No Rainbow Without the Sun

Elizabeth I's "rainbow portrait," discussed over at Phantasmaphile.

"Objects contain the past, present and future,
if we know how to trap their secrets."
—Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door (1977)

(Rock divination photo by Earthworm.)

A beautiful image of Pope Gregory I. Though he lived several hundred years before the creation of the Tarot in northern Italy, this portrait would make a wonderful Pope card. It succinctly, yet elegantly, expresses religious authority and knowledge.

This is a 19th century French print of a bas-relief by Renaissance sculptor Michel Colombe. With some slight modifications, it would make a wonderful Knight of Wands.

Enrique Enriquez on the tarologist’s fees:

In the unforeseen event that a question is exceptionally wondrous, to the extent of inspiring in the tarologist a renewed faith in humankind, the tarologist will be the one paying the client the standard fee, upon the delivery of his answer.

See the entire piece here.

A Tarot pinhole camera.

The tower is air.
Wisdom falls first.
—William Keckler

"The time has come for the star to appear once more. Perhaps I will dress in wolfskin, sitting in a tree watching the circle, waiting for the next step to be traced in the mud. All these shadows from the unknown. I am ignorant, but soon I shall begin to know." —Leonora Carrington, "The Stone Door" (emphasis ours)

I love this moody, atmospheric allegory of Death, by N. I. Narbut. The black gauzy scarf is a great touch.

"The star follows her strange course in the mountains, in the round temples, through green, lukewarm woods and penetrating hedges and walls. She lies hard, bright, and cold under the beds of lovers and under bodies of sleeping cattle." —the surrealist author, "mythic feminist" and painter Leonora Carrington, from her story "The Stone Door," collected in The Seventh Horse