Head Librarian at NYC's Morbid Anatomy, Laetitia Barbier shares her childhood encounters with tarot, her fondness for strong coffee and her most treasured deck By: The College of Psychic Studies. Posted Friday 22nd July New York's Morbid Anatomy caters well for the curious and the eclectic. We can thank its head librarian and programme director, Laetitia Barbier, for many of its multifarious cultural and artistic offerings.
Here, Laetitia, who harbours a deep and abiding passion for cartomancy, invites us into her home to admire her collection of treasures, her most cherished tarot decks and her personal tarot rituals But Pamela Colman Smith's visual sensibility feels to me like a bottomless poetic well and I marvel at how she managed to convey such powerful and complex stories with a minimal line work.
Besides, I don't collect Tarot decks even if I collect pretty much everything else and will only own decks I feel drawn to read with. Very much like any relationship, I feel like the amount of time and commitment we spend with one tool allows us to go deeper and have access to nuances hidden beyond the surface. The only exception might be of the Carnival of the End of the World by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick which was kind of a "love at first sight" encounter.
I read it for people on special occasions but the Rider-Waite-Smith is definitely my 'Cadillac'. I wish I could say I come from a long lasting lineage of cartomancers but I don't. In the early s, when I was about 6 or 7 years old, my mom used to pick me up from school and we'd listen to a radio show on RTL, in which a card reader, Didier Derlich, would read live to people calling the station.
Since it was the radio, he would name each card - La Papesse, La Maison-Dieu, Le Pendu - and offer comments on cards when they were reversed or upright. Spoken of, but never seen, the iconography of the cards formed in my imagination, crystallising in my mind. I was inventing how they looked and the enigma of their name was enough to fuel my imagination for hours. I loved that show so much and always insisted on listening to it on our way home.
