TAROTMANIA MAP
The world of Tarot 2004
Once upon a time, as the extra-Tarotical world became more and more ghastly all over, I decided to create a map of what I knew of a place I called Tarotmania. The latter existed, as Rod Serling liked to say "between light and shadow, between science and superstition", and most definitely, as I viewed it anyway, between a rock of irrationalism and a hard place of ludicrousness. Only the other day (in 2009) I read a forum comment expressing surprise at the degree of seriousness and competitiveness with which people were taking Tarot cards. The implication was that there was an appropriate amount of those things to apply to Tarot, and it was about the amount due a house of cards.
My response to that is to point out that in pretty much all human interests, the worlds people make of their endeavors and relationships, the communities they build, tend to mirror the alleged real world; and so dogmatists are pitted against heretics, aristocracies against peasants, and rule-makers and -obeyers against outlaws; and you can bet all the while somebody will have figured out how to squeeze every last dollar or pound or mark out of the whole mess. Somewhere, maybe buried deeply below the surface of a lot of absurdity and bovine roughage posing as truth and light, you might actually encounter an interesting idea.
The Tarotmania map points out and explains all that as it related to the world of Tarot in 2004. Some things have changed a bit. Tarot history is even less important to the larger community of Tarot than it was five years ago, even though pretty much all players now know the rough outline or talking points of the term "Tarot history", and sprinkle them liberally into their books and posts and postures. You might call that some kind of progress, but the thing is, people use the history just like they use their Ph.D's from lumber college, to pretend they know what they're talking about, when they are in fact still as dim as ever when it comes to Tarot.
But hey, if they knew what they were talking about, if they weren't obscenely self-glorifying nincompoops, if they had in fact used Tarot to become better, quieter people—we wouldn't a need a map to navigate their dangerously amusing droppings.
Oh, one last thing, the shape of the island. Well, that has something to do with the name of the southern part of Tarotmania, called YAMLand. Now, YAM is an acronym which stands for Yet Another Moron. In addition to making silly maps of the Tarot community, I have also made very dignified drawings of some of the key players and poopers of Tarot with yam heads. These hang in a very secret gallery on Tarotica Island. Maybe you will travel there and see it someday.
Enjoy your adventure.
Click Minimap Image Above to View Map
(requires a PDF viewer or plugin)
