More Scary Monsters
My new tarot deck arrived yesterday. The Bohemian Gothic Tarot is now brightening up our apartment, and I am spending part of the day flipping through it and becoming familiar with the images and interpretations. They are best viewed in a strong light, because every card depicts something taking place either at night, or in twilight, or on a very overcast day somewhere in Eastern Europe early in the Twentieth Century. Or maybe on a 1930s Universal Studios set. It’s hard to say.

There’s not a single relationship depicted that’s not troubling, a single smile that isn’t sickly, or clueless, or evil, a single child who doesn’t look either imperiled or corrupt. Even the most normally cheerful cards have sinister background music. The family in the Ten of Cups consists of a mad-eyed father, an obviously frightened wife gazing up at him as she clutches a pasty-faced baby, and a dejected little girl in the background. The little blonde boy of The Sun stares and smiles at the viewer from his pony with the nasty precocity of Miles in The Turn of the Screw. He's obviously planning to frighten the governess at midnight by flying his kite in the garden.

It’s all fascinating, but it needs to be viewed under a strong light. Otherwise the details get lost in all the black, midnight blue, and ash-colored ink. The book that came with the deck assures me, for instance, that the female demoness in the Strength card is glaring at me, but I still can’t quite catch her eye, even when I hold the card next to an open window so the sun hits it directly. She keeps lounging against a very bored looking lion, flexing her leathery wings, and looking coolly over to my right.

This is a deck for readings when you’re in a really, really bad mood, have given up trying to elevate it, and are opting instead to cast a morbidly romantic veil over the fact that your apartment is a mess, your bank account is overdrawn, and your cat just died.