Even if you have only just crossed the threshold into the mysteries of tarot, you know Rachel Pollack - author of the tarot classic 78 Degrees of Wisdom, teacher, scholar, novelist, and godmother/midwife/muse to innumerable modern-day tarot creations. But not everyone is familiar with her chapbook of tarot poems, Fortune's Lover, a jewel box containing a dozen lyrical musings on the major arcana.
In April 2019 at Readers Studio in New York, I had the rare pleasure of sitting down with Rachel to record a few poems from Fortune's Lover . Time was short, so we grabbed my portable mike and hustled ourselves into a glass-walled conference room in between sessions. The voices of excited conference-goers drifted in through the door-seams - and as you can hear, despite my efforts to clean up the audio, the recording retains a certain MacGyvered-together extemporaneous quality.
As fans of tarot lore and esoterics will be aware, the Magician in tarot corresponds to the god Mercury or Hermes, the double-natured god of thieves, messengers, and magicians. Rachel's poem unspools in alternating stanzas; it begins and ends with quotations from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, based on the translation by Isaac Newton.
My life and career in tarot have brought me many joys, but truly one of the highlights was this moment, where I got to play Newton to Rachel's Magician. The voice of Rachel Pollack is passionate, enchanted, and truly one-of-a-kind. I hope you will enjoy hearing it as much as I do.
Decks whose Magician cards are featured in this video:
- The Shining Tribe Tarot, by Rachel Pollack
- The Vertigo Tarot, by Rachel Pollack and Dave McKean
- The Haindl Tarot, by Hermann Haindl
- The Brady Tarot, by Emi Brady
- The Dalí Tarot, by Salvador Dalí
- The Tarot de Marseille (Camoin-Jodorowsky version)
- The Raziel Tarot, by Robert M. Place