Tarot Quotes

I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

This is your karma. You do not understand now, but you will understand later. The source of pain is within your own larger expression of being.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about the tarot cards, or the crystals, or the special teas. That’s not where the magic lives. The magic is in the tiny moments. The small touches, the gentle smiles, the quiet laughs. The magic is about living for today and allowing yourself to breathe and be happy. My dear boy, to love is the magic.

In the Tarot deck, the Fool is depicted as a young man about to step off a cliff into empty air. Most people assume that the Fool will fall. But we don't see it happen, and a Fool doesn't know that he's subject to the laws of gravity. Against all odds, he just might float.

Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum - its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow.

Tarot and dreams are two dialects in the language of the soul.

Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I'm not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz. The divorcee in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn't eat dairy but smokes menthols, who's always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like, "Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I'll let you wear my mood ring...

What is it we need to talk about, Lord Sun?” “Matthias, this isn’t an eighties sitcom. I can’t casually accept an orphan into my house for comic relief.

No! I don’t want to Ouija, or do the pendulum thing, and I swear if I see one tarot card or rune stone I’ll yack cupcake all over you. (Grace)

Para concluir, quiero dejar muy claro que los peligros de la brujería, de las cartas del tarot, de la religión y del ocultismo son muy reales.

Garbage, you know, is very revealing.It beats the shit out of tarot cards.

Tarot doesn`t predict the future. Tarot facilitates it.

When you drop the idea of predicting the future, you start to experience the cards as a mirror of the psyche. That`s when playing with the tarot becomes a path to wisdom.

Divination is the quest to understand more about the past, present, and future. In other words, Tarot readings are an attempt to understand ourselves better and discover how we might live better in the future.

My name is Rune Saint John. I am, before anything else, a survivor:

Fear is dangerous, not the tarot. The tarot represents the spectrum of the human condition, the good, the evil, the light, and the dark. Do not fear the darker aspects of the human condition. Understand them. The tarot is a storybook about life, about the greatness of human accomplishment, and also the ugliness we are each capable of.

The World "You know the saddest thing," she said. "The saddest thing is that we're you." I said nothing. "In your fantasies," she said, "my people are just like you. Only better. We don't die or age or suffer from pain or cold or thirst. We're snappier dressers. We possess the wisdom of the ages. And if we crave blood, well, it is no more than the way you people crave food or affection or sunlight - and besides, it gets us out of the house. Crypt. Coffin. Whatever." "And the truth is?" I ask her. "We're you," she said. "We're you with all your fuckups and all the things that make you human - all your fears and lonelinesses and confusions... none of that gets better. "But we're colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything..." And then she stopped. "Are you crying?" I asked. "We don't cry," she told me. Like I said, the woman was a liar." Fifteen Painted Cards From A Vampire Tarot

If you don't feel you have any choice in a situation, self-esteem and confidence plummet. But once you understand that you do have a choice, self-esteem will improve. You aren't a helpless victim anymore. You decide how you deal with a situation. You aren't just reacting to life; you're creating your life.

As the poet plays with words, the musician with sounds and the painter with colours, so the tarotist plays with the interaction of tarot cards and the psyche.

However...," Satan said. Bick sighed. "However, I didn't count on the growing interference of lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats and politicians into my business. I swear it seems that every year they stick their noses into more and more." Lucifer chuckled. "Sorry about that-I outdid myself there.

One thing is certain: Existence is overflowing. With everything it is luxurious. It is not a poor existence, no. Poverty is man’s creation.

Books are like Tarot decks. They provide answers and guidance but more importantly, they are doorways and portals to the otherworld and the imagination. They leave their imprint and keep whispering to us long after we close the pages or shuffle the deck.

Adam was crouched in front of it, staring unflinchingly into the headlights’ brilliance. His fingers were spread on the asphalt and his feet braced like a runner waiting for the starting shot. Three tarot cards splayed before him. He’d taken one of the floor mats out of the car to crouch on to keep from dirtying his uniform trousers. If you combined these two things – the unfathomable and the practical – you were most of the way to understanding Adam Parrish.

It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire. That’s of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it’s said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the everlasting dance.

The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated "saints" who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.

Tarot is a practice rich with history and cultural knowledge. It is a science of the mind.

Tarot is a card-game that you don`t play to win or lose. If there is a winner,it`s the player who discovers the value of play itself

La vida, como un comentario de otra cosa que no alcanzamos, y que está ahí al alcance del salto que no damos. La vida, un ballet sobre un tema histórico, una historia sobre un hecho vivido, un hecho vivido sobre un hecho real. La vida, fotografía del número, posesión en las tinieblas (¿mujer, monstruo?), la vida, proxeneta de la muerte, espléndida baraja, tarot de claves olvidadas que unas manos gotosas rebajan a un triste solitario.

Tarot helps us look within ourselves to understand our emotions, the reasoning behind our words and conduct, and the source of our conflicts.

The tarot is an outer oracle of which the inner oracle is the source

Some men are terrified by the dark nature of the Moon, but not the Devil. The Devil is afraid of nothing he can fuck. And there’s very little the Devil won’t stick his dick in. He’ll bugger the Priest, orgy with Art, and rape the shit out of Justice. The whole of the Universe is the only hole he won’t try to fill.

The cards give you images and symbols to focus your vague intentions and transform them into action. Your will is the magic. In other words, you are the magic. If you can create something in your heart and then act on it to make it happen, that is magic. Very simple, very straightforward—no witches, no spells, and no broomsticks.

Using the tarot cards was like when he had begun learning Latin. He danced ever closer to that moment when he would understand the sentences without having to translate each word.

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

In life, there are no true beginnings or endings. Events flow into each other, and the more you try to isolate them in a container, the more they spill over the sides, like canal-water breaching its artificial banks. A related point is that the things we label 'beginnings' and 'endings' are often, in reality, indistinguishable. They are one and the same thing. This is one of the things the Death card symbolizes in tarot - an end that is also a new beginning.

A lot of people think that the tarot is about being psychic and getting so-called psychic powers. Actually,the original meaning of psyche is soul. So the real power of the tarot is that it can help you to live your psyche, your soul, with more creativity, more awareness, more imagination,more clarity, more understanding and more joy.

If someone gave you the rules to the game you have been playing right away, you would miss the most exciting part – the details. Sometimes it’s all about the details, they make the whole more meaningful.

The shadow is needed now more than ever. We heal the world when we heal ourselves, and hope shines brightest when it illuminates the dark.

Tarot Reading is an art based on intuition, interpretation, and perception.

Tarot is always whispering to you. Tarot weaves truth, stories, secrets, and tales. All you need to do is slow down and listen.

It is the province of the tarot reader to move backwards, forwards, even sideways in time.

If a violent person wishes to attack us, let us send him a gentle phrase as this will defuse his violence.

There's no right or wrong way to seek truth, and as the old axiom states, all paths lead to the same place.

A good Tarot Reader never gives false hope or leave a client feeling disturbed,

Tarot is a way of sorting out what's bothering you and getting advice from the best-informed source - you - in a way that you're likely to listen to.

If you choose to forget all other things, remember only this and you will never fail: you are awesome, in the most total sense of the word.

Playing with the tARoT is an art that enables you to see what you didn`t see before.

To learn to play seriously is one of the great secrets of spiritual exploration.

The Magician represents the man who has attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious (in the sense given to it by C. G. Jung) and the deliberate action of the conscious (in the sense of “I” or ego consciousness).

Our work is to integrate and eventually transcend darkness and light altogether by holding them equally in a state of interconnection.

Originally, Tarot had been devised as a secret means to pass along ideologies banned by the Church. Now, Tarot's mystical qualities were passed on by modern fortune-tellers.

In essence, playing with the Tarot is a creativity exercise. It is right-brain medicine in an increasingly left-brain world.

You are a child of the divine, you are compressed stardust, you are a human being. You have a responsibility to cause as little harm to yourself and others as possible. To live the best, biggest life you can and to leave everyone you come across better than you found them.

Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.

They won’t understand,” Persephone said. She laid her deck of tarot cards on the table in front of him. “They didn’t when I came back.” “Am I different?” he asked. “You were different before,” Persephone replied. “But now they won’t be able to stop noticing.

I hope you find your truth and when you do, you stand in the middle of it strong, beautiful and nimble like the World dancer. Because when the Fool followed her own path and trusted herself, she found herself in the World. And by the time she did, she was so high on the music-so enraptured by the dancing, so lost in the beauty, so in tune with herself, and so filled with magic-she didn't even realize she'd arrived at her destination.

The key to the world is the key to your self and the key to yourself is the key to the world.

God has a plan and guess what? The plan is to stop waiting for him to do everything for you. The person you want in your life is not a sign. Not a clue. Not a wish. Not a prayer. Not a tarot card or a matter of timing. It is work. It is devotion, and like any dream if you want it then God will open doors for you to obtain it. You just have to stop setting the bar so low that everything below is a sign from God and everything above is asking too much.

Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: "Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them." Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

A tarot reading is a synchronistic conversation that employs deliberately random use of archetypal artwork to open up possibilities, create self-awareness and explore potentialities in the lives of the participants. Plus, it`s a lot of fun.

I did some research on Little Lord Asshat,” he said. It lacked any real heat, though. I’d overheard him earlier giving money to Queenie to buy Matthias “a razor, a toothbrush, and a fucking clue.

The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology, and phrenology, or mysticism like astrology, numerology, and tarot cards.

My lord, just to be clear,” one of the uniformed men said, “the gargoyle entered the premises from over here.” I said, “Entered the premises? It pulled itself off the wall. Right there. In the spot with the monster shaped cut-out.

pictures are like doors which open into unexpected chambers,

Guns are like men—only useful for a little while. They can go off at a moment's notice when you don't want them to and they make a lot of damn fool noise doing it.

Magic is what happens when the blueprint of who you are comes into the alignment with the expanding energy of the universe.

I think people make themselves beautiful. I think everything on our outside is a line sketch, and whatever’s on the inside blows those lines into three dimensions.

A robed figure stood before a coin, a cup, a sword, a wand---all of the symbols of all the tarot suits. An infinity symbol floated above his head; one arm was lifted in a posture of power. Yes, thought Adam. Understanding prickled and then evaded him. He read the words at the bottom of the card. The Magician.

One should learn to connect the bridge between the heart and the mind. That’s what crowns you with eternity, and makes you the master of your own life rather than a slave of someone else’s.

A lot of people think that the tarot is about being "psychic" and getting "psychic powers". Actually,the original meaning of psyche is soul. So the real power of the tarot is that it can help you to live your psyche, your soul, with more creativity, more awareness, more imagination,more clarity, more understanding and more joy.

Brand’s my partner,” I said. “Not just a Companion. He comes with me.” “Plus,” Brand said, “I hear all the cool bodyguards love to shut their clients in a strange room with a strange man. Extra points when zombies are involved.

One real danger in love relationships is that most people secretly believe that they must control the love object in order to feel safe in loving and being loved. The cause of this is simple—children are made to feel that they must "give themselves up" if they are to be loved. Thus, for most humans the act of surrender has meant the loss of autonomy or worse—loss of one's own mind. Surrender is neither control nor morbid dependency and cannot be made contingent upon giving away one's "soul"; nonetheless, the person surrendering opens completely to the moment, and runs the risk of being deeply hurt. Sadly, in our society this is not uncommon and frequently serves to harden or embitter a person toward life in general. Or, on the other had being deeply hurt in the act of surrender can lead to angry and painful "cries for help." When this occurs there is an insatiable and wrathful desire to be cared for as a child is cared for and the horrid fear of loss of independence.

To love with all your heart, the heart must first be opened.

Don’t you do it, Rune,” Brand said without having to ask what I was thinking. “Don’t you fucking dare.” “I’m just going to wait. Over there.” “I’m fucking serious. Get the fuck out of there.” “Right over there.” I pointed innocently. “I will shoot you in the ass, the goddamn ass! I will shoot you in the ass, and you’ll be shitting through an inner tube for weeks!” “I’ll be right back,” I said. “In! The! Ass!” I headed for the secret room.

Identify yourself,” Colleen demanded. “I’ve got a bat and I will beat the living shit out of you if you so much as blink. I’ve got a black belt,” she lied frantically, “and…and…a gun. A big one.” - Colleen O’Brien

Brand said, fiercely, in a breaking voice, "You're my boy. You can do anything. Anything.

You’re not somebody’s maybe. You're someone’s absofuckinglutely

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.

Didn’t you know what his father was like—what kind of ability Rune has inherited? Those aren’t just shoes to fill, it’s the whole fucking shoe factory. Don’t you ever doubt whether he can do what he says.

The stories of tarot are the reason for its existence. With a deck of cards, we can tell the stories of where we come from, how it is that we are here, what awaits us, and what we will or might become. Tarot tells the story that we are made in a divine image, and that the world (at least the world as we experience it) is made in that same image, so that in some subtle way God, humanity, and the world are all the same shape and are made of the same things. if that is true, then to be a student of tarot is to be a student of everything.

Food shouldn’t be that shade of green, lass.” – Faolán MacIntyre

Often we have to feel dissatisfied and anxious and terrible for a long time before we’ll admit to the truth that we should be doing something else. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, wrote about how anxiety is a necessary emotion that should be listened to—it is cuing you that change is needed. It is a feeling of uprooting, which is unsettling, but it prepares you for action. Often one must feel the anxiety and the instability in order to make great changes. So it’s time to leave what you’ve been doing and wander around in the dark for a while. You have to go find what does actually satisfy you. It is the start of a journey, and the thing you are searching for won’t be obvious immediately.

Salzman examinó su mano y vio centenares de figuras lejanamente parecidas a los arcanos del Tarot: la Riqueza, el Poder, la Fama, el Amor, la Inteligencia, la Fuerza, el Honor, la Juventud, la Razón, la Salud, la Imaginación, el Arte, la Clarividencia, el Valor, la Fe, la Suerte, la Belleza, la Virilidad, la Inspiración... Sin hacer ningún gesto, dio vuelta las cartas sobre la mesa. —Buen juego —dijo el Tallador—, pero no alcanza. Y jugó el naipe de la Muerte.

Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, its armor glistening and its pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin blood. You end up with a parody.

According to Q-Jo, the whole tarot deck, or at least the twenty-two trump cards of the Major Arcana, may be read as the Fool's journey. "On one important level," she explained, "the major cards are chapters in the story of a quest. I'm talking the universal human quest for understanding and divine reunion. And it doesn't matter whether the quest starts with the Fool or ends with him, because it's a loop anyhow, a cycle endlessly repeated. When the naive young Fool finally tumbles over the precipice, he falls into the world of experience. Now his journey has really begun. Along the way, he'll meet all the teachers and tempters - the tempters are teachers, too - and challenging situations that a person is likely to meet in the task of his or her growing. The Fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the fool. A lot of folks don't know what's in that bag they're carrying. And they're all too willing to trade it for cash. Inside the bag, the have every tool they need to facilitate their life's journey, but they won't even open it up and glance inside. Subconsciously, the goal of all of us out-of-control primates is essentially the same, but let me assure you of this: the only ones who'll ever reach that goal are the ones who have the courage to make fools of themselves along the way.

Much of what I love about literature is also what I love about the Tarot - archetypes at play, hidden forces, secrets brought to light. When I bought the deck, it was for the same reason I bought the car: I felt too much like a character in a novel, buffeted by cruel turns of fate. I wanted to feel powerful in the face of my fate. I wanted to look over the top of my life and see what was coming. I wanted to be the main character of this story, and its author. And if I were writing a novel about someone like me, this is exactly what would lead him astray.

David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.

I always like to think of Neal Cassady as being representative of the tarot card The Fool, which displays him at the outset of his journey with unlimited potential. The card also shows him about to step off a cliff and it’s clear he hasn’t planned things properly. He’s got a bag with him that contains all he needs, but he’s not bothering to open it. In his left hand he’s holding a white rose, which represents purity and righteousness. He’s got a little white dog with him, who’ll protect him on his journey, but will push him to learn life’s lessons. The Fool represents crazy wisdom, for his journey may well be to discover advanced and contemporary ideas, new frames of reference, shocking concepts, knowledge or viewpoints. The Fool has holy curiosity.

A winged angel, with the sign of the sun upon his forehead and on his breast the square and triangle of the septenary. I speak of him in the masculine sense, but the figure is neither male nor female. It is held to be pouring the essences of life from chalice to chalice. It has one foot upon the earth and one upon waters, thus illustrating the nature of the essences. A direct path goes up to certain heights on the verge of the horizon, and above there is a great light, through which a crown is seen vaguely. Hereof is some part of the Secret of Eternal Life, as it is possible to man in his incarnation. All the conventional emblems are renounced herein.

You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice – and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote?

Do not confuse the 'subconscious' with the 'unconscious', whose attributes include courage as well as true knowledge. A great deal of confusion has resulted from the use of these two terms as synonymous. I am using the term 'subconscious' here to stand for material -desires, anxieties, fears, hopes - repressed by the conscious mind as it deals with the outer realities of life. 'Unconscious' means the absic energy of life, that area of being beyond the ego. The subconscious, despite its hidden qualities, is really an extension of the ego. In a sense, it embodies the ego's absolute domain, that realm where it makes no compromises with reality. Because it does not concern itself with consequences the subconscious will walk you in front of a truck to avoid an unpleasant conversation. The unconscious on the other hand, balances and supports us by joining us to the great surge of life beyond our individual selves. The Hanged Man in the Major Arcana gives us a powerful image of this vital connection.

There isn’t any way to be. I will meet you where you’ve gone. The cards are blank; the cards are empty there. If I can just have one last cut. Do you have a plan for the new? The cards be blank. The symbols be over. I will tell my fortune with the blank cards of blank. What do you see?

It is now possible for humanity to awaken to the liberating fact that each of us is a star, as unique and self-radiant as our celestial counterparts. Instead of desperately trying to determine the will of God and then clumsily attempting to cooperate with it, each of us must now come to realize that our will, if properly understood and executed, is already in harmony with the divine will. In other words, in this age, the holy quest is to discover one's own way rather than trying to guess what a God wants for you and hope from moment to moment that you are guessing correctly.

Sex and magic are intertwined experiences—sex is one kind of magic (and can be made more magical without being concerned with sex-magic at any point), and magic can be, while erotic and arousing, not necessarily sexual in the way that is often understood. There is a commonly-held belief that those who practice sex-magic are indulging themselves in wild orgiastic rites at every opportunity. This is rarely the case. After all, if you need to go through lots of occult rigmarole just to get laid, then you're a bit sad, aren't you? Then again, the occult subculture is full of SAD people, desperate to finally get laid and attempting to turn to sex-magic as a last resort.

His deep voice drifted to her through the crowd of women. “…my lady when she returns. Och, there ye are, Blossom,” Faolán grinned, standing up and taking her hand so she could ease back into the restaurant booth. “These lasses were just asking if I was a stripper. I told them I doona think so,” he said, his face clouded with uncertainty. “I’m not, am I?” The inquisitive lasses in question flushed scarlet and scattered to the four corners of the room at the murderous look on Colleen’s face. “No, you’re not, but I guess I can see how they’d think that,” she muttered darkly. “What you are is a freaking estrogen magnet.

Finding her voice at last, she asked, “What dreams are you having, sir?” “I dreamt I was in a spring field and a woman stands in the shadows just at the edge of the nearby forest. I haven’t yet seen her face, only her long beautiful hair. I always wake too soon.” He reached up to touch the hawk touchstone around his throat as he described his dream, rubbing it absently between his fingers. Lily lowered her lashes to hide her astonishment. “When you see someone in a dream but cannot see their face, it means you haven’t met them yet,” she explained. “Then perhaps I’ll dream of her again tonight and this time I’ll see her face.” He smiled, reaching across the table to take her left hand and lift it to his lips. “My name is Ian Kelly, and it would give me the greatest pleasure to know yours.” “Lily Evans. Around here I go by Raven.” She raised a shoulder, indicating the gypsy tent. “Lily--indeed, a most beautiful name. Now tell me,” he stared pointedly at her hand, “I see no ring that another has claimed you as his, so my confidence is strengthened. Look at your cards again, milady, and tell me if you see me in your future…

The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled with the clicker culture of mass media, in which attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, the movies, the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible!, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist: The Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths, and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and psi. UFOs and ETIs. OBEs and NDEs. JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. It’s all an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. Trust no one. The truth is out there. I want to believe.

A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”. What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists! Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it! Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning? Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.

It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo—a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .)

Introductory paragraph incorporating the thesis: After a challenging childhood marked by adversity, Adam Parrish has become a successful freshman at Harvard University. In the past, he had spent his time doubting himself, fearing he would become like his father, obsessing that others could see his trailer-park roots, and idealizing wealth, but now he has built a new future where no one has to know where he's come from. Before becoming a self-actualized young man at Harvard, Adam had been deeply fascinated by the concept of the ley lines and also supernaturally entangled with one of the uncanny forests located along one, but he has now focused on the real world, using only the ghost of magic to fleece other students with parlor trick tarot card readings. He hasn't felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine. Followed by three paragraphs with information that supports the thesis. First: Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years. Four years is only a lifetime if one is a guinea pig. Second paragraph, building on the first point: Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e. the Crying Club. Third paragraph, with the most persuasive point: Harvard is a place Ronan Lynch cannot be, because he cannot survive there, either physically or socially. Without such hard barriers, Adam will surely continue to return to Ronan Lynch again and again, and thus fall back in with bad habits. He will never achieve the life of financial security and recognition he planned. Thesis restated, bringing together all the information to prove it: Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine. Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.