Slothrop's Tarot
| "His cards have been laid down, Celtic style, in the order suggested by Mr. A.E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too)." (p.738) | From The Devil's Picturebook (as quoted in Thomas Moore's The Style of Connectedness):
"Traditionally [the Fool] represents ... the somehow mysteriously structured chaos which seems to lie at the root of existence.... In most decks ... he is generally left unnumbered, or counted a zero. He is the cosmic cipher, the unmarshalable, archetypal square peg, the existential everyman, nonpartisan, nonaligned and 'wild,' as the poker term has it ... all over the place, at home everywhere and nowhere. The divine bum." (p.121) |
| "yes yes nothing like getting the 3 of Pentacles upside down covering the significator on the second try to send you to the tube to watch a seventh rerun of the Takeshi and Ichizo Show [...] to no clear happiness or redeeming cataclysm." (p.738) | "All his hopeful cards are reversed, most unhappily of all the Hanged Man, who is supposed to be upside down to begin with, telling of his secret hopes and fears..." (p.738) |
| "But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea..." (p.742) | |
External Resources
Gravity's Rainbow Alpha Guide
