Why the secret symbols of magic and witchcraft fascinate us
Earlier this summer, a collection of Sylvia Plath's personal items went up for sale at Sotheby's. It included intimate love letters, recipe cards, a rolling pin, family photo albums and her and Ted Hughes's gold wedding bands. The rings sold for a respectable $38,000 (£28,000) – but this was mere pocket change compared to the most sought after item in the lot: Plath's personal tarot deck. Originally expected to fetch between $6,000 (£4,351) and $9,000 (£6,527), it eventually went for $206,886 (£150,037).
The Tarot de Marseille deck was a 24th birthday gift from Hughes. Plath wrote in her journals of her wish to get better at reading tarot – but it played an important part in her art, too. She references the practice in her poem Daddy ("With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck/ And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack"
, while The Hanging Man takes its name from a tarot card.
Tarot has been a muse for countless writers, artists and designers in their work – TS Eliot wrote of the "wicked pack of cards" in The Waste Land, Salvador Dalí created his own deck, while Andy Warhol made a film of the Velvet Underground having their cards read. Earlier this year, fashion house Dior cast models as the characters from a deck of tarot cards for its spring/ summer 2021 couture show (Christian Dior himself had his cards read before every show). Recently, the costume designer for the sci-fi film Dune revealed that tarot cards were a source of inspiration.
arot has been a muse for countless writers, artists and designers in their work – TS Eliot wrote of the "wicked pack of cards" in The Waste Land, Salvador Dalí created his own deck, while Andy Warhol made a film of the Velvet Underground having their cards read. Earlier this year, fashion house Dior cast models as the characters from a deck of tarot cards for its spring/ summer 2021 couture show (Christian Dior himself had his cards read before every show). Recently, the costume designer for the sci-fi film Dune revealed that tarot cards were a source of inspiration.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211102-why-the-secret-symbols-of-magic-and-witchcraft-fascinate-us
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Article gets better. As a (very) beginning Tarot reader I found it interesting
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