Apologies, this will be a self-indulgent ramble.
We had some people over for dinner last night and someone browsing my books commented on my habit of using the major arcana of the Tarot as bookmarks. I’ve done this since undergrad and take it now as an unspoken eccentricity, but it originates in my earlier use of scrap ticket stubs for marks. I never knew how many of these I’d need so I just hoarded them in a bedside table until a girlfriend one day asked why my drawer was full of trash paper. Now I was conscious and so cowardly (pensando, consumai la ‘mpresa, to add some respectability). A few weeks later at a bookshop’s outdoor bargain shelves I found a copy of Oswald Wirth’s La Tarot: Des Imagiers Du Moyen Age (is this a translation?, I still don’t know). I opened it in passing curiosity and found at the rear a set of Wirth’s edition of the 22 major arcana. These I at once recognized as ideal bookmarks and have used as such ever since. I’ve now read a few books on the Tarot – Wirth’s, Jodorowsky’s, and the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot – and have a sense of what each arcana ‘should’ mean but I generally apply my own notion of associations for what card to use where. This is the fun of the system. Apart from a few ‘assigned’ cards with dedicated uses (listed below) the rest are pulled as fancy strikes and often switched halfway through volumes. A student once told me this revolving meditation on each arcana is a respectful and orthodox way to deploy the Tarot, but I mainly take it as a means of tracking how my feelings flex on the value of texts I’m reading.
These are the cards serving as set pieces always in use:
Sterne or Ovid – I – le Bateleur
Buddhism generally – VII – le Chariot (from Sanskrit Mahayana as ‘great vehicle’)
Proust – VIIII – L’Hermite
Dante – XVI – la Maison Dieu (originally XX – le Jugement but it seemed too pat)
Gita/Upanishads – XVII – les Etoiles
Shakespeare – XXI – le Monde
Extracts 