Pervigilium Tarot is a tarot collection featuring original and, somewhat, deviant imagery. Instead of the standard representation of the great archetypes, this collection brings forth the morbid and mysterious aspects of the occult imagination.

Purvehjee- How do you even pronounce that?

The collection is inspired by and named after “Prufrock’s Pervigilium”, a lesser-known poem by T.S. Eliot about the mad ramblings and soul-searching questions during wakeful hours. Just as do other Eliot’s poems, it talks about identity, constant questioning, reinterpreting, and transformation – which we believe to be the essential function of tarot.

So, what’s the deal?

Well, the gist of this tarot collection is its sensorial aspect. We tried disposing of the usual symbolism – which many of those interested in tarot already know by heart. While some may argue that the dismantling of the standard symbols deprives tarot of its universal quality, and by extension, its ability to relate to the shared experiences of both readers and those that are read to, it is such representation that has led to the ossification of meaning that prevents the readers to sensate and feel into different states of the mind we supposedly all share in particular stages of life or life experiences.

With this in mind, we went with something more corporeal and sensory, not only by merely representing the body but also by combining different textures that would ultimately evoke associations close to the emotional experience carried within the card. 

Thus, for example, the Eight of Swords would feature a background with scratched metal alluding to the anguish of being unable to escape one’s own skin. The Four of Pentacles is tainted with rust, hinting at the corrosive aspect of stagnation and resistance to change. 

On the contrary, watercolors are used to evoke the sense of fluid states, accepting and letting go, where there are no rigid boundaries between the self and the other, such as in the Six of Cups for example, or, in the case of Four of Cups, inability to form the necessary boundary in order to preserve oneself from the influx of overbearing emotions.

The Devil, like the cracked wood, resists what it must inhabit in order to grow, eventually cracking, until the pestilence creeps in through the crevices and nestles in so that the entire inside becomes corrupt.

None of these explanations exhaust the meaning of a certain card, because each of them represents a unique experience, which cannot be fully grasped if not felt, and it is only after that the reader can try and put into their own words.

Tarot, teratology, trauma – or just kinda gross.

Those who threw a glance at the collection might have noticed some contorted bodies, deformed, bloated or depleted – morbid, in short – and wondered where exactly is the mystery in that. There are two approaches we can take here – physiological and psychoanalytical.

Emotions are inseparable from the feeling body. There is a certain structure, posture, reaction that possesses the body faced with a certain trauma – and long after the initial trauma has passed, the bodily reaction still haunts the individual, now unconscious of its cause. Physiologically, the information is stored in the body, and decoding the meaning of such sensations, symptoms, reactions or postures can give significant insight into the initial experiences that provoked them. With this in mind, the teratogenic imagination here is supposed to invoke the complex states of mind through their respective physiological sensations and representations.

Okay, so, now let’s get even more speculative. In psychoanalysis, there’s a theory that trauma is an event we are initially unable to sublimate discoursively, through language. Its significance and meaning are impossible to convey at first, so this trauma ends up recurringly haunting us, causing anxiety and dread. Later on, it was the body that became the carrier of this radical alterity, as pain and pleasure are ultimately ineffable experiences, impossible to be fully shared or expressed – but, like trauma, they stay mute, solipsistic and unique to all of us. Tarot can take on the primitive role of stitching together the subject, whose identity has been left dismembered by the events and experiences the subject was forced to incorporate, but unable to comprehend. However, words always fail to convey the experience, so what ends up talking is the body, the only thing that is beyond words, the true mystery.

Collection? Bitch, where’s my deck!

Now, now. We keep saying collection because we keep talking about the collection of single pieces. A deck would imply a necessary interplay between the cards and the way they relate to one another in a spread during a reading. While one may form a deck out of these, they are meant as standalone cards as well, which is the focus of this short presentation. The spread implies a very different reading technique that is based on the narrative.

So, think of it as a poem versus the novel (and ignore the scorn of literature majors that will protest such abhorrent simplification). A novel is a narrative form, usually driven by a plot, and neither episodes, chapters, nor volumes function as separate units. In a tarot spread, it is up to the reader to work through such a plot and essentially tell a story. On the other hand, a poem does not necessitate a plot, but a detail, an experience, a feeling, that’s being extrapolated by each verse. It can be in a cycle or a collection of poems, which may provide additional insight, but it still works as a unique piece. In the same manner, each of the cards in this collection is meant to be read more like a poem, than a story. The reader can, of course, make a deck and play with different spreads, stitching up a narrative out of particular experiences.

And this brings us back to the beginning of this text and the name of the collection. Isn’t “stitching up a narrative out of particular experiences” in fact the essence of identity, the gist of its constant metamorphosis?