The Cloisters(22)

“Let’s go inside and show Ann how it works,” Patrick said, clapping his hands on his knees and turning his attention to Rachel.

They all rose, but I stayed in my chair for a moment, wondering what awaited me inside and whether I wanted to know what they were about to show me. Patrick’s words from the other day haunted me—it’s time. I felt a strange mix of disbelief and credulity—fear that I would not be able to believe what they so clearly wanted me to believe, and then again, fear I would. Easily, in fact. When Rachel reached the door to the living room, she turned back to where I sat and just like that, as if on command, I stood and followed her.

Inside, they had gathered around a low coffee table that Patrick had cleared of books. He held a deck of cards, taller than the usual playing deck, and thicker, with frayed edges and a backing that showed a series of yellow suns, set in deep orange hexagonal tiles. Patrick placed the deck on the table and looked at me expectantly.

“Shuffle,” he said.

The urge to laugh from nerves was overwhelming. I wanted to laugh so that they would all understand that I, too, was in on the joke. Because it had to be a joke, didn’t it?

“Go on. Shuffle,” said Rachel.

I kneeled next to the coffee table and took the deck in my hand. It was pleasantly worn, but when I went to fan the cards, they resisted.

“No,” said Patrick, “spread them around. Touch them. Get your energy on them. Then pull them back into a pile and cut the deck in three.”

With the cards spread across the table, I did my best to touch them. I was sure they were old—not hand-painted or made of vellum, but still, they had seen at least two hundred years of use. They were the first deck of tarot cards I had ever handled, and however briefly, I wondered if the cards might feel that in my energy before I realized the outlandishness of the thought. But there was something there, as I crouched on the floor of Patrick’s living room, surrounded by collections of medieval artifacts and rare books, watched carefully by my three mentors, that made me wonder, if only for a moment, if it was possible. To believe. The cards felt electric and entirely at home in my hands.

When I finished cutting the cards, Patrick laid out five in a grid, face-up. The illustrations were spare but full of arcane symbols—the ouroboros on the Fortune card, a lion on the card labeled la force, power. The pip cards showed a graphic restraint—a Three of Wands thinly executed on a robin’s-egg-blue background, and a Five of Coins with the symbols of the zodiac against a eucalyptus green. And a card that read protection illustrated with a watery horizon, full of sea creatures that writhed and frothed in the foreground. I was embarrassed to find myself so drawn to the imagery that I reached across the table and picked up one of the cards—a Three of Wands—to get a closer look at the inscription.

“It’s an Etteilla deck,” said Rachel. “An original. One of the first occult decks ever printed. This edition is from 1890.”

“What does it mean?” I asked, returning the card and looking up at Patrick.

He studied the spread in front of him. “We can see here,” he said, pointing to the card full of sea creatures, “an ocean of opportunity, of power, of exploration but also, self-consumption. The ouroboros, of course, a symbol of rebirth, death, and self-empowerment. The lion, a powerful card tempered by the pip cards that remind us about balance and desire.”

As he spoke, I found myself trying to place the cards in my life, trying to create meaning out of their darkly sketched imagery. In the body of the ouroboros—forever forced to devour itself—there was an echo from my past I wasn’t ready to hear.

“This is a deck,” said Rachel, breaking my reverie, “that we know was used for divination. But what we need is to find a set of cards from the fifteenth century that would tell us it was used for the same thing. A deck whose imagery is distinctly culled from other divinatory practices, or archival material that would allow us to make that argument about existing decks.”

“There are many loose, single cards around from the fifteenth century,” added Aruna, “but complete tarot decks from then, or mostly complete tarot decks like the ones at the Beinecke and the Morgan, are incredibly rare. It’s much more common to have complete decks from this vintage. Printing, after all, allowed for a master deck and multiple copies. That was less true when decks were handmade by artists.”

“And there would probably only be a handful,” I said, dragging my gaze from the deck. I couldn’t imagine that the pragmatic Florentines or residents of Rome would have indulged in such ideas, but I was surprised to find myself, when confronted with the imagery here, feeling the pull of possibility.

“It would be a major breakthrough,” said Rachel, “not only in the history of art but also the history of the occult to locate a deck like that. It would give legitimacy to a practice that so many people use today. To this.” She gestured to the spread between us.

If I had often been told that there was nothing new left in the Renaissance to study, then this certainly felt new. Not only new, but arcane and delightfully mysterious. And although it was an idea that under other circumstances I might have been inclined to dismiss, here, I could feel myself being seduced. That, for once, the thing academic researchers had stripped of its magic was about to have its magic restored. Wasn’t that, after all, why we had become academics and researchers in the first place? To discover art as a practice, not just as an artifact?