Darling reader,

Today I pulled the World Card, a particular world card that I drew the day my book was announced to the world, and sure enough I’m adding to the moments it commemorates as it now marks The World is Not Enough: Tarot & the Arts in the 21stCentury, presented by Invisible College, featuring yours truly.

This is an online festival convening artists, best-selling authors, musicians, scholars, and mystics from divergent lineages for conversation around the Tarot, and the enduring influence of chance and divination in avant-garde art and practice.

I’ll be presenting The Red Read, showing how a decolonial approach to the Tarot’s narratives and structures, rooted in indigeneity and queerness, can unlock new dimensions of consciousness.

In exploring the Tarot’s history, its mystical and religious underpinnings, its queer, postcolonial, and feminist potentials, its psychoanalytically compelling iconography, and the inner reflection it evokes, this gathering aims to bring fresh insight to the complex and subtle syncretisms—digital, analog, and etheric—through which the world becomes—every once in a while, at least—much more than it seems. 

Divination and chance operations played an important role in avant-garde movements of the last century, from the cut-up as practiced by William Burroughs and David Bowie, to the I Ching's influence on John Cage, to the serial experimentality of Fluxus, and beyond.  It can be argued that the most exciting and innovative minds of the last 500 years have had some relationship, however passing—even derisive—to the wisdom hidden in the cards.  The Tarot's impact on artists like Niki de Saint Phalle, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jonathan Anderson, or King Khan—or poets such as T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, John Wieners, or Alice Notley—is still only beginning to come fully into view. 

Somehow, even in this algorithmic and automated age, divination remains powerfully attractive—and the Tarot survives and continues to inspire, mostly without official sanction—or indeed, perhaps, largely by grace of the lack thereof.

Curated and hosted by the stunning Ariana Reines.

x,

Christopher