The epiphanies of my gloom..

 

 The Tarot (process) #3

Ever since my first contact with tarot cards, I have felt a strong connection to them and they have led me on a journey of insight and inspiration which has taken me far from their original teenage occult appeal. Their influence has reached deep into me and over time become part of what is now down there in the epiphanies of my gloom. Each time my focus has returned to them, it is like a new discovery with alternate universe revelations and filled with brand new mysteries. These cards have grown up with me, in real time, like a sister, the countryside or that feeling like I’m being watched. I see them now in my vertical photographs and I understand everything is all shuffled together into one.

Someone else’s present and my ultimate unknowing..

 

 The Tarot (some background) #2

Once upon a time, a friend of mine thought that he had a cursed pack of Tarot cards and he asked me if I could help him to dispose of them, one card at a time. Simply throwing them away or burning them was not gonna cut it for him, so I agreed to meet up and divide the deck. He told me the best way to break the hex would be to shuffle and then deal out the pack between us and then for each of us to relocate every card separately from one another, somehow, out there in the world. This was to be done in a deliberate and mindful manner as possible and 4 months later, just before New Years Eve, my half was gone. I was 17 years old then, about to turn 18 and it all sounded like a cool idea at the time.

The Tarot cards were Alister Crowley's Book of Thoth (above). A visually striking deck, layered with dense symbolism and beautifully painted by Lady Frieda Harris and published in 1944. I had possession of half, which was around 39 cards and between September and December I found places for them in my world to be discovered by others. At times I felt like a reverse pickpocket as I slipped them into the coat pockets of strangers on the streets. I hid a few in library books here and there and put one inside a Bible on the pulpit in a church. I put the Death card into a bottle and threw it into the sea. I stuck the Hermit up in a phone box next to the call girl cards. I gave the Ace of Wands to a child to run and show their parents and I attached The Chariot card to the collar of a dog on fetch. I left The Sun at the top of a monkey puzzle tree in my local park, where I used to sit and read. These are just a few examples that I remember as I write this.

Looking back on this experience I now consider it a kind of esoteric introduction to an awareness of my own perception with an attention that I cannot remember ever giving to it before. It was a practical lesson in aligning (or assigning) the universal symbols of the tarot with that of my own psyche and in turn with the world around me, before pot and psychedelics entered the scene, making everything all about them. Maybe it was because of the hex, but I took the task seriously and I carefully considered each card before committing it to someone else’s present and my ultimate unknowing.

The initial impulse which motivates us..

The Tarot (process) #1

I have noticed similar narratives emerge from both photographs and tarot cards. The tarot is made up of individual facets of the human condition which are distilled and represented in a single card which together as a pack can be viewed as a map of consciousness. In a traditional tarot reading, cards are turned over and placed into sequence in response to a question and a narrative emerges from between the cards and begins to connect them. Photographs are in turn facets themselves, distilled moments from a lifetime which, when viewed together, map out the story of our own lives. The initial impulse which motivates us to raise a camera in the first place stages the context (or question) which lies at a photograph's heart and contains within it the full unabridged biography of its author. Meaning photographs, like the tarot, are powerful psychological tools for exploring facets of our own psyches which may not otherwise be accessible to us and can only be read and comprehended as images.