The World is Not Enough

Invisible College presents The World is Not Enough: Tarot & the Arts in the 21st Century, an online festival convening artists, best-selling authors, musicians, scholars, and mystics from divergent lineages for conversation around the Tarot, and the enduring influence of chance and divination in avant-garde art and practice.

Speakers
Courtney Alexander, creator of the acclaimed Dust ii Onyx: A Melanated Tarot, will teach a spiral methodology for reading the cards, rooted in Central and West African cosmologies.

Scholar of crypto-Judaism and data scientist Stav Appel of The Torah in the Tarot will present “Kabbalah Qabalah Cabala,” disambiguating the various forms of Jewish mysticism present in the many spiritual and artistic approaches to the cards.

Preeminent Tarot historian, multimedia artist, and co-author with Alejandro Jodorowsky of The Way of the Tarot Marianne Costa will teach the fundamentals of the Tarot de Marseille, along with some of her newest research on Remedios Varo.

Qabalistic numerologist, Thoth deck expert, and author Remington Donovan will reveal what the numbers in the Tarot refer to, what they do, and what they mean. 

Bestselling author and artist Kim Krans of the viral Wild Unknown decks will connect the Tarot's iconography to the realm of dreams, Jungian depth psychology, meditation, and mystery schools. 

Beloved novelist and cultural critic Chris Kraus will speak on the role of chance operations in major art movements, including her experience curating the legendary Chance Event in the Nevada desert in 1996.

Scholar and diviner Christopher Marmolejo of The Red Tarot will show how a postcolonial approach to the Tarot’s narratives and structures, rooted in indigineity and queerness, can unlock new dimensions of consciousness.

Pioneering feminist surrealist artist Penny Slinger of the influential Dakini Oracle will reveal the geomantic dimension of spiritual work, by which an inward journey becomes high art.

Prolific novelist, queer icon, and witch Michelle Tea will describe the Tarot’s role in creativity, recovery, and healing.

Composer and musician Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene will share some of his experiences creating through the Sforza-Visconti deck.

And musical guests The Lightman Sisters & Daniela Gesundheit will provide music throughout the day.

Followed by an afterparty at The Russian Samovar, NYC. Register here.

In exploring the Tarot’s history, its mystical and religious underpinnings, its queer, postcolonial, and feminist potentials, its psychoanalytically compelling iconography, and the inner reflection it evokes, this gathering aims to bring fresh insight to the complex and subtle syncretisms—digital, analog, and etheric—through which the world becomes—every once in a while, at least—much more than it seems. 

Divination and chance operations played an important role in avant-garde movements of the last century, from the cut-up as practiced by William Burroughs and David Bowie, to the I Ching's influence on John Cage, to the serial experimentality of Fluxus, and beyond.  It can be argued that the most exciting and innovative minds of the last 500 years have had some relationship, however passing—even derisive—to the wisdom hidden in the cards.  The Tarot's impact on artists like Niki de Saint Phalle, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jonathan Anderson, or King Khan—or poets such as T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, John Wieners, or Alice Notley—is still only beginning to come fully into view. 

Somehow, even in this algorithmic and automated age, divination remains powerfully attractive—and the Tarot survives and continues to inspire, mostly without official sanction—or indeed, perhaps, largely by grace of the lack thereof.

Curated and hosted by Ariana Reines, with support from The Cluny Institute. 

Invisible College is an online study hall focused on the mystical dimensions of poetry, ancient texts, and the arts.  Recent courses have focused on The Book of Job, Paradise Lost, James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Krystov Kieslowski's DEKALOG, The Song of Songs, the Nag Hammadi texts, Rilke's Duino Elegies, and more.