Apropos of nothing in particular…. because if I don’t give in to impulse more readily, this blog is never going to take off…. a selection of offerings from the surprisingly crowded market for cat Tarot:
from Elizabeth Wilson, Cultural Passions:
“I don’t believe it’s possible to tell the future […] However when, in the 1980s and 1990s, I gave “readings” at fundraising events – feminist causes or school jumble sales – their popularity surprised me. There was a degree of disavowal (or what Theodor Adorno called “disoriented agnosticism”), but the Tarot was not actually seen as just a bit of fun. I dusted down skills I had once learned as a mental health worker and was soon hearing of domestic misery, occupational redundancies and anxious hopes for a different future. On more than one occasion the person whose cards I was reading asked if she (it was usually a woman) might consult me privately, evidently assuming that I was an established clairvoyant. This was disconcerting and I eventually gave up the fundraising altogether, worried about the ethics of the enterprise.
“Religion should never have been allowed to hijack all that we don’t know and pervert it into certainty. But the Tarot’s redeeming feature is its acknowledgement of mystery through the free play of visual metaphor. Its playfulness contradicts those who dismiss it as superstition. It speaks not of rules for life and dogma, but, like many secular aesthetic experiences, of possibilities.” [link]
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