problems:

• wanting to start writing or painting or working on your medium of choice, but unsure how to begin;

• restarting a project that has become blocked or lost its way;

• figuring how best to present a project to the world; and

• getting out of a rut to try something new and daring.

The book is also meant to be a source of inspiration. Because I believe firmly in looking to our betters to teach us and guide us, I have included anecdotes of creators throughout time to show how others have overcome obstacles, as well as recommendations of paintings to study, books to read, music to listen to, films to watch, etc.

Remember: the Greeks believed our genius was not part of us but was a divine visitation. Our jobs, as artists and writers, was to become the best possible vessel for that genius. Part of that is to be forever learning, improving, expanding, and experimenting.

QUESTIONS

Is it okay for me to buy my own tarot cards? I read somewhere that your first deck is supposed to be a gift.

It is absolutely okay for you to buy your first tarot deck. That is one of those mystical mumbo-jumbo things designed to make beginners feel inadequate and unwelcome. I have a Virgo moon; I have no time for such nonsense.

Is the tarot just about telling the future?

People have always wanted to know their fates. Will I be rich? Will I be wise? Will I fall in love? And they have used whatever they had around them to try to sneak a glimpse into the future.

I’m always very curious about the different methods used and the way they were developed. I’ve had my face read in Chinatown, dragged there by a Malaysian friend who swears it’s an accurate, ancient practice. I’ve had my palm read by people in multiple countries. In Greece, I had my coffee grounds read. I sipped my Turkish coffee while chatting with the very nice woman. Then my cup was inverted on its saucer, and the shape the grounds made was interpreted to tell me my future. I had a woman in the American South read my cards, but she used a deck of playing cards rather than the tarot. I’ve had my tea leaves read in London, and my astrological chart read in New York City.

There are many other ways to tell your fortune. There’s numerology, the telling of your fate by the numbers of your birthday or the number of letters in your name. There’s bibliomancy, where you open a book to a random page and line, and through that your future is revealed. There’s ceromancy, for which you pour melted wax onto a surface and read the shapes it makes. There’s an old Irish New Year’s custom that requires you to melt metal and then pour it into cold water. The shape it hardens into will tell you how your year will be. Many believe that your dreams can tell you your future, if you sleep with certain items under your pillow or drink or eat the right things before bed. With pyromancy, you gaze into a fire; with tyromancy, you look at...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1501120239
• ISBN 13: 9781501120237
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande