The Black Tarot

Illustrations by Luis Royo

pub. Naipes Heraclio Fournier

Sucker price: about $50. Alida price: about $13.

reviewed by: David Bruce Albert Jr., Ph.D., [email protected]

They say familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe not always, but in the case of the Tarot, it certainly seems to be true. The more people work with Tarot decks, the more concerned they become with understanding what it means, or with making it mean what they want it to mean, than with what the Tarot actually does mean. While some Tarot authors and illustrators display a deep understanding of the Tarot and how to express it in one form or another, others just create Tarot decks to serve their own particular agenda, producing decks that seem more like textbooks of their own ideology rather than oracular symbols. The Tarot is neither a vehicle for the expression of, nor a pulpit for the glorification of, of one's own opinions, politics or perversions. It is an oracle of the Unseen and a symbol of the Unknown; it has to do with transpersonal mystery, and not personal or interpersonal psychobabble. If it makes you feel "spiritually connected", "resonates with your inner being", changes your inner child's diapers, or any of that other new-agey twaddle, then what you have may be art, it may be sincere, and it may even be useful for something, but it isn't the Tarot. If it scares the hell out of you, or at least gives you that same sense of mystery and dread as hearing a bump in the night and wondering who -- or what -- might be there, then you have something close to the genuine article. The Unknown isn't just what you don't know; it's what you can't know, and its presence through the symbols should make you at least a bit uneasy. Unless of course you are inexperienced enough to not know what it means, in which case you can learn; or you are stupid enough to know everything about it, in which case you can be ignored.

Once in a long while a Tarot deck comes along that captures that mixed sense of mystery and anxiety that shows the author really does understand what he or she has stepped into. Some of the classical decks -- the Swiss 1JJ in particular -- have that feel to them. The Crowley Thoth deck has that feel too; once you put the books away and kick the habit of trying to figure out what they are supposed to mean, the cards begin to tell you what they do mean, and you realize you've got a dragon by the tail.

The Black Tarot is another one of these. On the surface, it looks like a fairly simple assemblage of unrelated, semi-erotic artwork. If you are looking for a deck of cards with dark, semi-nude girly pictures in bizarre, horror-sci-fi settings, this is what you want, and you probably paid the $50 for it. The Major Arcana features girl-monster pairings in scenes that vary from sci-fi wastelands to gothic nightmares. The Minor Arcana has the usual suits of wands, chalices, swords, and pentacles; the aces and court cards have more of the monster-girl artwork, while the numbered cards are just simple pips, with so many wands, etc., and no symbolic or descriptive illustrations. The cards themselves are a little smaller than most Tarot decks these days, measuring 6cm x 11cm, about the size of the 1JJ. The cards and the short manual that comes with them are in English, Spanish, French and German.

There is of course much more to this deck than soft-core eye candy. As the accompanying manual states, "Do not get involved with this Tarot if you only want to know about good things and guess about exterior and material events. The Black Tarot forms a symbolic group of the darkest side, so that the own "self" and its demons emerge. The Beauty and the Beast which we carry inside." That is the clue to the secret of this deck. While I am not a devotee of Freudian psychology, I recognize it has many important insights, one of them being the interplay between the constructive (Eros) and destructive (Thanatos) forces within the unconscious so chillingly depicted in the Major Arcana. Whether you think these forces are "basic drives" or are a complicated amalgamation of other factors, the Major Arcana and the illustrated cards of the Minor Arcana reveal the many facets of this psychic interaction.

Let us take The Fool as an example. A monster embraces a beautiful maiden, who holds up a mirror to the monster's face. In the manual we read that this is the card of self-deceit, and its being revealed in the mirror. I like to think of this card as revealing the truth behind false pretenses. Are you who are so beautiful capable of facing the reality of all the things you have done? Can anyone possess the beautiful without being truly ugly as well? Can ugliness ever exist without beauty -- real or imagined -- against which it is judged? Are you enough of a fool to think that you can cloak the truth behind a facade of good? Beware of the beautiful, for they bear an ugliness they cannot face, and will likely project it on you. Be even more wary of the ugly, for they simply reflect that which you cannot stand about yourself. All deceptions will be revealed in the mirror of truth, and all things that seem beautiful are the bearers of unbearable horror. Such as buying this deck in a drooling fit of erotic lust at auction for $50, and then kicking yourself when you find you could have had it for a quarter of that.

It is a mistake to think of the erotic and the thanatotic as absolute categories, for they are neither good nor bad in themselves. Unchecked, Eros is every bit as destructive and Thanatos; maybe more so, for its effects are more insidious. The Eros force run mad lies at the bottom of overpopulation, pollution, and the squalor that is urban civilization. Thanatos unbalanced may have given us the H-bomb, but it is also the force that teaches those who will listen to live in balance with nature. One could compare Eros and Thanatos to the Oak King and the Holly King; without Oak there is no generation and hence no harvest, but without Holly there is no regeneration and hence no harvest. Only when the two are in balance does life flourish. That modern culture keeps the two out of balance and out of control with social engineering and "morality" may well portend its eventual collapse.

There are much deeper implications than psychology alone, for within the Eros-Thanatos interplay lie the basic concepts of energy and polarity. While no one knows what energy really is, we do know that the universe exists and evolves because energy is always in motion. The negative seeks the positive, the north pole seeks the south pole, the male seeks the female, and so on. That is where the figure of the circle emerges; a circle is the pattern formed by energy moving between polarities through time. Ultimately, that is what the Major Arcana is all about: how things change through the movement of cosmic energies. It is the cosmic that is mirrored in the psychological -- that you have a mind at all is a reflection of cosmic energies in motion. Your own petty little problems that seem so overwhelming are not even noticed by the supermassive black holes that fuel galactic cores, and yet it is because of these astronomical phenomena that you exist at all. Sometimes, like the maiden that holds the mirror to the monster's face, the horror of personal angst is simply a facade of oversocialization, a paper tiger threatening the dragon of universal consciousness.

That seems like an awful lot of philosophy to get out of a set of dirty pictures, but this deck has been put together with a great deal more thought than most people seem to give it. Right, the meanings don't match up with the "standard" RWS, but no one claimed this to be an RWS clone, and that is probably for the better. As I have said elsewhere, the RWS "standard" has outlived its usefulness, and to move onward, it is best left behind. "Obstacles die in his hands and the persevering energy flattens the rocks," is to me a much more robust interpretation of the Knight of Pentacles than, "Utility, serviceableness, interest, responsibility, rectitude -- all on the normal and external plane." No wonder I had such trouble learning the dignitaries!

I should mention that I had another kind of trouble with the Black Tarot. Not trouble, exactly, but maybe what some people would rather not have. There is something darkly resonant in the cards and their interpretations that gave me the most vivid nightmares I have had in years. Now I regard nightmares not as bad things, but rather as evidence of contact with the Unknown, for reasons already explained. Not that anything really bad happened, just images of repeated associations between the cards and their meanings, as though there is something very right about the way these cards are done and the interpretations assigned to them. Almost as though the stars were right, but that leads us in a different direction. Well, this is not a deck I would use for casual or "party" readings, but then I learned through (bad) experience not to do this kind of thing anyway.