UC San Diego

Tarot is an oracular and speaking literature, embedded in magical divination practices, and as such, has an inherently strange and irrational relationship to history and even time itself. This work applies the oracular tarot to a number of situations and contexts, all of which will illuminate some facet of magic and narrative as being living, affective agents in the world. I explore the intersections of psychoanalysis and literary theory and the ways that these disciplines prepare a reader for the irrational practices and results of engaging oracular texts. I allow tarot to introduce itself through an auto-ethnographic and phenomenological description of a reading encounter and present a literary analysis of its results. From there, I extend the texts, practices and results of reading oracles outward, toward the texts, practices and results of reading more broadly within a narratively-constructed world.

I present tarot as a pedagogical tool that allows students to physically explore and examine semiotics and embodied reading practices through two classroom case studies. In the first lesson plan, signification systems and reading practices are examined in a Communication course through the restaging of a 16th century narrative parlor game and oracular group readings. In the second, after interpreting and physically embodying individual tarot cards in a Theatre & Dance course, students develop contextually dynamic choreography within living tarot spreads.

Further, I examine the ways that tarot has replicated and renewed itself through history as a facet of its aliveness and the biography of tarot in the hands of Stuart R. Kaplan, founder of US Games Systems, Inc. I present a dialectic of demystification and remystification in which the occult object is stripped of its enchantments in order to be turned into a commodity, which is then remystified by the logics of fetishism, commerce and narrative industries. This remystification then opens up the magical object to mass-distribution and reach while generating forms of magical practice that were not imagined by the commodity producer, thereby demonstrating how a rational and disenchanted age provides the tools and technologies necessary to re-enchant the world. Throughout this dissertation, I present a number of challenges and meaningful alternatives to rationality. By divining literature, I mean to re-enchant our understanding of narrative. By a history of tarot, I mean to demonstrate how tarot is alive and detail something about how it has lived.