THE CHAP TAROT

Arcana

Pandora Harrison presents the fourth instalment of her series of Chap Tarot cards and how they can illuminate the curious

Salutations, good patrons of this divine tome, and blessed be. In this instalment I’d like to introduce you to the infamous Marie Lenormand, cartomancer to 19th century France bon ton, and outline four additional Major Arcana cards from a chap-tastic angle. Now, are you sitting comfortably with a suitable libation in hand? Good. Then I shall begin. Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand (1772–1843), known as the sybil of the Rue de Tournon, was a prophetess, palm reader and seeress. But most of all, she was a fortune-teller whose palm was often crossed with silver during the Napoleonic era, and the greatest cartomancer of all time. A bright, confident Marie Anne arrived in Paris in 1786 at the age of 14. She claimed to have obtained her first deck of cards from gypsies who taught her how to read them. By 17 she had made her first impactful prediction, the fall of King Louis XVI. A star was born. A flare for self-promotion quickly set Marie Anne up as a ‘bookseller’, in

fact a front for her fortune-telling enterprise. But Mademoiselle Lenormand did indeed collect books, and as an eager reader she diligently studied mathematics and astronomy as part of her practices. She dedicated herself to the hermetic arts and divination by studying a variety of folklore techniques, such as reading tea leaves and coffee grounds, palmistry and scrying with mirrors. She was intuitive by instinct and would combine these with astrology and numerology and, of course the main tool of her trade, playing cards.

Her Rue de Tournon ‘shop’ was adorned with phantasmic decoration, including dried bats, nailed by their wings to the ceiling, stuffed owls, cabalistic signs and skeletons; pretty much anything likely to impress a weak or superstitious mind in possession of a full purse. Her reputation grew and she soon attracted both royal and revolutionary clientele, from the Princess de Lamballe to Robespierre. But the dark arts were illegal during this time and she occasionally found herself in the Bastille, but never for long and never without a deck of cards. During an early incarceration she encountered a fellow inmate, Madam Josephine Beauharnais, whom she predicted would one day be raised higher than a queen. Madam Beauharnais became a widow during The Terror, was released from the Bastille and married a soldier whose star was on the rise... The soon-to-be Empress Josephine was fascinated by the superstitious beliefs of her homeland of Martinique, and is said to have believed in tarot as a form of divination. She developed a close bond with Lenormand and sought her unique services on several occasions, much to Napoleon’s disgust. His intense dislike for Lenormand was a result of a palm reading she did for him in 1807, in which she predicted his exile and death. His wife’s persistent interest in Lenormand proved a source of conflict in the marriage and thus Josephine’s visits to the Rue de Tournon bookseller resumed in secret. Lenormand apparently prophecised Josephine’s divorce and, with other such dire predictions, including the fall of Napoleon’s Empire, Lenormand fled Paris and retired to the countryside with a tidy fortune.

Her career lasted 40 years, but outside the bon ton of Paris she began a second career as an authoress. She wrote at least 15 bestselling books, including Memoirs of Empress Joséphine, a three-volume tome filled with anecdotes from Lenormand’s relationship with the Empress. Lenormand died in 1843 and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Upon her death, Marie Anne’s nephew, a devout Catholic, was appointed as her heir and burned all of her occult library and paraphernalia, taking only the monetary fortune that she had left behind.

To this day you can still purchase a deck of Mademoiselle Lenormand fortune telling cards based upon the 1799 German Spiel der Hoffnung (The Game of Hope). Unlike tarot cards, which rely more on personal interpretation of images, the Lenormand decks have everyday symbols like ‘key’, ‘dog’, or ‘house.’ Many decks also include traditional playing card suits: hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. Each card has a straightforward meaning that doesn’t change, whereas in tarot a card can be read differently depending on the question asked.

CHAP TAROT CARDS

#13 LAZARUS (DEATH)

The Death card is the single most misunderstood card in the deck. It is not, as is usually believed, about someone’s demise, but rather a release of energy from the acceptance of death that allows new energy to flow in. Like spring following winter, without death clearing away the old, nothing new

can find a place in the world.

David Bowie continuously released energy throughout his career by reinventing himself when the time was right. Since the orchestrated demise of Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane, we witnessed a continuous death and rebirth cycle of The Thin White Duke. Death brings new life in the form of creatures that feed on the corpse. Since Bowie’s death in 2016 much has been created musically honouring his memory, but it was his final album, Blackstar, which essentially designed his death and swansong in much the same way he designed his life, as art.

The card advises that if we can accept death (as Bowie did) and the resulting transformation, we can live life more fully, and this knowledge can bring calm and the desire to change. In a reading, the card represents a time of change or fear of change, or even fear of death, depending on the surrounding cards. Reversed, the card indicates being stuck in old habits, inert and lethargic in life, avoiding change; boredom and depression.

#14 TIME LORD (TEMPERANCE)

This card serves as an intermediary card. A temperate card that can influence the cards surrounding it, especially ones that are in a state of flux or considered chaotic, but mainly this card is representative of someone who is able to approach all of life’s problems with joy (almost as if by magic) and possessing the ability to deal with life as it comes, and not according to routines or habits. The Time Lords are purported to be a wise and technologically advanced race from the planet Gallifrey. They are the selfappointed guardians of time and of maintaining a balance of power between the races of the universe. Taking action on their part is rare, bound by the moral complexity of interfering in the natural flow of history. The Doctor, however, did occasionally dabble in the timelines of a wide range of events and individuals, as was his wont as a renegade Time Lord. Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor is a capricious if somewhat despondent creature, whose capacity for righteous anger is frequently tempered by his personal warmth, fuelled by jelly babies. In the 1975 six-part serial Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor faces the dilemma of changing history to avert the creation of the Daleks. The Doctor hesitates, ethically questioning whether he has the right to make such a decision.

In a reading, the card represents moderation and balance in all things. Sometimes this can mean doing nothing, like the Time Lords’ policy of non-intervention. The intemperate person always needs to be doing something, but often a situation requires you simply to wait; sometimes the battles we choose not to take are just as important as those we do.

Reversed, the card warns of wildness and going to extremes, not understanding or knowing what action is appropriate to a situation. It cautions against allowing your life to fragment and not let old fears and habits die into the past; a need to calm down and allow the process of death and rebirth to happen and flow.

#15 DORIAN GRAY (THE DEVIL)

Oscar Wilde once said that “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” It is somewhat fitting that Wilde’s only published novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a direct reaction to his experience of being a poster child for the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, an intellectual and artistic movement emphasising pleasure and beauty rather than social-political themes. Undiluted aestheticism, warns Wilde warns, will erode one’s moral code. Wilde himself admitted in a letter to the St. James’s Gazette that Dorian Gray “is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.” And so it is Dorian who is the devil in this card. The hedonist or materialist’s fixation on the pursuit of desire (monetary, sexual and political) can only lead to misery. Desires and emotions are seen as an energy in tarot, rewiring focus and direction. Energies focused in the wrong direction can lead to dangerous obsessions, sexual crimes and violence.

The blackness of the card’s illustration is depression and an inability to see the truth. It could be a relationship gone bad where emotions run high. Dorian ultimately abandons the concept of morality and sells his soul to the devil, so that his portrait becomes more disfigured with each one of his selfish acts, while he himself remains young. This is an illustration of the incompatibility of morality and unconditional aestheticism.

Reversed, the card symbolises an attempt to break free of misery or bondage; a bad situation that is no longer to be accepted or tolerated. You may want to liberate yourself, but you must be conscious of the misery before you can break free of it. If the card is in a past position, the change has already taken place but scars and feelings of anger remain.

#16 THE HAPPENING (THE TOWER)

The Happening in this case is the lost week at the Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva Switzerland, in the summer of 1816 where Lord Byron, Dr John William Polidori (Byron’s friend), Percy Bysshe Shelly, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Percy’s future wife) and Claire Claremont (Mary’s stepsister and paramour of Byron) indulged in a spot of wine, laudanum and storytelling. The Villa Diodati represents the tower in the card and, in the worst of situations, can be known as ‘The House of the Devil’ for it serves as a prison for those who live to satisfy their ego through materialistic desires (wealth, fame and physical pleasure). It is a tower of illusion and repression.

One night, while Byron was reciting Coleridge’s Christabel, Shelley suffered a severe panic attack with hallucinations. The previous night Mary had had a nightmare that would inspire her most famous novel, and poor Claire's emotions were so stirred by what she was reading that she apparently had a hysterical fit. The moment was right, the stage was set. The party decided to have a ghost-story competition. Their combined creativity, the storm being unleashed outside the villa and various stimulants encouraged prodigious levels of cerebral activity. The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's short story The Vampyre (1819). These stories became the cornerstones of Gothic horror. Gothic fiction places emphasis on both emotion and a pleasurable kind of terror, both of which are known to stimulate areas of the brain that can lead to nightmares and hallucinations.

In a reading, the card indicates that your dreams are disturbed, arguments occur frequently and depression is evident. The card is illustrated by an exploding tower, representing the release of pent-up energy determined to get beyond the barrier of repression. If this card is present in a reading, look for the clearing away of a situation that has been building up and is stressful or intolerable, and which can thus lead to new beginnings or liberation. Reversed, the card indicates an on-going stressful situation, confinement or detention.

In the final Chap Tarot instalment, I shall discuss the Lunar Tarot Ritual and the last five Major

Arcana cards. n