I don’t just think about cards; I think in cards. While fully awake, I drift off into fantastical worlds with strange creatures.

Robin Hood, Rembrandt, the Tin Man, Gandalf, Smurfette, Macbeth, and Schmendrick the Magician have gathered for a tea party at the Mad Hatter’s. They nervously check their various clocks, which all tick too loudly. The Tin Man dabs away the first few tears because he can’t find his built-in clock. Robin is getting embarrassed by Smurfette’s advances. Why does he always have to play the hero, though! Where are the others? They should have been here ages ago. Tick-tock, tick-tock … The tea is getting cold. Just then, the door to the Hatter’s cave flies open, and Edmont Dantès squeezes out a »Pardon« between two heavy breaths. The kangaroo hops in, closely followed by a visibly annoyed Cleopatra and a sheepish-looking Death, who gets his scythe caught on the doorframe, tangles himself in his cloak, and, clumsy as ever, stumbles into the laid table. Lukewarm tea sprays through the air, a few bees fly up, and luckily Alice just comes out of the kitchen and catches the expensive teapot at the last minute. An embarrassed silence. Tick-tock, tick-tock … The grandfather clock has gotten some tea on it. It’s running. Rembrandt looks horrified at this dripping distortion of reality. Macbeth stands up: »This cannot go on! We agreed on punctuality!« Gandalf nods in agreement. Death stammers: »YES, BUT … THE PORTER …« Alice tries to smooth things over: »He’ll have his reasons, he’s very busy with his bees and the whole business.« Banquo’s Ghost appears and interjects with a »True.« Macbeth pales. Cleopatra rises in all her majesty. Now it has to come out. Everyone knows it, no one says it. »We agreed not only on punctuality but also on sobriety. You can’t show up drunk to the tea party; we have important things to discuss here. I smelled it in the carriage. The Porter is not a good influence on you.« Smurfette reaches under the table for Robin’s tights-clad thigh and whispers with a bedroom glance »It provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.« Schmendrick hears her voice louder over the sluggish ticking of the runny clock than he wants to. He knew it. The kangaroo pulls a flask from its pouch and pours some into its teacup. »Why?« As everyone starts to talk at once, they hear a strange, ominous pounding. The clocks stop ticking. The bees fearfully fly back into Death’s hood. Close-up on the teacup, in which trembling concentric circles form. Gandalf is the first to grasp the situation and looks at the Hatter: »Not again. You promised you would bury that stupid thing in the forest by the three oaks.« The Hatter stealthily pulls a small box out from under the damask tablecloth, slowly opens the lid with a transfixed look. Du-dum. Du-dum. The pounding gets louder. Du-dum. »But … my preciousssss.« The Tin Man’s arm squeaks as he stretches out his hand and points with wide-open eyes at the box: »Is that … Is that a heart?« Alice puts a hand on the Hatter’s shoulder. »Now give it to him. You know it’s the right thing to do.« The Hatter hands the richly decorated box to the Tin Man, and the Tin Man beams and squeaks with joy. Finally! The clock drips from the wall, time stands still. Then the door flies open with a crash, and Pippi bursts in. »Sorry, guys. I still had to paint, and the noodles weren’t cooked yet, and then Huckleberry came by and everything went crazy, and unfortunately the monkey ate my sketches but I have the iPad and the charging cable with me and I think I saw Banquo’s Ghost on the way but it doesn’t matter, you’re all here already and if we step on it now we can get the drafts finished today. Have you already started? Did I miss anything?«

I would have to preface this work with an endless list of acknowledgements! Thank you to everyone who has ever thought up and brought stories and characters to life. I’m still working on the Major Arcana, trying to grasp their meaning, and my brain is going nuts.

Number XII. The Hanged Man. What else could you call him? Cliffhanger. No. That makes me think of a climber holding on to the edge of a rock. Indiana Jones emerging from the abyss with the help of his whip. The American soldiers climbing the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc to liberate Europe. Band of Brothers. Parachutes. Crashing. No. The Hanged Man hangs still. Lord of the Flies. I am the spirit who always says no. But he is only suspended, not hanged. He is hanging in the air. Matrix. What’s the name of that actor I don’t like again? John Travolta. No. That was Pulp Fiction with Uma Thurman, who always reminds me of Cleopatra with her pageboy haircut. The other one. Never mind. Doesn’t fit anyway; the Hanged Man is suspended by his ankle. Unwillingly? Unwillingly hanging in the air. Astronauts. The job description sounds exciting, but ultimately, as an astronaut, you probably just hang around stupidly and weightlessly in a small chamber most of the time. Like in a submarine. Das Boot. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. Düüüüm-dü-dü-dü-dü-dü-düüüüüuu. Wrong direction. Direction! The Hanged Man has no direction. He dangles. But he has time. If you’re just hanging around anyway … Upside down. A change of perspective. You can suddenly perceive things differently. Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: draw things upside down. Something is taking shape. But only when you come to rest in your back-and-forth dangling. Then the view can become clear. But rest. Rest can be really damn hard. Sometimes you have to force it. I noticed that on vacation. Normandy and the sea and sunshine. A nervous breakdown from rest. In Phyllis Curott’s deck, the card is called Offering. To make a sacrifice. The firstborn. To sacrifice something. To sacrifice oneself. The soldiers also sacrificed their lives. So many crosses and stones. Eternal rest. Not good either. But better than zombies. What was the point again? Oh yes, the Hanged Man. Involuntary rest. His hands are tied. A good excuse! Tarantino. A gag. Hannibal Lecter. It rubs the lotion on its skin. Prisoners in dark holes. All prisoners in history use the forced rest to think. To dig. They emerge from their captivity as new people. Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Edmont Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo. The forced rest leads to a change of perspective. Finally, there is silence, the mists clear. Mists of Avalon. Excalibur. Transformation. In the forced rest, in the involuntary standstill, the veils fall. Clarity. A new beginning. New strength. A turning point. The Hermit also stands still. But voluntarily. Retreat is not captivity. And he isn’t striving for a change. Who else is in the crew? Death. He stands for the change you might not have wanted. But not in Terry Pratchett. Him again. In my head, the orangutan, the librarian of the Unseen University of Ankh-Morpork, sits there, and with every association, with every new term, he swings to the next bookshelf, to the next association, and manically and completely disorderly pulls out the next books, throws them on the floor, and no one can find their way around anymore. Is this supposed to be research? That’s probably what Google feels like. Pause. Walk the dogs. Away from the laptop. Tie my typing hands. Out. Focus. Let the thoughts come to rest. I’ll do it like the Hanged Man. I’ll try to calm myself down by closing the laptop, so that the boiling letter soup in my head can cool down and bring a word to light. One term. And so that I can get the images of military cemeteries and the whistling from Kill Bill out of my head again. Fat chance. While the dogs are sniffing and doing their business, my head (not me – I wanted to relax – the librarian in my head is doing this) thinks about the prisoners from literature and television and their transformations. The heroes, so strong and yet so vulnerable with their linden leaves in the dragon’s blood, who rise from their low point like the phoenix from the ashes. Heroes. Hero’s journey. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. By … Campbell?* I had researched that as part of the Storytelling module and worked out the different stages of the hero’s journey in Batman Begins. By the way, the hanging guy wasn’t in Matrix, but in Mission Impossible. Campbell studied the stories and epics of the world’s cultures and kept finding the same patterns. So the hero’s journey with its highs, lows, temptations, and villains seems to be quite universal. The same stages and (attention!) archetypes keep appearing. The Fool’s journey through the Major Arcana is also sometimes called a hero’s journey, or Hero’s or Heroine’s Quest. I should do more research on that. Tom Cruise, that was it.

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (Nolan & Goyer, 2005), the hero’s journey is very obvious. The young Bruce, impetuous as the Fool, sets out angrily and disappointed to live among criminals. He ends up in prison (Aha!). Rescue comes, and he is recruited for the League of Shadows. Faced with the test of killing a man, he blows up the whole place and returns to Gotham, purified, to do good. He says he can’t do it as a man. He has to become a symbol. He confronts his greatest fear and chooses the bat. A creature of the night. Dark, mysterious, frightening. After the first idiotic attempts at flying, the Fool matures with every further test. In his Bruce Wayne playboy attire, Rachel throws at him: »It’s not who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.« (Nolan & Goyer, 2005, 1:11:00). Wait. Projects. Identity. That’s what it says in my Minor Arcana. And it’s true. Who we are should be expressed in what we do. Then our identity is coherent. You could probably call it closing the mind-behaviour gap. Integrity! And later, he reveals himself to her: »It’s not who I am underneath but what I do that defines me.« (Nolan & Goyer, 2005, 1:57:00). The circle closes. He becomes, in Campbell’s terminology, the Master of Two Worlds. And he himself has become a new symbol. He is no longer the bat; he is Batman, whose own sign shines over Gotham City. The end? No. Lieutenant Gordon pulls out the Joker card. A madman is up to mischief and leaves Fool cards at his crime scenes.

A new beginning. We find out what kind of freak he is in The Dark Knight. The Joker, the Fool, Heath Ledger. So disturbing, so hot, died so young. He never even saw the movie, and it was the best villain performance in all of film history. »Why so serious?« – the message of the Fool. Is there actually a Batman tarot?

Enough. The Hanged Man. By the way, bats also hang upside down. That’s how they sleep. What feels like a hundred years ago, I saw photos in the Stern-magazine where the photographer had turned photos of bats upside down. They suddenly looked frighteningly human. And in South America or somewhere, there’s a type of bat called the velvety fruit-eating bat (and its german name sounds like a fancy yoghurt). But that doesn’t help me right now. At what point in the hero’s journey does the hero hang involuntarily in the air? At the fifth. The Belly of the Whale. The hero is swallowed and presumed dead. A part of him actually dies. He crosses a threshold. Campbell (2020) writes about being swallowed: »This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that that passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation.« (Part I, Chapter I: 5. The Belly of the Whale). Makes sense. A new stage (of insight, of being) always requires me to leave something outdated within me behind or perhaps even consciously destroy it. My old beliefs. My bad habits. A part of my identity, my practised story. Like the Hanged Man, I change my perspective, in order to or by adopting a new identity. Back to Phyllis Curott: I sacrifice something. Should I just call the Hanged Man Bruce (If so, probably The Bruce. Robert The Bruce. King of the rebels. William Wallace is six foot five. Mel Gibson. Mad Max. More heroes. It never ends.) and paint a bat? Better not.

It’s no use. The Hanged Man remains nameless, and I have to get out of my head. Out of my Sword energy. Besides, it’s my day off today. I have to be the Hanged Man myself and close the library in my head. House cleaning. Do something with my hands. Pentacles. Wash dishes. That relaxes me. While doing so, listen to my super creepy audiobook, let myself get absorbed into a story, and thus block out all the other stories. Auditory blinders.

But it’s nice that everything I’ve ever heard, seen, and read is apparently good for something after all. In this thesis and the Fool’s journey, everything comes together. Is that creativity? Probably.

Washed, showered, vacuumed, and the stack of books statically secured. The hero’s journey and the Fool’s journey won’t let go of me. I had already considered calling the Fool the Hero, even before Campbell came back to mind. But somehow, that doesn’t quite fit. Besides, the Fool and the Magician are the strongest archetypes for me, and I would prefer not to rename them. The Fool is the beginning, and the Magician is, in a way, the end, the goal. Or, with his number I, the beginning and the outlook on the goal. Like the Aces. And: Wouldn’t we all like to be magicians?* But what about calling the Hanged Man the Hero for now? Why not, it’ll turn out later if it fits. Iteration, iteration, iteration.

That’s what’s so beautiful about this thesis anyway. Somewhere it said you can or should incorporate everything you learned during your studies. Well, I learned to (better) deal with my creativity, and this work is certainly also a way of processing that.** And by working creatively here and observing my own creativity as consciously as possible, I am moving through the Arcana myself, through the world of the cards. If I do my job well and thoroughly, I will encounter all of them in the thesis process.***

Now, in the second half of the conception phase, I’m no longer the creative Fool with the fixed idea of designing a tarot. I’m still a long way from the completion of the masterpiece. But I have arrived in my hero’s journey.

Hours later. Other people are already sitting on the couch now; I’ve just come back from Rewe (the supermarket), the pizza was finished. A short research session on the hero’s journey had hooked me on assigning Campbell’s 17 stages to the 22 Major Arcana to finally complete their provisional naming. I skim-read my books again according to the stages. The new ones on Visconti-Sforza and Marseille haven’t arrived yet. In the others, I found a moderate amount of insight. Rachel Pollack (2007) divides the Major Arcana into three stages; in my opinion, the division into two is more common. I couldn’t get much out of her three-part division at first: She takes the Fool, as the protagonist and as a gateway to the world of the others, out. That leaves three times seven cards. The first seven, from the Magician to the Chariot, are the worldly, the rather obvious. The second seven, from Strength to Temperance, are about introspection and the search for the self. And the third, from the Devil to the World, are more mythical, with the goal of enlightenment. (p. 22,23)

Can I and do I want to agree with that? I don’t know. But the two-part division doesn’t really make me happy either, and all the other divisions I wanted to figure out (I would have preferred something with four) didn’t work. And if we’re already with Campbell and stories, we might as well divide the whole thing into three acts. That has been working for over two thousand years. The division itself isn’t important to me at this point. For me, it is only a means to an end, so I can structure the cards meaningfully for myself and thus also name them.

So. 22 cards, 17 stages, 3 acts, 6 tarot books. Even after a lot of pushing and swapping, it doesn’t quite add up. The Major Arcana don’t follow the monomyth – but they aren’t terribly far away either, and frankly, my provisional assignment seems no less conclusive than Rachel Pollack’s three-part division or Phyllis Curott’s reversal. Or Waite’s swapped cards …

A.E. Waite swapped cards VIII and XI for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Before, the order from VIII to XI was Justice, Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Strength; with Waite and everything based directly on it, it is Strength, Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice. Why he did it, he apparently didn’t reveal. It seems inconclusive to me, and since I never liked the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot anyway, I chose the old order. The one Crowley also based his on. There, VIII (Justice) is called Adjustment, and XI (Strength) is called Lust.

So I read criss-cross and up and down again and note what makes sense to me in the context of the hero’s journey, what reflects the stages of a story. I also make my peace with the three acts. I still don’t like Pollack’s interpretation, but when I look at the individual acts with their events and think of my court cards, the first act is the path of the foolish apprentice to the creative visionary, the second is that of the visionary to the expert, and the third is the one on which the expert approaches the Goddess. In each act, something is learned and the learned is integrated. The Fool, who began completely without intention, grows with his tasks and thus brings his masterpiece to completion.*

Then it’s time to go shopping, and even in the car, I can’t concentrate on my audiobook. But just changing locations sometimes helps, and I get the idea that I can actually tell the Major Arcana as a story. The brief research today once again revealed that we humans need stories and that it is often easier for us to learn with the help of stories. Stories and archetypes. That’s worth some follow-up research. Maybe that’s exactly what it needs: concrete questions and realistic impulses in the Minor Arcana (which stand for more everyday things) and a big story with 22 chapters for the Major Arcana. The user follows the Fool through his hero’s journey and encounters all the other figures with him. Can that work?

Then it suddenly dawns on me what I had read before: Phyllis Curott (2020) did exactly that in her accompanying book. She tells the story of the Fool, who she calls Pilgrim and who is sometimes female and sometimes male. The simple reason I only noticed it now is that I think I didn’t read a single one of the story sections completely, even though some are not even a page long. They are not very tangible for me. The corresponding sections are called Wisdom. Sometimes it’s very much about Pilgrim, something happens to Pilgrim, Pilgrim experiences something. Then again, I am addressed directly as a reader and flooded with wisdom. It doesn’t grab me; it doesn’t pull me in. It’s too vague.

Let me praise the Advent calendar book I bought for my dogs a few years ago. In it Dog and Cat celebrate a birthday party. For 24 days, there is the continuation of the story of how they prepare for the party. Once you’ve read one day, you’re already excited about what will happen the next day. Even if the story isn’t super exciting and full of unexpected twists.

Yes, I read stories to my dogs. They also like to watch TV.

I really like the idea for now. 22 chapters of the Fool’s journey. This would also clearly differentiate the Major Arcana from the Minors. And personally, if done right, I would find it enriching and coherent to get not only questions, impulses, and advice from a tarot but also to simply experience a story that I can then keep and process in my head. Today, while I was writing down my thoughts, I was able to experience for myself how well stories stick in your memory. I want to try my hand at this implementation!

However, the implementation raises a completely different question: Where to put the story? The original idea was that the deck would essentially do without an accompanying book. And of the printers I have come across so far in my research, only one offers a flyer/insert at all. I think, at most, a booklet with 32 pages. The booklet for the Ocean cards also has 32 pages. The Shakespeare cards have a little more. Is that enough? Probably not. Molly Roberts, creator of the Art Magick cards, solved it differently, as far as I can see. The cards come with a 16-page insert (with miserably tiny print and dreadful fonts). In the same design, so obviously belonging to the cards, her book Art Magick: How to become an art witch and unlock your creative power is available for purchase. Would that be a solution? Include a poster with a tabular overview with the cards and produce a separate book? Or move further away from the idea of the tarot and put the stories on the backs of the cards? No way, that would ruin my entire concept. Have a separate A6 brochure printed and include it with the cards?

Okay, the final practical implementation is probably not yet settled. But I’m almost satisfied with the system, content, and structure of the cards for today. Satisfied enough that I can finally knock off on my day off, eat pizza, and go to sleep. A creative thesis is no walk in the park.