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Intellect Books - Emily E. Auger

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249 pages

English

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In the first book-length study of Tarot cards on the silver screen, Emily E. Auger contextualizes cartomancy – the practice of fortune telling via playing cards – and dives deep into its invention and promulgation in film. After providing an introduction to divination and cartomancy, Auger offers detailed descriptions and analyses of the roles that cartomancy and Tarot cards play in films. The book features an abbreviated filmography – including nearly 200 films – detailing their relationships to cartomancy. As Tarot communities continue to grow worldwide, Cartomancy and Tarot in Film will be of interest to scholars of esoteric studies, film, folklore, playing cards, popular culture and religion, as well as diviners the world over.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

A Brief History of Cards and Cartomancy, The Invention of Cards and Cartomancy, Cartomancy Prototypes in Narrative

Chapter 3

A Brief History of the Tarot Trumps, The Gaming Deck: From Paint to Print, Tarot and Cartomancy, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Popularization and Commodification

Chapter 4

Cartomancers and Querents as Film Characters, Gender, Age, Marital Status, and Profession, Ethnicity, Eccentricity, and the Supernatural, The Mystic, Nomadism

Chapter 5

Cartomancy and Tarot in Film Narratives, The Cartomancy Reading, The Narrative Roles of Cartomancy and Tarot Scenes, Cartomancy and Tarot in Genres and Themes

Chapter 6

Tarot Trumps in Film

Chapter 7

Conclusion

Sujets

Arts visuels

Cinéma

Cinema

General officer

History of film

Art

General

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 mai 2016
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781783203338
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,5120€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Emily E. Auger
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production managers: Steve Harries and Mike Grimshaw
Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN978-1-78320-331-4
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-332-1
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-333-8
Printed and bound by Short Run Press Ltd, UK
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Part 1 Divination, Cards, and Culture
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Cards and Cartomancy The Invention of Cards and Cartomancy Cartomancy Prototypes in Narrative
Chapter 3: A Brief History of the Tarot Trumps The Gaming Deck: From Paint to Print Tarot and Cartomancy The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Popularization and Commodification
Part 2 Cards and Cartomancy in Film
Chapter 4: Cartomancers and Querents as Film Characters Gender, Age, Marital Status, and Profession Ethnicity, Eccentricity, and the Supernatural The Mystic Nomadism
Chapter 5: Cartomancy and Tarot in Film Narratives The Cartomancy Reading The Narrative Roles of Cartomancy and Tarot Scenes Cartomancy and Tarot in Genres and Themes
Chapter 6: Tarot Trumps in Film
Chapter 7: Conclusion
Appendix 1: Filmography
Appendix 2: Charts
Chart 1 Cartomancers and Querents as Characters
Chart 2 Cartomancers and Querents: Gender, Age, Marital Status, and Professionalism
Chart 3 Tarot Trumps in Film
Chart 4 Tarot Trumps in Film Genres
Chart 5 Frequency of Tarot Trumps in Film Genres
Chart 6 Tarot Trumps in Films by Theme
Chart 7 Frequency of Tarot Trumps in Films by Theme
Appendix 3: Cartomancy and Tarot Films by Date
Appendix 4: Carmen on Screen
Appendix 5: Directors of Cartomancy and Tarot Films
Appendix 6: Actresses and Actors Playing Cartomancers
Appendix 7: Actresses and Actors Playing Cartomancy Querents
Bibliography
Sources for Films (Novels, Graphic Novels, Video Games)
Cartomancy Decks Cited
Index
This book is dedicated to my parents.
Acknowledgments
First, and most of all, I want to thank those who contributed to the multiauthor two-volume Tarot in Culture anthology: Ed Buryn, Julie Cuccia-Watts, Tabitha Dial, Michael Dummett (1925–2011), Helen S. Farley, Joyce Goggin, Mary K. Greer, Bruce Hersch, Brian Johnson, Danny Jorgensen, Jeanna Jorgensen, Richard Kaczynski, Marcus Katz, June Leavitt, Carol Matthews, Paul Mountfort, Christine Parkhurst, Robert Place, Rachel Pollack, Casey J. Rudkin, Rachel Pollack, Leslie Stratyner, Catherine Waitinas, and Batya Weinbaum, as well as the original pre-publication reviewers of that manuscript Arthur Rosengarten and Professor Elizabeth Sklar. Working with these individuals provided a unique and valuable collegial context for the continuation of my own research on Tarot. I particularly enjoyed corresponding with Christine Parkhurst over several years in relation to a panel she developed on Tarot and health for the Tarot and Medical Humanities areas of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) conference (2012). (I started the Tarot area of that conference in 2005.) I also enjoyed working with Richard Kaczynski and found his studies of the Thoth Tarot very informative; several film titles are included here because of his research. Mary K. Greer was, as always, extremely well informed and helpful: she identified the Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Playing Cards from a grainy image.
Thanks go also to Sally Sweatman, the Manitoba Opera education coordinator, for compiling the list of films in Appendix 4, and Darlene Ronald, the marketing director of the Manitoba Opera, for granting me permission to reproduce that list here; Geoff Burton for his repeated efforts to send me a viewable copy of his film The Fall of the House (2003); Tristan D. Cajar who provided me with the translation notes he made from my VHS copy of Un Adorable Sinverguenza [An Adorable Rogue] (1983); R. Christopher Feldman, who confirmed some details regarding The Tarot of the Orishas ; and Peter Borgwardt who answered my website call for help with a few card identifications. And last, but by no means least, my thanks to Melinda and Steve for helping out with that networking problem; and ML for finding the entire project, from start to finish, so very, very interesting.
Preface
Cartomancy developed as a “lesser” form of divination in Western Europe sometime after the introduction of playing cards there in the later half of the fourteenth century. It is “lesser” insofar as it relies on interpretation rather than divine inspiration, but it is a form that usually requires some initiative on the part of the querent, a process the ancient Greeks and Romans prioritized in their valuation of different kinds of fortune-telling. Tarot was invented in fifteenth-century Italy as a five-suited deck: twenty-one trumps and a Fool were added to the original four suits to add diversity to the games that could be played with it. Although not technically a trump, the Fool is often included as one of them in general references. The illustrations on these initially unnumbered and untitled cards related to the significant events, people, and beliefs of the day; the images were conventionalized when painting gave way to printing as the preferred mode of card production. There is little evidence that Tarot was used for divination until the mid-eighteenth century, after which, that gradually became its most popular application. Cartomancy and Tarot also became motifs, first in literature and then in film, where the cards serve as props supporting (a) the development of character, atmosphere, and plot; (b) imitations and fictional elaborations of real-life diviners and divination practices; and (c) dramatizations of the forces of chance and fate once popularly anthropomorphized as Fortune or Fortuna. In these contexts, both historically familiar and new meanings and interpretations are associated with the cards, particularly Tarot cards.
Cartomancy and Tarot in Film expands my previous discussions of Tarot as heterotopian in “The Heterotopian Tarot as Genre,” included in the multiauthor anthology Tarot in Culture (2014), and in Tarot and Other Meditation Decks: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Typology (2004). Heterotopias are, as Foucault explains, real locations where otherwise incompatible spaces intersect or events that are incompatible with social norms occur. 1 Examples include the spaces set aside for rites of passage and crisis that are often associated with time, such as those associated with puberty, marriage, and death. Such spaces also include, among others, the brothel, colony, garden, library, museum, ship, and theater. 2 Similarly, Tarot cards and spreads—the arrangements of cards laid for cartomancy—may provide an intersection point for some combination of past, present, and future; of real time, vision time, and/or dream time; and of the motivations, thoughts, and actions of natural, spiritual, and supernatural characters and forces. This study shows that the Tarot heterotopia is often dramatized in film as an archetype of transformation that takes the symbolic and/or literal form of an axis connecting various natural, supernatural, or metaphysical realities. This axis typically serves as a conduit for information, as in the classic predictions of future love or sudden death, from one realm to another. The cartomancer and/or the cards may directly fulfill this role, or they may point to some other person, prop, or location that does. In any case, the cards bear a message related to transformation, and this message is likely to demonstrate the historical and/or new meanings that have accrued to them. I discuss this accrual of meanings in relation to Tarot images, classic and re-invented, in Tarot and Other Meditation Decks ; here I expand it to include the representations of cartomancy in film.
There are some scholarly studies that address Tarot reading in contemporary practice, which seems to be more popular now than cartomancy with regular playing decks. These studies tend to validate cartomancy and meditative uses of the cards as the means by which some people find their way through life, particularly in times of difficulty or tragedy. 3 Since Tarot found a place in such modern classics as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Charles Williams’s The Greater Trumps (1932), William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley (1946), Hugh Ross Williamson’s A Wicked Pack of Cards (© 1961), John Fowles’s The Magus (© 1965), Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968), and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), it has become a familiar motif in popular fiction, 4 and is thus discussed in analyses of these works. 5 Cartomancy and Tarot in film, however, has not been the subject of any previous study, at least none that I have located. Karin Beeler’s Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Characters in Recent Television and Film (2008) does not mention Tarot or cartomancy. Carol Lee Fry mentions cartomancy in passing in her Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spirituality in Film (2008) with reference to the protagonist of The Gift (2000): “She is a single mom in a southern town who supports her children by being the local soothsayer (she gives readings from cards), but she’s also a good counselor.” 6 Fry also mentions several films, including Season of the Witch (1976), The Exorcist III (1990), and The Ninth Gate (1999) without elaborating on the signi