I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Robert Masterson from CUNY this past weekend, who will soon be acting as a visiting professor, distinguished scholar and lecturer at several universities across India. I’m delighted to learn that Professor Masterson is bringing Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” into his 2018 curriculum (I think he liked the handy class plan at the back). I’m traveling the world! Considering himself “an investigative poet” in the tradition of the greats whom I so admire, Masterson had gotten the idea that I was actually laying out tarot cards, as I do when giving a reading, to come up with my work on Plath. I realized that as I am a tarot card reader, this could be a misconception others share too.
No, the Decoding process does not work this way. This is not a tarot reading. It’s reading poetry with the tarot. WTF does that mean? I thought I’d write a post to explain the system:
For those not familiar with the tarot, let’s get introduced. The tarot evolved from a medieval card game into a pack of 78 cards used for divination, as they contain a bounty of universal archetypes and symbolism delving into the subconscious—much in the way that dream interpretation does. Of these 78 cards, 22 are called the Major Arcana. These are the cards you know from Hollywood: Death, Lovers, The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune. They represent the big life events and milestones. The remaining 56 cards in the Minor Arcana represent the more mundane aspects of life: work, earnings, chance meetings, struggles, communication, ideas, etc. The Minor Arcana is divided into ranks, like a deck of playing cards (ones, twos, threes, etc.) and the Court Cards (Pages, Knights, Queens, Kings). Additionally, also like a deck of playing cards, the Minor Arcana is divided into suits (Pentacles, Swords, Cups and Wands).
The way I decoded Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was to match her poems in the tarot’s order. Therefore her first poem, “Morning Song,” corresponds with The Fool card. The Fool is number zero, air and beginnings, and of course “Morning Song” is full of these things (see my post on “Morning Song” for the American Journal of Poetry here).
Next in Ariel is Plath’s poem, “The Couriers,” which corresponds to The Magician card. This is card number one. The Magician is a wandering trickster considered to be full of himself. “Do not accept it,” as Plath would say.
And so on…
Now, here’s where the heads start spinning. It’s not just that Plath matched her poems with tarot cards. Her powerful, multi-dimensional poems embody enough of the tarot meaning and symbolism that within each Plath poem, there are six levels of meaning: Tarot and Qabalah; Alchemy; Mythology; History and the World; Astrology and Astronomy; and the Arts and Humanities.
It’s common knowledge that Plath was well-read on the last four subjects. It’s my goal to educate the world to all that she knew about the first two, which is plenty.
Professor Masterson closed his call to me with what felt like the best compliment of all: “You’re like an outlaw literary scholar,” he said, “on the fringes of the establishment, shooting your fiery arrows without the sanction of the MLA.”
I like that. The sun is rising. It is the “cauldron of morning.”