I asked my good friend Chris, a massive Lovecraftian fan, if he would like to chat about all things Tarot. As the conversation developed I thought it would be a great idea to put his ideas on my blog. Thankfully he agreed, and this interview is really a way for me to get inside that brilliant but wonderfully eclectic mind of his.
Chris has an uncanny ability to link a wide range of information to the Tarot and hopefully, by transcribing this interview, the Tarot and your approach to reading the cards, will be transformed.
1. Chris, could you take a moment to tell my readers something about your background and interests in Tarot?
Hi, I’m Chris. Doug and I became friends a long time ago and very early on in our friendship we discovered the Tarot. Over the years we’ve taken many perspectives on the Tarot, some that we agreed on, others that we have disagreed on. We’ve wandered in halls of mirrors not only in the relationship we’ve each had with the Tarot, but also in the spectrum of decks that we’ve used and the various ideologies that have underpinned those decks.
One of the most important practical transitions that we have made, is to cease to have our knowledge of the Tarot delivered to us, in pre-digested form through books and articles and to look to the Tarot itself as our primary source. One of my earliest contentions about the Tarot is that one would need a book to interpret the meanings of the cards. It has always been an intuitive position for me that the very idea of Tarot is something along the lines of “a picture can speak 1000 words” and this remains my position today. To write a description of the meaning of an individual card is to in some way emasculate it somewhat. Practical Tarot reading is far more Gestalt art than it is occult or esoteric, and I would direct any rookie Tarot reader in the direction of Gestalt psychology before many of the classic Tarot texts such as Crowley’s phantasmagorical “Book of Thoth”.
One of my other passions in life is the work of the 1920’s cosmic horror writer HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s compelling Mythos was born out of a world where science and reason were triumphing over mysticism and superstition, and his work reflects that tension to great effect. The protagonists, usually intellectuals, scientists or explorers, are privy to mind blowing revelations about the universe and man’s place in it. The opening passage from his famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, reads:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Lovecraft in this most dramatic of preludes perfectly captures the thrill and challenge of Tarot reading for me. By abstracting us in reflection, the Tarot can offer us vistas of insight into the unconscious narrative through which we live and which defines not only our future, but critically – our past. Are we prepared to undergo this paradigm shift? Or would we prefer to “flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” and simply use the Tarot to reinforce the preconceptions which have created the tension that resulted in our consulting the Tarot in the first place? Are we prepared to sacrifice our credulity to win a greater understanding?
Considering the spirit of revelation inherent within Lovecraft’s Mythos it’s unsurprising that there have been several Tarot decks which have used imagery from his stories. I own two of these decks, the Necronomicon Tarot and the Dark Grimoire Tarot.
The Necronomicon Tarot was conceived by Donald Tyson, a contemporary occultist from Canada who is perhaps best known for his writing on the subject of Enochian magic. By way of his version of the fictional dread tome “the Necronomicon” and his novel “Alhazred: Author of the Necronomicon” he ratified the ancient and awesome cosmic forces and deities of Lovecraft’s loose pantheon with the factually ancient and awesome forces of western astrology without diminishing or distorting either. He conceived his Tarot cards as the third part in a trilogy to illustrate the events, entities and characters of the former installments. Because of the Tarot’s long association with western astrology, his deck makes sense and some of the images created by his visual collaborator Anne Stokes are the most vivid Tarot cards I’ve come across. However, it’s his presentation of the pip cards that as a Tarot reader I’m not comfortable with.
There is a convention in contemporary Tarot to present the pips of any given suit as installments in a story and this is the approach that Tyson takes. From his perspective this makes perfect sense, after all he’s illustrating the stories he’s already told in his previous works but in terms of reading Tarot when one sees one part of a story it’s difficult not to also have in mind the preceding and subsequent parts. For a card to have a feeling of movement within a fixed narrative for me distorts the card’s use in divination. It’s difficult to separate the narrative of the deck from the narrative of the querent. While I appreciate that from an esoteric perspective the pips illustrate the evolution of a particular element to its natural conclusion, when reading for divinatory purposes primacy should be given to the cards that have been drawn.
The Dark Grimoire Tarot published by prolific Italian Tarot publishers Lo Scarabeo was created by Michele Penco. I picked this deck up by accident while browsing in a mainstream bookshop in Birmingham. While there were no overt Lovecraftian references on the box, and the cards themselves were sealed, I got the impression from the general imagery that the deck was at the very least a little Lovecraftian in its inspiration.
The deck is in fact completely Lovecraftian, perhaps even more so than the Necronomicon Tarot. The images are presented in sepia tones which remind me of old photographs. The settings are almost exclusively within this era as well, depicting scenes and entities from Lovecraft’ stories. Even though the deck presents scenes from various stories there is no clear narrative amongst them – pips or trumps which make them conducive for practical Tarot reading. The aces are all unopened books which I feel captures the concept of the ace perfectly.
One of the great things about the Dark Grimoire Tarot for me is the spectrum of emotions it evokes. It manages to capture my imagination in the same way that Lovecraft’s stories do. It’s very potent and sets the tone for revelation and adventure which is what brings me back to the Tarot again and again.
Doug asked me to write a paragraph of introduction, I suppose that I have exceeded that expectation, but it’s difficult to control yourself when you’re asked to discuss something that you’re enthusiastic about. I know that Doug feels the same way about the Tarot, and over the years I have learned a great deal not only from his shockingly accurate readings, but also his constant attention to the process of reading too.
Thanks for taking the time to do this interview Chris 
! I’ll post the rest of this interview over the next couple of weeks.
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