Molière bends the dramatic machine toward comedy, exposing human vanity, hypocrisy and self-deception. His characters are often trapped by the stories they tell themselves. In Tartuffe, The Misanthrope or The Miser (L’Avare), recognition becomes comic: we laugh because the character cannot see what everyone else can see. The audience occupies a privileged position, watching the mechanism of self-deception from the outside.

Shakespeare goes further still. His plays frequently contain multiple plots, shifting locations, comic interruptions and enormous variations in tone. Yet his theatre remains profoundly Aristotelian in another sense: everything depends upon action, reversal, recognition and consequence. Hamlet thinks, delays and acts; Macbeth acts and discovers too late what his actions have created; King Lear‘s understanding arrives through catastrophe. Shakespeare turns the Aristotelian theatre of action into something almost psychological: the stage becomes a laboratory in which consciousness discovers itself through what it does.

Modern theatre can break almost every classical rule and still inherit Aristotle’s deepest insight. Beckett can reduce action to almost nothing; Brecht can interrupt illusion; absurdist theatre can abandon conventional plot altogether. Yet the fundamental question remains: what happens when human beings are placed in a situation, and what does that situation reveal?

Perhaps this is why theatre survives every attempt to define it. Aristotle gave us structure; Molière gave us laughter; Shakespeare gave us contradiction; modern theatre gave us fragmentation. But underneath all of them remains the same mysterious experiment: put human beings on a stage, let them act, and see what truth emerges from the consequences.

The word theatre, with its powerful suggestions, has evolved and been used for different fields: Theatrum Historiae, the theatre of history, or Theatrum Historiae Naturalis, the show of nature, the theatre of politics and power (a quite horrible show, if I may say it), the theatre of our mind… and this is one of the most fascinating shows we all assist every day….

The Theatre of Tarot

There is a strange moment that sometimes happens during a Tarot reading. You turn a card. You look at it. And before you have had time to remember what the books say it means, something inside you has already answered.

Perhaps the figure on the card reminds you of someone, or the landscape feels uncannily familiar. Perhaps you suddenly remember a conversation you had twenty years ago, or a door you once stood in front of, or a decision you have been postponing. The card has not told you anything. It has simply appeared, and somehow, in the small theatre of your mind, the curtains have opened.

This is one of the reasons I have always been fascinated by Tarot. Not because the cards contain fixed answers, but because they contain images. And images are… moving, shifting, changing every time we look at them.

Images are troublesome things.

They refuse to stay where we put them. They slip through the rational mind, sneak beneath language, rearrange the furniture of memory. We look at an image, and then discover that the image is looking back at us.

This is the reason why Carl Gustav Jung‘s idea of active imagination has always seemed to me so close to the experience of Tarot. Jung understood that the unconscious does not necessarily communicate with us in the tidy language of explanations (life would be so easy, so straightforward, but so bland and boring too!). It speaks in images, dreams, symbols, fragments, characters, landscapes and strange little dramas. His method of active imagination was, in part, an invitation to enter into a conscious relationship with these inner figures rather than immediately silencing them or translating them into something more respectable.

Imagine dreaming of an old man standing at the end of a forest path.

The rational mind might ask: What does the old man symbolise?

Jung’s approach could ask something stranger: Who are you, old man?

And then wait for an answer.

This distinction is important. To interpret an image is to stand outside it. To enter into dialogue with it is something else entirely. And this is where Tarot becomes fascinating. A Tarot card can be treated as an answer, certainly. It can be assigned a definition, memorised, catalogued and carried around like a pocket dictionary of fate. But it can also be treated as a character.

The Hermit can walk onto the stage. The Fool can refuse to leave. The Tower can fall in the middle of the conversation. The Queen of Cups can sit silently in the corner, listening to everybody else.

Suddenly the Tarot deck is no longer a book of meanings. It is a cast. And the reading is the play.

I have spent more than two decades reading Tarot, and one thing has become increasingly clear to me: the most interesting part of a card is often not what it means, but what it does to you when you look at it.

This is why I have always resisted the idea that a reader must first learn hundreds of definitions and then apply them correctly. The image comes first. Always.

See.

Feel.

Trust.

See what is actually there before rushing to name it. Feel what the image stirs in you before your rational mind begins tidying everything away. Trust what arrives, even if you cannot immediately explain where it came from. This is not about abandoning reason. Quite the opposite. It is about giving another form of intelligence permission to speak. When we look at The Tower, for example, we might know that traditional Tarot associates it with upheaval, revelation, collapse, liberation. But none of those words is the experience of looking at the Tower. The traditional image is a building struck by lightning. People are falling. A crown has been dislodged. Fire is coming from somewhere that fire should not be. Before we know what it means, we have already seen something happen. And then the inner theatre begins.

What has fallen? Who is falling? Was the tower ever safe? Did the lightning destroy it, or reveal what was already unstable?

The card has become a stage upon which the mind can rehearse possibilities. And this is the reason why, in designing the Tarot of Crossed Destinies, I draw every card as a room; to put the viewer inside the space, inside Tarot and its meaning. I put the reader on stage, to make it feel, experience, live the card with all its power!

This is where I believe Tarot and active imagination meet; the image does not tell us what is happening inside us, but gives what is inside us somewhere to happen. There is something wonderfully subversive about allowing an inner figure to speak. We spend much of our lives doing the opposite. We silence inconvenient thoughts. We disguise uncomfortable emotions. We rationalise jealousy, anger, fear and desire. We construct a version of ourselves that is acceptable to the people around us and, eventually, even to ourselves. Then something strange happens. The disowned parts do not disappear. They become ghosts. Jung called one of the most important configurations of these rejected aspects theshadow. The shadow is not “evil”. It contains everything we have pushed outside the image we have constructed of ourselves: impulses, fears, desires, talents, vulnerabilities, contradictions.

The shadow can be frightening. But it can also be ridiculous. It can be tender. It can be magnificent.

Sometimes the thing we are most ashamed of is not a monster at all. It is simply a part of ourselves that was never given permission to sit at the table.

Tarot can provide that chair.

The Devil enters the reading. The Five of Swords arrives. The Moon appears with all its nocturnal uncertainty. We could immediately decide that these are negative cards. Or we could ask them what they want.

What are you doing here?

What do you know that I don’t?

What happens if I stop trying to make you disappear?

This is an invitation to recognise that our own psyche is capable of creating a relationship with an image. And this process becomes even more interesting when two or more cards are placed together.

A single card can become a character.

Two cards can become a scene.

More cards can create a show!

This is at the heart of The Tarot of Crossed Destinies.

I have always been fascinated by what happens when two apparently independent images are brought into relationship. The meaning does not simply belong to the first card or the second card. Something else appears. A third thing….

Imagine The Hermit crossing paths with The Fool. One carries a lantern. The other carries almost nothing. One has travelled far enough to know how little he knows. The other disappeared into the darkness of a thick forest because he does not know enough to be afraid. What happens when they meet?

The traditional meanings of the cards can tell us something. But they cannot tell us everything.

Perhaps The Hermit is trying to stop The Fool. Perhaps he secretly envies him. Perhaps The Fool is the younger self the Hermit abandoned. Perhaps The Hermit is the future self of The Fool. Perhaps neither recognises the other. Or perhaps they are both aspects of the same person, meeting for the first time. This is where Tarot becomes an inner theatre. The cards do not merely represent psychological states. They interact. And through their interaction, something hidden can become visible.

There is another curious thing about theatre. We can watch a character suffer and we can empathise, understand them, and we may cry with them. We may become frightened, or recognise something painfully familiar. We are inside the story, we live the story as it evolves, and yet we are separated. The distance created by fiction gives us a peculiar freedom; looking at something outside ourselves, we finally see something inside ourselves! Tarot works through a similar displacement.

Instead of saying: I want to escape, we can look at The Fool.

Instead of saying: Something in my life is collapsing and I don’t know whether to save it, we can look at The Tower.

The card gives the feeling a body. Suddenly something that was previously an indistinct pressure inside the chest is standing three feet away from us on a table. And now we can talk to it. This is one of the great gifts of symbolism. It turns the invisible into something we can look at without pretending that we have solved it. There is a temptation, of course, to control the theatre. To decide beforehand what every character must say. To force the reading towards the interpretation we already wanted. But then the theatre becomes propaganda.

The interesting part of Tarot happens when the cards refuse to behave. When The Lovers appears where we expected The Emperor. When the card we thought would be reassuring makes us uncomfortable. When an image suddenly reminds us of something we had forgotten. This is why I believe intuition and imagination are another way of paying attention. The intuitive reader does not abandon interpretation. The intuitive reader delays it. There is a small but crucial difference.

First we look. Then we listen. Then we allow the image to disturb our expectations. Only afterwards do we begin to interpret.

It is almost like improvisational theatre. You cannot know what the other actor will say. If you already have the entire dialogue written in your head, you are no longer listening. Perhaps this is what I find most beautiful about active imagination and Tarot alike. Neither requires us to manufacture an answer. They ask us to remain present long enough for something unexpected to appear. The unconscious is not necessarily a dark basement containing a secret message that we must decode. Perhaps it is more like a strange theatre whose actors have been waiting patiently while we have been too busy reading the programme.

There is the child we abandoned somewhere along the way.

The tyrant.

The lover.

The coward.

The fool.

The hermit.

The magician.

The creature who wants to run.

The creature who wants to stay.

The part of us that knows.

The part of us that has absolutely no idea.

They are all waiting backstage.

And sometimes a Tarot card opens the door. This is ultimately what The Tarot of Crossed Destinies is about for me. Not about discovering a predetermined destiny. Not about asking the cards to make decisions on our behalf. Rather, it is about what happens when images meet. When one symbolic world crosses another. When two characters occupy the same stage. When their trajectories intersect and something neither could have produced alone suddenly becomes visible. Perhaps that is what a destiny really is. Not a road already drawn somewhere in the heavens, but an encounter, a crossing, a moment in which two possibilities meet and, for an instant, create a third.

Our inner life works in a similar way. We are not one fixed character, as we love to believe, to tell ourselves. We are a theatre of voices, memories, desires, fears, possibilities and contradictions. Every day, different characters cross the stage. Some we recognise. Some we would rather not. Some have been waiting years for their entrance. Tarot does not necessarily tell us which one is right. It turns off the lights, it opens the curtain, and asks us to watch. Sometimes, if we are patient enough, one of the characters turns towards us and speaks. ...But not with the voice of fate, with our own.

Perhaps that is where the reading really begins.

To the next time

Andrea

This happens everywhere. In music, a melody returns in another key or with another rhythm. In poetry, a word is repeated, but the second time it carries the weight of everything that came before it. In dreams, a room returns but something is different. In memory, we encounter the same event years later and discover that, although nothing in the event has changed, our understanding of it has. And it happens in Tarot. A card remains itself, but every time we come back to it, it has, somehow, changed. Its meaning has shifted. ...And if we place the same card beside another Tarot card, it becomes something else entirely. A sentence starts to form, a story to develop.

This is why three cards can be so much more than three images…

Tarot Permutation. An Experiment

Take three cards from the Tarot of Crossed Destinies. Each card is a room. Something has happened there, but we do not necessarily see the event itself. We see its traces: the objects left behind, a door left ajar, a piece of furniture with a candle still burning, a strange detail in the background, something that seems to have been moved, something that is conspicuously absent. Each card is a fragment of a world, and our mind instinctively tries to connect it to the next fragment.

We place them A, B, C, and a story appears. This happens almost before we have had time to decide that we want to tell a story. We look for a beginning, a middle and an end. We imagine what happened before the first image and what must happen after the last. We transform sequence into causality. We assign motives. We decide who is responsible. We fill the gaps.

Then we rearrange the cards: A, C, B.

Nothing has changed except their order, and yet something happens to the story. Perhaps what seemed like an ending becomes a beginning. Perhaps an abandoned room becomes a room waiting for someone. Perhaps a consequence becomes a cause. Perhaps a character who seemed to be a victim becomes responsible. Perhaps something that seemed incidental suddenly becomes the most important object in the room.

There are six possible configurations: ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB and CBA. Six arrangements, the same three cards, nothing added and nothing removed. Yet each configuration creates a different temporal architecture, and therefore the possibility of a different narrative. Sometimes the difference will be subtle, sometimes it will be enormous. Other times, one arrangement will seem immediately convincing while another will feel forced, awkward or almost meaningless.

I find that last possibility particularly important. We should not force every permutation to reveal a “secret”. The point is not to prove that everything has a hidden meaning. Sometimes the mind constructs a story effortlessly; sometimes it struggles. Sometimes one configuration produces an uncanny sense of recognition, while another produces only confusion. That difference is itself part of the experiment. It tells us something about our own need for coherence, about the stories we are prepared to accept and the stories we resist.

This is where the myriorama begins to become, for me, a psychological instrument.

Imagine approaching the three cards while thinking about something inside ourselves: a thought that has been returning, a feeling whose origin we cannot quite locate, a memory that seems insignificant but keeps resurfacing, a person we have not thought about for years, a fear, a desire, a place remembered with inexplicable tenderness, or perhaps simply some small detail of our inner landscape that we would like to understand better. We hold that thought without immediately explaining it. We draw three cards and allow them to reflect it back to us.

The cards do not need to tell us what will happen. They are not being used here as predictions. They give form to something that is already inside us, something that perhaps existed before language had found a way to describe it (ah, Italo Calvino and the Tarot of Crossed Destinies! Do you see how everything is connected: the use of Tarot as a non-verbal language!)

We then look carefully at each card as a room. What happened here? Who was here? What has just happened? What seems to have happened but is not shown? Why is this object here? What is missing? What is the relationship between the people and things in the room? We look at the objects almost as evidence. Each card is an aftermath, a scene in which an invisible event has left traces.

Whose room is this, anyway?

Do you see now why it was so important that the room was empty, that no human being was there?

Let’s do a little experiment. Take these two versions of the Emperor. One is an empty room; the regalia are on the floor. Immediately, our minds race to find a reason why the room is in this state. The other card shows a mighty ruler in his kingdom. Do you see the difference? When we enter into the empty room, it is immediately OUR space, our place. We inhabit it with our minds, memories, emotions. The room envelops us. We are part of it. Or, if you prefer, the Tarot becomes a perfect mirror of you (mind and soul, unconscious, etc.) watching it… When you look at the other card, you are in the presence of the Emperor! Someone else is there. You look at him and he stares back at you. It is not your space to feel or inhabit, it is HIS! …This changes everything, and this is why I am using the Tarot of Crossed Destinies to develop new ideas and theories on Tarot and run so many experiments. I am curious to know your point of view on these aspects.

Let’s go back to our magic experiment with permutations and variations.

Let’s Run the Experiment!

Let’s place the three rooms together, and allow the first story to emerge.

But, please, this first story should not be taken as the final truth. Because the first interpretation has a peculiar authority, we often mistake what we see first for what is true. We say, “This is what the cards say”, when perhaps what we should say is: “This is what I saw first”. The distinction is enormous. Our first interpretation may be illuminating, but it may also be shaped by fear, desire, recent experiences, memories, expectations or whatever emotional weather happens to surround us on that particular day. The first reading can be a... trap, a prison. And we should always escape free!

This is why the other five configurations matter; they allow us to disturb our first certainty.

We take the same three cards and rearrange them. Then we do it again. And again.
We ask each time what happened in this new arrangement, what happened before and afterwards, who has agency, what has changed, which object has suddenly become important, what has disappeared from our attention, whether the emotional tone has altered. Perhaps we gain a glimpse of something we had not considered. Perhaps we understand the original feeling differently. Perhaps we find a contradiction. Perhaps we discover that two apparently incompatible stories can both contain something true… Or perhaps we simply end up with a better question… Or perhaps, among the six arrangements, one suddenly clicks.

The three rooms become one world. An object in the first card suddenly explains something in the third. A shadow we had ignored becomes central. A door becomes a departure rather than an entrance. Something we had considered incidental becomes the emotional centre of the sequence. And we experience something very close to recognition: I have seen this before. Not literally, perhaps, but internally. The arrangement has found a shape that corresponds to something we could feel but could not articulate.

Nothing external has revealed itself. The information was already somewhere within us. The permutation has simply allowed us to approach it from another direction.

This is where the ancient magic of permutation and the modern psychology of the inner world seem to meet.

The cards do not contain six predetermined stories. They contain possibilities for relationships. The story happens between them, and within the person looking. In this sense, the six configurations are not six answers but six ways of disturbing our certainty about the answer.

The arrangement changes.
And therefore the narrative changes.

Perhaps this is what the old magical practices understood intuitively. The magician does not necessarily need new material. The letters, with the words they can form, are already there. What changes is their relationship, and from that relationship something appears.

Permutation possesses such a strange magical character because it suggests that the world is not merely made of things, but of relationships between things. If those relationships can change, then the same elements can produce another world.

The Kabbalist rearranges letters. The Roman inscriber constructs a square. The maker of the Abracadabra amulet removes letters until the word disappears. The Mesopotamian ritual specialist repeats names and formulas within an intricate sequence of actions. And the maker of a myriorama discovers the infinite stories emerging from rearranging the same cards.

There is something almost frighteningly close to consciousness in this.

We too are made from a finite collection of things: memories, images, words, faces, places, sensations, fears, desires, fragments of conversations, small things we have never forgotten and enormous things we have somehow forgotten almost entirely. We do not receive a completely new set of pieces every morning, and yet we inhabit different inner worlds throughout our lives. ...Perhaps because we continually rearrange them. Our consciousness is a myriorama. We are ever-shifting myrioramas...

This is the quiet magic of permutation. It reminds us that, to change our reality, we may need only to change the order, and not the elements that compose it. Sometimes it is enough to move one little “thing”, to place it beside another. To look again. To walk through the same rooms in another order. Suddenly a door appears where there wasn’t one before, not because the door has been created, but because, for the first time, we have approached the room from the other side.

The cards, the letters, the memories remain the same, but the world, perhaps, shifts: the arrangement, the perspective, the relationship between things. And sometimes that small movement is enough to make the invisible visible. We can change our story. We can reshape ourselves as a myriorama, changing the disposition of the elements that form our psyche. Is psychotherapy, perhaps, a way of rearranging the cards of the mind? Moving them into another configuration, allowing us to see the same memories, the same experiences, from another perspective?An intriguing thought.

Perhaps this is what we have always meant, in one form or another, by magic.

To the next week

Andrea

I found the idea of Tarot as something alive deeply fascinating: a living creature, breathing, changing, continually reshaping itself in order to grasp the Zeitgeist of its era. That point of view profoundly influenced me, and it has remained with me ever since. It became one of those apparently simple ideas that, once planted in your mind, never quite goes away. It keeps returning, producing new thoughts year after year.

Tarot became, in my mind, something like quicksilver. Deeply fascinating and never entirely graspable; always moving away, just when you think you have caught it, taking new shapes, shining with different reflections, revealing something different depending on the angle from which you look at it. And this seems particularly true of the Tarot of Crossed Destinies. Its very structure is based on movement and recombination. It is a myriorama: a world made of fragments that can be rearranged into different configurations, so that the same elements can suddenly tell another story. This shape-shifting quality is intrinsic to its nature, but there is another aspect of the idea that I would like to explore here: the ancient and rather mysterious relationship between magic and permutation, between the repetition of a limited set of elements and the possibility that, by rearranging them, something new and perhaps hidden might emerge.

Why should rearranging the same elements feel magical? Why should the repetition of the same letters, words, images or symbols in a different order have the power to fascinate us? Why does a sequence sometimes seem to contain a secret when its elements have merely changed places? Perhaps there is something very old in us that recognises, in permutation, a miniature image of creation itself. A limited vocabulary can produce an infinite number of possibilities. The elements remain the same; what changes is their relationship. And from those relationships, something new seems to come into being. Think of atoms, combining and rearranging themselves into molecules and structures of astonishing variety; think of the countless forms of life emerging from the repetition, differentiation and organisation of cells; think of crystals, plants, bodies and galaxies, all governed, in different ways, by patterns of repetition, symmetry, combination and transformation. There is something both mathematical and geometrical in these natural permutations and rearrangements, something our predecessors observed long before they possessed the scientific language with which we describe them today. They were fascinated by patterns, proportions, correspondences, repetitions and transformations because, perhaps, they sensed in them something fundamental about the way the world itself comes into being. And for them that quid, was magical in its essence.

The Tetragrammaton

One of the oldest and most enduring examples can be found in the Jewish mystical tradition in the treatment of the sacred name of God. The Tetragrammaton, YHWH, is not simply another word. It is the four-letter name that became surrounded by extraordinary reverence; in ancient religious thought a name was never merely a label. To know the name of something was, in some sense, to approach its essence; to pronounce a name could mean approaching a power. In later Jewish mystical thought, the letters themselves could become objects of contemplation and combination. The Sefer Yetzirah, probably composed in late antiquity, describes creation through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet together with the ten sefirot. The letters are not passive signs but fundamental elements of creation: they can be engraved, weighed, combined and interchanged. The text explicitly speaks of their combinations and permutations.

The idea is extraordinary: the world is, in a sense, made from a limited set of elements, but infinity emerges from their possible arrangements. The letters remain the same, while their relationships change, and from those relationships something else comes into being. This principle becomes even more developed in later Jewish mysticism, particularly in the ecstatic Kabbalah associated with Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century. His practice of tzeruf, or the combination and permutation of letters, could involve the systematic rearrangement, pronunciation and visualisation of letters and divine names as a meditative practice. The practitioner did not simply contemplate a sacred word as a fixed object. The letters became mobile, and their movement became a way of altering attention and consciousness.

This is a beautiful inversion of our ordinary idea of language. We tend to think that a word possesses a meaning and that rearranging its letters destroys that meaning. The mystic could approach the matter differently: perhaps rearrangement reveals possibilities that were hidden precisely because we had become accustomed to the original form. The fixed word becomes a door, and the permutation opens it. Behind it there may be another door, and behind that another. The same letters can enter endlessly into new relationships. What appears at first to be a destruction of meaning becomes instead a search for meanings concealed within the material itself.

The Land between the Two Rivers

It would be tempting to draw a straight line backwards from Kabbalah and claim that the same system already existed in ancient Babylon or Assyria, but history is rarely so obliging. We should be careful here. Ancient Mesopotamian magical traditions did not possess the later Kabbalistic theory of letter permutation. Nevertheless, they inhabited a world in which words, names, repeated formulas, signs and ritual sequences were treated as active things rather than as neutral descriptions. Mesopotamian exorcists and healers used incantations, amulets and ritual actions to address illness and malevolent forces, and these traditions were transmitted through written series that were copied and preserved with remarkable care. The Assyrian Maqlû series, for example, preserves a long ritual sequence of incantations intended to counter witchcraft.

A Mesopotamian magical text, therefore, was not simply a sentence saying something about the world. It was an operation performed upon the world. The repetition, sequence, precise words and the order of actions mattered. A formula repeated over and over is no longer an ordinary sentence. It becomes an act of magic, where magic is understood as the power to bend reality to our will. There is something almost musical about this ancient mentality. A formula is repeated until it crosses the boundary between everyday and ritual speech. The sound becomes detached from ordinary conversation and acquires another kind of presence. The written sign can do something similar: a name is written, repeated, copied, carried; an image is repeated; a formula is inscribed and performed. The magical object becomes a small universe in which a limited number of elements have been arranged with extraordinary precision.

We should not turn this into the claim that Babylonian magicians were practising a system of permutation identical to that of later Kabbalists. The historical evidence does not support such a simple continuity. But the deeper resemblance is compelling: a finite vocabulary can become inexhaustible through combination, repetition and ritual arrangement. Perhaps this is one of the oldest intuitions behind magic: that the world can be addressed by using its own elements, but placing them into a configuration that does not ordinarily occur.

The Sator Square

One of the most mysterious objects ever produced by this fascination with arrangement is the Roman Sator Square. SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS. Five words, five letters in each word, twenty-five positions. It can be read horizontally and vertically, forwards and backwards, while the central word, TENET, forms a cross within the square. The whole structure is a two-dimensional palindrome (a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backwards as forwards, e.g. madam). Archaeological examples are known from Roman contexts, including Pompeii, where examples predate the destruction of the city in 79 CE.

What make the Sator Square so intriguing is the problem of its meaning. Sator means sower, planter, founder or originator; tenet means holds, keeps or possesses; opera can mean work, effort, care or service; rotas means wheels. But Arepo remains mysterious. It is not an ordinary Latin word and has produced an extraordinary number of interpretations. It may have been a proper name, a constructed word, or something whose meaning has simply been lost. The sentence therefore seems to mean something, but refuses to settle comfortably into a single meaning. Perhaps that is part of its enduring fascination. The Sator Square is not merely read; it is explored. The eye travels through it, discovers reversals, symmetries, correspondences and reflections. The same elements appear again, but from another direction. It begins to feel less like a sentence than like a structure that has to be entered.

There have been many attempts to discover hidden Christian meanings within it, most famously the extraction of PATER NOSTER from its letters, arranged as a cross, with the remaining A and O interpreted as Alpha and Omega. But the existence of Sator examples in pre-Christian contexts means that this cannot simply explain the square’s origin. The Christian interpretation belongs to the later history of the object, rather than necessarily to its beginning. What interests me here is something more fundamental: someone took a limited number of words and discovered that their arrangement itself could become an object of contemplation. The words were transformed by their architecture.

ABRACADABRA

From the square we can move to the triangle, another form in which the same principle becomes even more visible: ABRACADABRA. Today the word seems almost... “comic”. We associate it with stage magicians, disappearing rabbits and theatrical gestures. But one of its earliest documented appearances is very different. In the Liber Medicinalis, associated with the Roman writer Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, the word was prescribed as a magical remedy against fever. It was written repeatedly, but each successive line removed a letter:

The result is a descending triangle. As the word diminishes, so too, symbolically, is the disease supposed to diminish; the resulting inscription was worn around the neck. I find the simplicity of this almost unbearably beautiful. Nothing new has been introduced. There are only the same letters, again and again, until almost nothing remains. The magical transformation is produced not by adding information but by changing the configuration of what is already there.

And here the shape becomes as important as the word. Written language becomes an image; the image becomes a ritual; the ritual becomes an imagined mechanism of healing. The word is no longer simply something that means. It does something. The letters have acquired a physical arrangement, and that arrangement has acquired a symbolic force.

Perhaps this is one reason squares and triangles have such a persistent presence in magical traditions: geometry gives language a body. A word normally disappears as we read it. We move through it, one letter after another, one word after another. But when the same word is arranged into a triangle or a square, reading slows down. We stop travelling through the word and begin looking at it. Reading, normally a linear process, begins to fold back upon itself, becoming almost circular. Suddenly, we perceive relationships that ordinary reading tends to hide.

…

End Part I

The adventure will continue next week, as we connect this topic to Tarot.
Andrea

But where exactly is this place? Where does a memory live? Is it a hidden archive inside the brain, a vast library in which every experience has been carefully catalogued and preserved, waiting for us to retrieve it unchanged? We tend to imagine memory in precisely this way. Something happens. The brain records it. Time passes. Later, we retrieve the recording. It is an extraordinarily seductive idea… that, unfortunately, is also wrong.

Modern neuroscience has revealed something much stranger: memory is not a faithful archive of the past but a dynamic, reconstructive process. When we remember, we do not simply retrieve an intact object stored somewhere in the darkness of the brain. We reconstruct an experience from fragments, associations, sensations, emotional traces, expectations, knowledge and everything that has happened to us since. Even seemingly stable memories can become temporarily unstable when retrieved and may subsequently be modified before being stored again, a phenomenon known as reconsolidation. In other words, remembering is not simply an act of looking backwards. It is also an act of re-creation.

This is where the Castle begins to reveal another of its secrets.

The Tarot of Crossed Destinies was conceived as a strange architectural machine. Each Tarot card is a room. Each room is a card. There are no fixed characters waiting inside to tell you what the story means. The images are deliberately empty of human figures. There may be a staircase disappearing into darkness, a window opening onto an impossible landscape, an abandoned table, a strange object lying beneath a shaft of light, a doorway leading somewhere we cannot see. There is no protagonist because the protagonist is you. You enter. You look around. You notice a detail. Your attention moves through the architecture, establishing relationships between objects, spaces and symbols. Something reminds you of something else. A colour evokes a place. A doorway becomes a memory. A shadow becomes a feeling. The image is no longer simply something you look at. It becomes somewhere you have been.

And perhaps this is closer to the way memory itself works than we usually imagine.

We often speak about memory using the language of storage. We keep memories. We lose them. We retrieve them. We store experiences. We speak of memories as though they were objects placed inside boxes, waiting patiently for us to take them out. But the brain is not a museum. It is closer to the Castle that is constantly rebuilding itself. An experience does not arrive in the brain as a perfect little object labelled with a date and neatly filed away. What becomes memory is assembled from many different elements: sensory information, emotional significance, contextual information, previous knowledge and later interpretations. When we retrieve a memory, these elements can be recombined. The memory is reconstructed in the present.

This means that the memory of a childhood room may contain the actual architecture of that room, but also the feelings we associate with it, what we later learned about that period of our life, stories told by other people, photographs we have seen, and everything we have subsequently become. The child who experienced the room and the adult who remembers it do not inhabit the same world. The room may not have changed at all. We have.

And so, when we remember, we inevitably bring our present self into conversation with our past. The memory becomes a negotiation between then and now. This is why two people can remember the same event differently. It is why siblings can emerge from the same childhood carrying entirely different versions of it. It is why a memory can sometimes become more vivid with time while becoming less historically accurate. Memory is not a photograph. It is a storyteller. And storytellers have a dangerous habit of changing their stories.

The ancient Greeks already understood that memory was something more mysterious than a simple mental filing system. The very word leads us towards Mnemosyne, the Titan goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Memory was not merely the ability to retain information; it was intimately connected with poetry, art, history and the preservation of human culture. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates compares memory to a wax tablet upon which impressions are stamped. But the wax is not identical in everyone: some is pure and deep, some hard, some soft, some easily marked and some resistant. Memory, in this beautiful metaphor, is already something imperfect, something vulnerable to distortion. What we receive, what we retain and what we later recall depends partly on the nature of the material upon which the impression was made.

The Romans developed another extraordinary metaphor for memory: the memory palace. The ancient method of loci involved imagining an architectural space and placing images within it so that they could later be retrieved by mentally walking through rooms, corridors and landmarks. Quintilian describes this technique in his Institutio Oratoria, explaining how places could be impressed upon the mind so vividly that returning to them could recall not only the location itself but the people, thoughts and experiences associated with it. Cicero similarly describes memory as a kind of treasure-house and discusses the use of striking places and images to aid recollection. The principle is wonderfully simple: give memory a place. Put an image in a room. Put another image in the next room. Walk between them. Suddenly the invisible becomes architectural.

Does this ancient idea remind you of something? …..Perhaps the Castle.

Because the Tarot of Crossed Destinies is, in a sense, a memory palace that refuses to remain still. Its rooms are not fixed destinations. They are fragments that can be connected, separated and rearranged. And this is where the idea of the myriorama becomes essential.

A myriorama is a system of interchangeable images that can be rearranged to produce an enormous number of different scenes. Its magic lies not only in the images themselves but in the spaces between them: the possibility of joining one fragment to another, then rearranging the fragments and discovering that the story has changed. This is precisely what happens with memory. We possess fragments. We connect them. We rearrange them. And from those fragments we construct a narrative of who we are.

The extraordinary thing is that the same fragments can produce different stories.

Place the same cards in a different order and the Castle changes. Place the same memories within a different interpretation and we change. Meaning does not exist only inside individual pieces. It emerges from relationships. A room matters, but so does the room next to it. A doorway becomes meaningful because somewhere else there is another room waiting beyond it. A shadow becomes ominous because of what came before. A landscape becomes hopeful because of what follows. The same image can become a beginning, a conclusion, a warning, a memory, a dream or an answer depending on what surrounds it.

Nothing is completely isolated. Everything is connected.

Perhaps this is why the empty spaces of the Castle are so important to me. An empty room is not devoid of meaning. It is an invitation. When you look at an architectural space without a human figure, your mind instinctively places itself inside it. You estimate its depth. You imagine its temperature. You wonder what lies beyond the door. You notice the window, the staircase, the object abandoned in a corner. Your attention becomes the moving figure inside the image.

The card becomes experiential rather than merely representational. You do not simply ask, “What does this card mean?” You ask, “Where am I? What happened here? What is about to happen? Why does this room feel familiar? What does this remind me of?”

And that last question opens an enormous door.

Memory is deeply associative. One fragment can summon another. A smell can resurrect an entire summer. A melody can transport us to a room we have not thought about for twenty years. A particular colour can return us to a childhood garden. A Tarot image can operate in much the same territory. It provides a fragment from which the mind constructs a narrative. The card does not dictate the story. It gives the imagination somewhere to begin.

This is also why I think Tarot can become fascinating when approached psychologically rather than simply as a system of fixed meanings. The cards do not necessarily need to tell us what will happen. They can help us examine how we are telling the story of what has already happened. A card can become a new room from which to look at an old memory. The Tower can transform the memory of collapse. The Hermit can transform solitude. The Five of Cups can change the way we look at loss. The Six of Swords can turn departure into movement. The World can place an ending inside a larger architecture. The card does not alter the past, but it may alter the room from which we look at it. And sometimes that is enough to change the future.

There is something deeply liberating in understanding that memory is not a perfect archive. We tend to think that if our memories are imperfect, then we have somehow lost access to the truth of ourselves. But perhaps the opposite is also true. If memory were a perfect archive, we would be prisoners of our past. Every interpretation would be permanent. Every wound would remain attached forever to the meaning we first gave it. The fact that memory is reconstructive means that our relationship with the past can evolve. We can revisit an experience that once seemed humiliating and discover that it taught us resilience. We can remember someone we once hated and, decades later, understand their actions differently. We can revisit an old failure and realise that what appeared to be an ending was actually a beginning.

The historical event has not changed. But its meaning has.

And meaning is not a trivial addition to memory. Meaning determines how memory participates in the story we tell ourselves about our lives.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest reasons I wanted the Castle to be made of rooms rather than simply scenes. A scene tells you where to look. A room invites you to explore. When you enter a room, you decide where to direct your attention. You may notice the ceiling before the floor. You may be drawn towards a tiny object in the corner rather than the enormous doorway in front of you. Someone else entering the same room might see something completely different.

This is also true of memory. We do not remember everything. We select. We emphasise. We suppress. We connect. We interpret. Our attention becomes a kind of cartographer, drawing invisible maps through the landscape of experience.

The Castle gives that cartographer somewhere to wander.

It offers an architecture without prescribing a single route.

This is the freedom of the myriorama. There is no final arrangement. There is no single correct story. There is only another possible connection. Another doorway. Another room. Another way of arranging the fragments.

If memory is reconstructed each time we retrieve it, then the past is not entirely behind us. In a peculiar sense, it is still being made. When we remember something, we bring our present understanding to it. We may reinterpret an experience that once seemed unbearable and discover something within it that we could not see before. We may discover that the person we were is not a stranger, but neither are they the person we imagined. We return to the same room carrying a different self.

The room has not changed.

But the person standing inside it has.

A Tarot Psychological Experiment

This is perhaps where Tarot, psychology and the myriorama meet most beautifully. Tarot connects symbols. The myriorama connects images. Memory connects fragments of experience. And the human mind connects all of them into narratives.

We are storytelling creatures. We do not simply experience our lives. We arrange them. We give them beginnings and endings. We create protagonists and antagonists. We decide which moments were turning points and which were merely details. We return to certain rooms again and again while allowing others to disappear into darkness.

This is why I have become increasingly interested in taking these interconnected ideas, memory, the myriorama, the room, the Tarot card, and bringing them together in a more deliberate way. If a Tarot card can become a room, and if a room can become a space in which memory begins to unfold, perhaps the Castle can be used to enter the strange architecture of our own past. We can use the cards to look at memories from different rooms, from different angles, allowing the mind to wander through them rather than forcing them into a predetermined interpretation.

I recently decided to try this myself.

I will not tell you the memory I explored. It is deeply personal, and some rooms of the Castle should perhaps remain behind closed doors. But I would like to share the experiment itself, because the method surprised me so much that I could not resist writing about it.

There is a painful memory from my childhood that I have carried for a very long time. It is one of those memories that refuses to become entirely silent, one that still carries an emotional charge I have never completely understood. I have spent years trying to look at it from different perspectives, trying to understand what happened, what I felt, what I became because of it. In some way, I wanted to make peace with it. Perhaps I wanted to banish the ghost.

So I decided to enter the Castle.

I sat down, brought the memory to mind and, rather than trying to analyse it intellectually, I focused first on the memory itself: the images, the sensations, the emotions attached to it. Then I began laying down cards, one after another, creating a kind of magic square. I deliberately decided not to assign a positional meaning to the cards. There would be no “this card represents the past”, “this one represents the obstacle”, “this one represents the outcome”. I did not want to impose another structure upon the memory.

Instead, I wanted to read the cards directionally, freely, allowing one room to lead me towards another.

And this distinction became very important.

I did not ask, “What does this card mean?”

I asked, “How does this card connect to that memory?”

It became a kind of association game. I allowed my attention to wander through the rooms. I looked at the architecture, the objects, the colours, the windows, the shadows, the tiny details that might normally remain unnoticed. I waited to see what would catch my attention. Which detail would suddenly trigger something? Which object would remind me of something I had forgotten? Which room would evoke an emotion that I had not associated with the memory before?

I began the experiment almost sceptically.

And then something happened.

I spent a couple of hours inside this strange architecture, and the experience became surprisingly intense. One card led to another, one detail to another, one association to another. I found myself bringing back elements of the memory that I had not been consciously considering. Different emotions emerged. Some were contradictory. Some belonged to the child I had been; others clearly belonged to the adult looking back. Perspectives shifted. Certain things that had seemed fixed suddenly became strangely fluid.

The cards had not told me what happened.

They had not revealed some hidden objective truth about my childhood.

Something much more interesting had happened.

They had given my mind places to go.

Instead of holding the memory entirely inside myself, I could see fragments of it distributed across an external architecture. The room became a container. The corridor became a connection. The objects became triggers. The different cards allowed me to move around the memory rather than remaining trapped inside the single perspective from which I had always experienced it.

And suddenly that word kept returning to me:

architecture.

I have been thinking about it throughout the writing of this essay, and now I understand why.

Perhaps one of the most powerful things the Castle can do is to turn the invisible architecture of our interior world into something we can actually look at.

Our memories usually exist inside us as an indistinguishable mixture of images, sensations, emotions, interpretations and stories. They are intimate precisely because they are difficult to see from the outside. But when we encounter them through rooms and corridors, through landscapes and objects, through the shifting arrangements of a myriorama, something changes. The interior becomes exterior.

For a little while, the memory is no longer only inside my head.

It has a room.

It has a doorway.

It has a staircase.

It has windows.

It has shadows.

I can walk around it.

And if I can walk around it, perhaps I can begin to see something I could not see while standing permanently in the same place.

When I finally stopped the experiment, I felt something I had not expected: gratitude, but also relief. I had not erased the memory. Nothing had been magically cured. The past remained exactly where it had always been.

And yet I had experienced it with different eyes.

The Castle had given me another arrangement of the fragments.

Perhaps that is what the myriorama ultimately offers us: not the possibility of changing the pieces, but the possibility of discovering that the pieces can be arranged differently.

I am still thinking about what happened.

And I am not entirely sure where this experiment will lead. Perhaps it was simply an unusually intense act of imaginative association. Perhaps there is something more profound happening in the strange intersection between spatial imagination, memory and symbolic storytelling. I don’t know yet.

But I am incredibly curious.

And this is why I wanted to share the experiment with you.

I would love to know whether the Castle can become, for other people, a place not only for divination but for remembrance; not merely a machine for asking “What comes next?”, but an architecture through which we can ask, “What happened there?”, “What did I feel?”, “What have I forgotten?”, and perhaps most importantly, “Can I look at this room differently now?”

If you have the Tarot of Crossed Destinies, perhaps you could try your own exploration. Choose a memory you want to understand differently, not necessarily the most painful one, and certainly not one that feels overwhelming or unsafe to revisit. Bring it gently to mind. Lay down the cards without forcing them into predetermined positions. Then enter.

Don’t ask only what the cards traditionally mean.

Ask what they remind you of.

Let your attention wander.

Look at the architecture.

Look into the corners.

Follow the doors.

See which details call you.

And allow the Castle to become what it was perhaps always meant to be: not a place that gives you answers, but a place that gives your questions somewhere to live.

I would be genuinely fascinated to know what you discover.

Perhaps we could begin a different kind of exploration together; a collective experiment in the architecture of memory, one room, one card, one forgotten corridor at a time.

May magic always be with you

Until the next time,

Andrea

Among all the wonders it has unveiled during my endless meanderings through its labyrinthine halls, perhaps the most astonishing lies hidden behind the oldest illusion we all share: that we see reality as it truly is. It is a curious belief, deeply rooted within us. We imagine that the world enters our eyes fully formed and that the mind merely records what is already there. We picture ourselves as silent spectators seated before the great theatre of existence, watching an objective reality unfold before us. The world seems to exist outside our minds in all its solidity, patiently waiting to be grasped exactly as it is.

Yet both philosophy and modern neuroscience invite us to consider a far stranger reality… Before the world reaches our consciousness, it must undertake an extraordinary journey. Light reflected from objects enters our eyes, vibrating air reaches our ears, invisible molecules touch our sense of smell, pressure awakens our skin, chemical reactions stir our tongue. What arrives is not a tree, a face, a melody, or a sunset. It is merely a torrent of electrical signals, fragmented sensory information carried through the nervous system. The brain receives none of the objects we believe we perceive. It receives only patterns.

From these fragments it performs one of the greatest acts of creation in nature. It separates figure from background, distinguishes movement from stillness, recognises faces, identifies voices, compares new sensations with old memories, anticipates what is likely to happen next, discards an immeasurable amount of information, and fills countless gaps before we even become aware that anything has happened.

Language joins this silent labour. Long before we consciously reflect upon the world, language begins dividing the continuous flow of reality into recognisable forms. We learn to call this collection of colours and textures “tree”, that vibration of air “music”, this emotion “fear”, that expression “joy”. Words do not merely describe reality; they help organise it. They gather the infinite complexity of experience into categories that allow us to navigate the world, to think about it, and to communicate it to others.

This does not necessarily mean that an objective reality does not exist. It simply reminds us that we never encounter it unmediated. We encounter a world already filtered by our senses, interpreted by our nervous system, organised by memory, shaped by language, and illuminated by imagination. What we experience is not reality in its absolute totality, but reality as it appears through the extraordinary architecture of the human mind.

Our brain, then, is not a passive observer but an astonishingly creative organ, continuously composing the world from fragments. Colours become objects, sounds become voices, memories merge with sensations, expectations influence perception, and countless scattered pieces are woven together into something so coherent that we simply call reality.

Reality, then, is not merely perceived. It is composed.

This ability to compose meaning is so part of our nature that we rarely notice it, or think about it. We recognise faces in clouds, animals in the silhouettes of mountains, castles in the shapes of distant rocks, and human expressions in the grain of old wood. Psychologists call these phenomena pareidolia and apophenia: the tendency to perceive meaningful images or meaningful connections where none objectively exist. These words are often presented as cognitive biases, as though they were flaws in our perception. Yet perhaps they are something else entirely. Perhaps they are evidence of the astonishing engine that made our species possible.

Human beings are not simply pattern recognisers. We are pattern creators.

Without this capacity there would be no myths, no religions, no science, no philosophy, no literature, no art. Every constellation drawn across the night sky is an act of imagination imposed upon indifferent stars. Orion does not exist. The Great Bear does not exist. We created them by connecting distant points of light into stories. In exactly the same way, every scientific theory begins with the intuition that apparently unrelated phenomena may belong to the same hidden pattern. Newton connected the falling apple to the movement of the Moon. Darwin connected finches scattered across islands into a single theory of evolution. Einstein connected space and time. Creativity, whether artistic or scientific, often consists of discovering relationships where no one had previously imagined them.

Meaning rarely resides in isolated objects.

It emerges from relationships.

This simple observation fascinated the Gestalt psychologists of the early twentieth century. They argued that the whole is never merely the sum of its parts. A melody is not simply a sequence of individual notes, nor is a sentence merely a collection of words. Their meaning arises from the relationships between the elements. Change one note, move one word, alter one image, and the entire structure transforms. Nothing has changed materially, yet everything has changed conceptually.

The same principle appears in one of the most curious inventions of the nineteenth century: the myriorama. At first glance it seems little more than a charming parlour game, a series of illustrated cards depicting landscapes that can be rearranged almost endlessly while always forming a coherent panorama. A bridge may lead to a castle, the castle to a forest, the forest to the sea. Rearrange the cards and another landscape appears. Rearrange them again and another journey begins.

The secret of the myriorama is not that it contains an infinite number of images. It contains only a finite collection. Its infinity lies in the relationships between them. A solitary house beside a cemetery tells one story; place that same house beside a flowering orchard and its emotional meaning changes entirely. The image itself remains untouched. What changes is its context.

The human mind functions in the same way.

Memory, for instance, is no longer understood as a static archive from which we retrieve perfectly preserved experiences. Every act of remembering is also an act of reconstruction. Each memory is rebuilt according to our present emotions, our current knowledge, and the countless experiences that have intervened since the original event. We do not remember like librarians retrieving books from shelves but like storytellers continually rewriting the same tale in different ways... The fragments remain, but their arrangement changes, and with it the meaning of an entire life.

Identity itself may be nothing more than an immense myriorama. We often imagine that our lives possess a fixed narrative, yet every important event acquires its meaning only in relation to the events surrounding it. A childhood failure may later become the origin of resilience. An unexpected encounter may reveal itself decades afterwards as the turning point of an entire existence. The facts remain identical; only their position within the story changes.

Stories are one of the primary ways through which the human mind organises reality. They allow us to assemble scattered experiences into coherent worlds. Every novel, every myth, every philosophical system, every scientific theory, and every religion is, in its own way, an attempt to build a myriorama: to take fragments and discover among them an invisible architecture.

This is why tarot has fascinated humanity for centuries. Whether approached as a spiritual practice, a psychological instrument, or simply a symbolic language, tarot does not offer meaning as something already contained within the cards. It invites the reader to construct meaning through relationships. A card rarely speaks alone. It acquires its voice from the cards surrounding it, from the question that generated the reading, from the memories and emotions of the person interpreting it. The symbols become catalysts for the very process through which our minds naturally operate.

When I began designing The Tarot of Crossed Destinies, I realised that the ancient myriorama offered something far more profound than an unusual visual device. It embodied a philosophy. Every card was designed not merely to exist independently but to connect physically and narratively with countless others. Every shuffle generates another geography, another sequence of encounters, another story. Like the brain itself, the deck does not produce fixed meanings. It generates possibilities.

Perhaps that is the deepest lesson hidden within both the myriorama and the human mind. Reality itself is not a finished picture waiting to be observed. It is something continually assembled through relationships: between memories and expectations, between imagination and perception, between one event and another, between ourselves and the stories we choose to tell.

The universe gives us fragments.

Meaning emerges from the way we connect them.

Thus, the next time you enter the Castle, carry these words with you. Remember the marvellous relationship between the world, our consciousness, and the language through which we give shape to experience.

Whatever “reality” may stand before you, a dream that seems like an impossible mountain to climb, a sorrow weighing upon your heart like a gigantic boulder, a problem more intricate than an ancient military cipher, remember the lesson the Castle taught me.

What appears absolute is often only one interpretation among many. A problem may become a challenge. A sorrow may become an invitation to change and grow. A dream may reveal itself as the beginning of an adventure towards an unknown destination.

Ask the Castle to guide you.

Lay a few cards before you. Build an architecture of esoterica that reflects your question, then begin to wander. Meander freely through the rooms the Castle unfolds before you. Let your eyes drift naturally across its corridors. Allow your attention to settle where it wishes, to linger upon a detail, a symbol, a forgotten doorway.

Then, simply... listen.

If you are patient, within the profound silence of the Castle you may begin to hear a distant echo: the quiet voice of another reality asking to emerge. The old one, the one your mind has clung to so tightly, may slowly begin to fracture like an ancient mirror, revealing that what seemed so solid was only one reflection among countless others.

Do not resist.

Look beyond the reality upon which your thoughts have become fixated. Search for other meanings. Other possibilities. Other emotions. Let each one pass before you without judgement. Observe them as a traveller watches unfamiliar landscapes from the window of a passing train.

Little by little, the Castle will lead you elsewhere.

It will not change the world outside. But it may change the way in which you look at it, revealing another interpretation of what once appeared objective, absolute, and immovable.

And sometimes, that is the greatest magic of all.

May the Castle be kind to you.

To the next time

Andrea

But the deepest magic of the Castle is not the “instability” of its architecture, however strange and beautiful that may be. The true mystery of the Castle lies in its attention. The Castle listens. Then it answers. Not through words that can be written down or translated, but through sequences. The rooms it places before you form sentences, questions, and replies to thoughts that had not yet fully formed when the answer began to appear. Nothing is accidental. Nothing is random. The Castle teaches me, through the many sleepless nights I have spent wandering its corridors, that the meaning is not only contained in each individual room but also in the invisible grammar that connects them: the rhythm of their order, the hidden logic of their disposition, the thread that passes through doors, thresholds, and passages...

After many years of listening, the Castle revealed something I had not expected. Beneath the architecture, the symbols, beneath even the cards themselves… It began, as the Castle’s most important lessons often begin, quietly. Not with a revelation, but with a state of openness, a moment in which I stopped searching for a particular answer and simply allowed myself to receive what came. I entered without a question. I listened rather than asked.

And the Castle gave me three rooms: Temperance. The Six of Coins. The Nine of Cups.

Something in this sequence immediately felt different. There was a connection between them that I could sense before I could explain it: a hidden thread, a trait d’union, a sentence whose meaning was emerging slowly. I remained in the Nine of Cups and allowed the room to settle around me. As always happens in the Castle, when one gives enough silence to a room, it begins to speak...

And from somewhere inside that silence, a memory appeared.

Chan Chan.

The name itself contains a mesmerizing echo. A repetition. A doubling. In the Chimú language, it refers to the sun, repeated twice, as if one sun were not enough to express the central force around which the entire world was organised.

Chan Chan was the capital of the Chimú Empire, a magnificent civilisation that flourished on the northern coast of what is now Peru before being conquered by the Inca in the fifteenth century. It was the largest adobe city ever constructed, a vast labyrinth of palaces, temples, reservoirs, workshops, and sacred spaces built between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes. Chan Chan was a peculiar city, built for the living, iand for the dead alike.

The great ciudadelas were royal residences and monuments designed to preserve the presence of rulers beyond physical death in a gesture of continuity: life, death, life again, like an eternal tide endlessly flowing and dancing upon the shore of existence. The walls of Chan Chan speak the visual language of a people whose imagination was shaped by the profound metaphor of the ocean: fish, waves, birds, and endless geometric patterns repeating themselves like the eternal rhythms of the tides..

The Chimú Empire eventually disappeared, absorbed into the larger world of the Inca. The city of the sun became part of another empire’s memory. But something of their understanding remained: the idea that death does not necessarily mean departure.

This was the mystery that appeared inside the Nine of Cups.

At the centre of the card sat a mummy. But look closely… it is not the Egyptian image of a body sealed away in absolute darkness, preserved as a relic of something that has ended, but the Andean image of the ancestor: seated upright, dressed in the symbols of authority, still participating in the world.

The Sapa Inca, the divine ruler, did not disappear after death. His mummy continued to exist as a presence. It had its own palace, its own attendants, its own lands. The royal lineage cared for it, dressed it, carried it in procession, and brought it into ceremonies alongside the living ruler.

The dead were not behind the living. They were beside them. They were consulted. They were listened to. They participated. The boundary between life and death was not a wall but a membrane, something through which influence and meaning could continue to flow. The past was not something left behind, it was seated in the room. Standing in that room, I understood what the Castle had been trying to reveal.

It was speaking about time.

But do not think about the time of clocks and calendars. Not the straight line we imagine moving from yesterday toward tomorrow, carrying us inevitably from what has been into what has not yet arrived. Something older and stranger was being proposed.

Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time, questioned our ordinary understanding of time. He argued that human beings are not simply creatures placed inside time, like objects floating within a river. We do not merely experience time passing around us.

We are time.

What he called “Dasein” (being-there) is temporal because temporality is the very structure of our existence. We are always carrying what has already happened, always projecting ourselves toward possibilities that have not yet arrived, always existing in the fragile meeting point between memory and expectation.

We are the past walking toward what it does not yet know.

Sartre, approaching the same mystery, described the human being as something never completely identical with itself. We are never simply what we have been. We are always becoming. We carry our history, but we are not imprisoned by it. We are the possibility of what we choose to become.

L’existence précède l’essence. Existence precedes essence.

We are not finished objects. We are unfinished movements.

The illusion is believing that time has only one direction. The Castle showed me another way of understanding this mystery, one that rises from the mountains and high plains of the Andes. My memory travelled to the Aymara. My father had studied their language as a child, while living in Argentina, and suddenly this distant thread, buried somewhere in the fabric of my memory, returned to me.

The Aymara people possess, within their very language, a vision of time profoundly different from the Western imagination. The word nayra means both “eye” and “past.”

For the Aymara, the past is in front of you. The future is behind you.

This seems strange, unsettling. We are deeply accustomed to imagining ourselves walking forward into the future, with the past disappearing behind our backs. But the Aymara vision origins from another intuition: what we can see is what we know. The past is visible, it has already happened. It is the landscape before the eyes of our memory. The future, however, is unknown. It has not yet entered our field of vision. Therefore, it approaches from behind. The future is not something we walk toward. It is something that walks toward us.

This perspective changes our relationship with both memory and possibility. The past is no longer a lost country behind us, something finished and unreachable. It is a landscape we continue to observe, a territory from which we continue to learn. The future is not something to dominate, predict, or capture before it arrives. It requires attention, openness, receptivity, the ability to welcome what comes.

One of my favourite Roman poets, Horace, wrote: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day, trusting little in tomorrow. The future is an unstable territory. It is dangerous, like quicksand. Keats, facing his own mortality, understood the same truth when he wrote of autumn: Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. Do not allow what is coming to steal what is here.

The future should not devour the present.

What exists now is already complete in its own way.

The Aymara vision reveals something deep: time is not merely a line reversed. It is perhaps a circle. The future becomes the present. The present becomes the past. The past becomes the visible landscape before us. And the wheel turns again.

This brings us close to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, that terrifying and beautiful thought that existence is not something to escape but something to affirm completely. Amor fati. Love of fate. Not resignation, but a profound yes to existence in all its forms, including its repetitions, its returns, its endless becoming.

The Castle was not asking me to choose between the Western arrow of time and the Andean circle of time. It was asking me to hold both at once: the journey and the return, the line and the wheel, the future ahead and the future approaching from behind.

And then the Tarot itself revealed another possibility.

We usually read the cards according to the Western imagination: past, present, future. We move from what has been toward what will be. We face forward.

But what happens if we turn around?

What happens if we read the cards in the Aymara orientation?

The cards of the past are the ones before our eyes. They are visible. They are known. They are the landscape we inhabit. They are not behind us; they are in front of us, available for contemplation.

The future is behind us, already approaching.

The Tarot reader is not someone who forces open a hidden door to discover a predetermined destiny. The Tarot reader listens. The question is not simply: “What will happen?”

The question is more profound: “What is already arriving that I have not yet learned to see?”

The mummy in the Nine of Cups was not an image of something dead and finished. It was an ancestor seated in the present, still participating in the meaning of the moment. The past alive. The past speaking.

This was the true lesson of the sequence: Attention. The patient art of being fully present. To look at the past without fear because it is the landscape before our eyes. To welcome the future without anxiety because it is already approaching. To stand between them, exactly where they melt, where existence happens: the present moment.

Heidegger called this the Augenblick: the moment of vision, the instant in which past and future gather into the fullness of the present. Sartre called it freedom: the recognition that we are not prisoners of what we were, nor guaranteed by what we will become.

Perhaps the Aymara would simply look at the landscape before them and say:

Yes.

This.

Look.

The past is in front of you.

The future is approaching from behind.

And the present moment is where you are standing.

The card you are holding tells you what is here.

To the next time
Andrea

From outside the door come other sounds. Strange, confused sounds. Something metallic. The faint rattling of chains. The wind, perhaps. A ghost, maybe. The mind races desperately in search of an explanation. You know that the Castle would never harm you, but… nevertheless, try to close your eyes when the sounds of the night become so ominous. You find yourself too tired to remain awake, yet unable to surrender to sleep.

Last night was one of those nights.

I could not endure it any longer. I climbed out of bed, dressed myself, and began wandering aimlessly through the Castle, holding my lantern like the Hermit. Room after room. Corridor after corridor. At night, even the most familiar places seem different. Perhaps they are different. I do not know whether it is merely a trick of the imagination or whether the Castle truly reveals another face when darkness falls. The Castle and its mysteries…

I slowly climbed steep stone stairs and wandered through narrow corridors where the slender openings once used by archers allowed the cold air of the night to enter, disturbing the thick spiderwebs hanging from the ancient vaults. The flames of my lantern trembled with every breath of wind, casting uncertain shadows upon the walls. Eventually, I arrived where, perhaps unconsciously, I had wanted to go all along. The battlements. Fresh air. Exactly what I needed. I stood there for a while, looking at the night resting peacefully beyond the walls. What a serene view. The world outside seemed untouched by worries, by the restless storms of the mind. Slowly, the torments of the sleepless night began to dissolve, carried away by the cold air.

And then I heard them. Footsteps... light, echoing upon the ancient stones of the pavement. Rhythmic. Measured… Marching, slowly approaching. At first, I could see nothing. No one. Only the sound was present. Then, from the darkness beneath an archway, they slowly emerged. Three ghostly soldiers. They were enveloped in long, dark cloaks with deep hoods, as if they had wrapped themselves against the cold of an ancient night that had never truly ended. Their faces were nothing but skeletons, yet within the emptiness of their sockets I sensed something unexpected. Not menace, no rage or determination, but... sadness and an incommensurable weariness. They carried long spears in their skeletal hands, the iron tips hanging rigidly at the end of the wooden shafts. Once sharp weapons of war, they were now rusted and battered, their edges long forgotten, their purpose lost to centuries of waiting.

And as they passed before me, silent and eternal, I understood that they were the Nine of Wands slowly unfolding in front of me like a mysterious fan, revealing its intricate patterns, its hidden meanings, and the secret it had been waiting to tell me…

They passed me without saying a word and continued their endless march along the battlements, following the ancient line of the merlons before slowly disappearing into the darkness of the night. Eternal sentinels, condemned to wait for something that might never come. Waiting for the enemy to approach. Waiting for the battle that would finally justify their existence. The battle that would give meaning to their long vigil, a purpose to their suffering, and perhaps, at last, a closure.

The Desert of the Tartars

As I watched them vanish into the shadows, a novel I had read many years before, when I was still a teenager, returned to my mind: The Desert of the Tartars (Il deserto dei Tartari), also published in English as The Tartar Steppe and sometimes as The Stronghold, written by the Italian author Dino Buzzati and first published in 1940.

Buzzati’s masterpiece tells the story of Giovanni Drogo, a young military officer who, at the beginning of his career, is assigned to the remote Bastiani Fortress, a lonely and almost forgotten outpost standing at the edge of an immense and mysterious desert. Beyond the walls stretches the vast emptiness of the Tartar Steppe, a silent land from which, according to ancient rumours, a powerful enemy might one day emerge.

At first, Drogo considers the fortress a temporary stage in his life. He dreams of returning to the city, of pursuing a more exciting existence, of love, friendships, and adventures. The fortress appears isolated, absurd, almost unreal; a place where nothing happens and where time seems to have lost its meaning. Yet slowly, almost imperceptibly, something changes. The rhythm of military life begins to possess him. The rituals of the fortress, the companionship of the soldiers, and above all the promise of a future heroic moment begin to weave an invisible net around him.

One day, the Tartars will arrive. One day, the great battle will begin. And when that moment comes, Drogo will finally prove his value. His sacrifices will finally make sense. His years of waiting will finally be rewarded. But that moment never arrives. Or rather, it always remains just beyond the horizon. Months become years. Years become decades. The possibility of glory becomes more powerful than reality itself. The soldiers continue to watch the desert, studying every movement, interpreting every distant shadow as a possible sign of the approaching enemy. Their entire existence becomes an act of waiting. The fortress becomes not only a physical place but a state of mind, a prison built not with stones but with expectations.

And while they wait for the great event that will finally give meaning to their lives, life itself quietly passes them by. Youth disappears. Friendships fade. The world changes beyond the walls, while inside the fortress everything remains suspended, frozen in anticipation. The soldiers become guardians of a future that never arrives.

Buzzati’s novel is one of the most profound reflections on one of humanity’s greatest illusions: the belief that life will truly begin after a certain moment, after a final obstacle has been overcome, after the decisive battle has been fought. We often create invisible fortresses around ourselves, telling ourselves that happiness, fulfilment, or peace belong to the future.

When this happens, then I will be happy.

When this problem is solved, then I will rest.

When I finally achieve this goal, then I will feel complete.

But sometimes the awaited moment becomes a mirage. The horizon continues to move away, and the waiting itself becomes our existence.

This is why the ghostly soldiers of the Castle reminded me so deeply of the sentinels of Bastiani Fortress. They were not merely spirits of the dead. They were spirits of expectation. They were prisoners of an unfinished story, trapped between what had already happened and what they believed still had to happen.

And perhaps this is one of the most powerful connections with the Nine of Wands.

Traditionally, the Nine of Wands represents endurance, resilience, perseverance, and the strength to continue despite exhaustion. It is the image of the wounded guardian who has survived many battles and yet remains standing, holding the final wand while the others rise behind him like a protective wall. He is tired, scarred, perhaps afraid, but he refuses to surrender.

Yet the deeper meaning of the Nine of Wands is not only about endurance.

It asks a more difficult question: What are you still waiting for?

There is great nobility in perseverance. There are moments in life when we must stand firm, protect what matters, and continue despite difficulties. But there is also a shadow hidden within this archetype. The same strength that allows us to survive can sometimes become the chain that binds us. We can become so accustomed to fighting that we forget who we were before the battle began.

The soldiers of the Castle had waited for so long that waiting had become their identity. They no longer guarded the walls because an enemy was coming.

They guarded the walls because they had always guarded the walls.

They were waiting for a conclusion that would finally explain everything that had come before. A final battle. A final victory. A final moment of meaning. But perhaps some stories do not end with a battle. Perhaps some battles end when we finally understand that we no longer need to fight.

The Nine of Wands stands exactly at this mysterious threshold: between courage and exhaustion, between perseverance and captivity. It honours all the battles we have survived, all the wounds we carry, all the nights when we continued despite believing we could not go on.

But it also whispers a warning.

Do not let the battle become your entire world.

Do not become so devoted to guarding the gates that you forget there is a kingdom beyond them.

Sometimes the greatest act of strength is not to raise the weapon one more time.

Sometimes the greatest act of strength is to recognise that the enemy has disappeared, the war has ended, and we are finally allowed to walk away from the walls...

till the next time

Andrea

Yet the very title of this project, The Tarot of Crossed Destinies, quietly challenges this assumption. It suggests something far more unsettling and, perhaps, far more beautiful: that no destiny has ever belonged entirely to the person living it. Every life is written in the margins of countless others. Every decision, every encounter, every loss and every unexpected joy reverberates far beyond the boundaries of our own story. Perhaps there is no such thing as an isolated fate. Perhaps destiny has always been a conversation.

The expression itself owes much to one of the books that has profoundly shaped the way I think about Tarot: Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. The premise is deceptively simple. A group of travellers, having mysteriously lost the ability to speak, gather around a table in an ancient castle. Unable to tell their stories with words, they arrange Tarot cards one after another, constructing silent narratives through images alone. Each traveller uses many of the same cards that appeared in previous stories, yet every sequence transforms their meaning. The same Emperor who represented authority in one tale becomes tyranny in another. The Fool who embodied innocence suddenly becomes madness. The cards do not change; the stories surrounding them do.

Calvino’s novel is often celebrated as an extraordinary literary experiment, but reducing it to a game of narrative construction would miss its deepest intuition. Beneath its playful surface lies a profound meditation on how human beings create meaning. Images are never neutral. Symbols do not possess immutable definitions waiting to be deciphered. Rather, they become alive only when they encounter a consciousness capable of interpreting them.

Carl Gustav Jung spent much of his life exploring precisely this mystery. His theory of archetypes suggests that certain symbolic forms belong to what he called the collective unconscious, a reservoir of images inherited across humanity that reappear in myths, dreams, religions and works of art. Yet even these universal images are never experienced in exactly the same way. They are filtered through memory, culture, personal history, desire and fear. The archetype is collective; its meaning is always intimate.

Think of a symbol as familiar as the rainbow flag. Socially, its meaning appears well established. It has become one of the most recognisable emblems of LGBTQ+ dignity, visibility and the ongoing struggle for equality. Yet no symbol ever exists solely in its official definition. For me, it evokes decades of battles for the simple right to exist openly, to love without shame, to inhabit one’s own identity without fear. It reminds me that freedom has always required courage. For someone else, however, the very same image may awaken feelings of anxiety, loss or resistance, because they perceive it as representing a profound transformation of social structures they once considered immutable: a restrictive and rigid patriarchal vision of love and family. The flag itself remains unchanged. What changes is the universe each observer brings to it. Symbols never speak by themselves; they speak through us.

Tarot functions in exactly the same way. We often ask what a card means, as though meaning were hidden inside the ink and paper, waiting to be extracted by someone sufficiently knowledgeable. But perhaps this is the wrong question altogether. The Fool is never simply the Fool. Death is never merely transformation. The Devil is never only temptation. Every card becomes what it becomes through the encounter between its archetypal language and the inner landscape of the person contemplating it. The cards do not dictate meaning; they reveal the meanings already moving beneath the surface of our consciousness.

And yet Calvino invites us to go even further. His greatest philosophical insight is not simply that symbols are fluid, but that destinies themselves are inseparable. In The Castle of Crossed Destinies, every narrative overlaps another. One traveller’s ending becomes another traveller’s beginning. A card abandoned by one story is immediately claimed by another, carrying with it echoes of all the meanings it has previously held. It is impossible to isolate a single narrative from the web of stories surrounding it.

Perhaps human existence unfolds in precisely the same way.

We are accustomed to imagining ourselves as protagonists. Modern culture encourages us to speak about my journey, my purpose, my destiny, as though our lives unfolded along solitary paths stretching from birth to death. The Beatles captured it long ago in a song I deeply love

All through the day
I me mine, I me mine, I me mine
All through the night
I me mine, I me mine, I me mine

Now they’re frightened of leaving it
Everyone’s reading it
Comin’ on strong all the time

All through the day
I me mine
I me me mine, I me me mine
I me me mine, I me me mine

All I can hear
I me mine, I me mine, I me mine
Even those tears
I me mine, I me mine, I me mine

(The Beatles, I, Me, Mine)

But reality rarely behaves so neatly. We become who we are because our lives continually intersect with those of others. Every teacher, every lover, every stranger, every betrayal, every unexpected act of kindness redirects us, sometimes so subtly that we never notice the moment our path changed. Likewise, we are constantly shaping destinies we will never fully witness. A conversation we barely remember may become the turning point of someone else’s life. A gesture that seemed insignificant to us may echo for decades in another person’s memory.

Many years ago, a dear friend of mine, a writer and sociologist with a lifelong fascination for the occult, offered me a thought that has remained with me ever since. He said, “Perhaps your destiny is not to become someone extraordinary. Perhaps your destiny is simply to walk into a grocery store one ordinary afternoon and casually say something to a stranger. For you, those words mean nothing. For them, they become the sentence that changes everything.”

I have never been able to forget that conversation.

At first, I found the idea deeply unsettling. It dismantled every romantic notion I had about destiny as some grand personal accomplishment waiting to be fulfilled. What if the most important thing I will ever do is something I never even recognise as important? What if my greatest purpose belongs not to me, but to someone else? What if the centre of my story is, unexpectedly, a minor scene in another person’s?

Hidden within my friend’s words was a conception of destiny that reaches back to the ancient Greeks. For them, fate was not merely prediction; it was necessity itself. The Moirai spun, measured and finally severed the thread of every human life, and even Zeus, sovereign of Olympus, could not entirely escape their authority. Above gods and mortals alike stood Ananke, inexorable necessity, before whom every will ultimately bowed. It is a magnificent vision, but also an unsettling one. Human beings become actors performing a script whose ending has already been written, participating in a cosmic drama whose author remains forever beyond the stage.

Voltaire‘s words echo in my mind: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”. I have never been comfortable with the idea of acting in someone else’s play, of moving through life like a mere puppet in a script already written. There is something profoundly unsettling about it, something almost ominous in the thought that our choices might be nothing more than an illusion of freedom. If that were true, what would remain of our lives? Of their meaning? Of their purpose?

And yet I have always found myself drawn elsewhere, toward traditions that leave room for participation rather than submission. The Buddhist understanding of karma offers, to my mind, a far more subtle vision. Karma is not fate in the deterministic sense, nor is it a celestial bookkeeping system of rewards and punishments. It is the continuous unfolding of causes and conditions. Every thought, every word and every action becomes a seed capable of shaping future experience. We inherit the consequences of countless previous actions, our own, those of our families, even those of the societies into which we are born, but we are never merely prisoners of that inheritance. At every moment, new causes are being planted. Destiny is neither fixed nor infinitely malleable. It is a living conversation between the weight of the past and the freedom of the present.

When I created Oracolarium, the first augmented reality oracle deck whose cards come alive with colourful and meaningful animations when viewed through a mobile device or tablet, this very notion of destiny shaped the way I represented the concept of Destiny itself. I imagined an actor standing on a stage, a puppet who finally cuts the ropes binding him to an invisible hand. It is the moment when awareness transforms into freedom, when we recognise that the threads controlling our movements are not as powerful as we once believed.

Karma reminds us of this profound truth: our destiny is never entirely outside our hands. We inherit circumstances, patterns and consequences from the past, but we are also continuously creating what comes next. Destiny is not something imposed upon us; it is something we participate in shaping. It has always been this way.

The voice of a Poet

One of my deepest passions in life has always been poetry. And among all the voices that have accompanied me through the years, Edgar Lee Masters remains one of the most intimate. His words have often seemed to give form to things that existed inside me before I had the language to express them: doubts and anxieties, fears and hopes, dreams, disappointments, moments of joy and moments of profound solitude.

The Spoon River Anthology has been my companion since adolescence. I returned to it again and again, reading and rereading its poems until many of them became almost a part of my own internal landscape. There was a period in my life when I found myself more comfortable in the company of the dead than the living, and the voices of Spoon River became a strange and beautiful form of friendship. These were not silent graves. They were voices speaking across the boundaries of time, offering confessions, regrets, revelations and wisdom. Poetry became our silent dialogue.

Perhaps this is why Masters’ vision of destiny has always fascinated me so deeply. Spoon River Anthology is, on the surface, a collection of epitaphs. The inhabitants of a small American town lie buried in their cemetery, and from beyond death they speak. Each poem gives a voice to someone who, during life, may have been misunderstood, ignored, judged or forgotten. The banker, the prostitute, the teacher, the politician, the dreamer, the failed artist, the betrayed lover, the lonely widow… all are granted one final opportunity: not to justify themselves before society, but to reveal the hidden truth of their existence.

Masters creates a cemetery that becomes almost the opposite of what a cemetery usually represents. It is not a place of silence; it is a place of revelation. Death removes the masks that people wear during life. Social roles disappear. Reputation dissolves. What remains is the naked story of a human being. In this sense, Spoon River is deeply connected to the Tarot.

The Tarot has always been concerned with archetypes, the recurring figures and experiences that shape human existence. The Fool, the Emperor, the Hermit, the Lovers, Death, the Tower: these are not merely characters but forces moving through every life. Masters creates something similar. Each inhabitant of Spoon River becomes a living archetype, a single card turned face upward after the great transition of death.

Masters’ genius lies in showing that no destiny can be understood from the outside. During life, we often see only fragments of one another. We see professions, appearances, successes and failures. We judge actions without knowing the invisible history that produced them. We mistake the surface of a life for the whole story.

But in Spoon River, the dead finally reveal the hidden cards. The person we believed to be a failure may have carried extraordinary courage. The person we admired may have lived in emptiness. The person condemned by society may have suffered wounds no one ever understood.

Masters asks a question that is central to any reflection on destiny: How much of a person’s life is truly visible while they are living it? How many destinies do we misunderstand because we never have access to the complete story?

This is the great tragedy and beauty of human existence. We are all unfinished narratives. We move through the world carrying invisible chapters that others cannot read. Every person we meet is a book whose most important pages may remain hidden from us.

Masters’ vision of destiny is not the rigid destiny of the ancient Greeks, where the thread of life is spun and measured by forces beyond human control. Nor is it a simple celebration of individual freedom, where every person creates themselves independently from the world around them. His destiny is something more fragile and more human.

A life is created through a thousand intersections. Through choices and accidents, love received and love denied, dreams pursued and dreams abandoned. Through the words spoken to us and the words we never heard.

The inhabitants of Spoon River discover, only after death, how many invisible forces shaped them. Their destinies were never isolated. They were woven from relationships, communities, historical circumstances and private decisions. They were crossed destinies.

This is why Masters feels so close to the philosophy behind Tarot. A Tarot card has no meaning alone. It exists within a spread, surrounded by other cards, influenced by its position and relationship to everything around it. A single card changes because another card appears beside it.

Human beings are the same. We are not solitary symbols. We are meanings created through relationship. A person’s destiny is never only their own. Every life contains traces of other lives. We carry our ancestors, our lovers, our enemies, our teachers, our friends, and even strangers who crossed our path for a moment and disappeared. We are made from encounters. Perhaps this is Masters’ deepest lesson: destiny is not only what happens to us. It is also what passes through us. The words we say. The kindness we offer. The wounds we leave behind. The courage we awaken in someone else. Long after we are gone, pieces of us continue living inside other people’s stories.

The dead of Spoon River understand something that the living often forget: no life is insignificant because no life exists alone. Every existence becomes part of a larger pattern, a vast human tapestry whose full design remains hidden from us. Perhaps only at the end do we understand the complete spread. Perhaps only then do all the cards finally reveal their relationships. But perhaps poetry, like Tarot, gives us a glimpse of that hidden pattern while we are still here.

Perhaps this is where Tarot truly belongs, as a language capable of revealing the invisible patterns through which our lives are already unfolding. The cards cannot tell us what must happen. They can only illuminate the threads we are already weaving, often without noticing them. In this sense, every reading becomes less a prophecy than an act of recognition.

And perhaps this is why I no longer believe we ever read only our own cards.

To the next time

Andrea

During these past weeks, the Castle has been wonderfully alive.

Every room has been filled with quiet industry. Decks have been wrapped, books carefully bound, Explorer Journals prepared, missives sealed, mysterious objects gathered, and countless parcels patiently assembled. My faithful gargoyles have carried box after box from the great hall to the highest battlements, ready to launch themselves into the skies and deliver their precious cargo to every corner of the world.

It is a curious feeling.

As I prepared each parcel, I did not simply read a shipping label. I remembered names. I remembered conversations. I remembered the many exchanges we shared throughout the Tarot of Crossed Destinies Kickstarter campaign: ideas about tarot, dreams, symbols, stories, and life itself.

These are not boxes being sent to strangers. Each parcel carries a fragment of a dream. It is as though I were sending a gift to a dear friend… a key to a place that, until now, existed only in our shared imagination.

At this very moment, countless gargoyles are crossing green valleys, gliding over jagged mountain peaks, soaring above restless oceans whose waves glitter beneath storm clouds. Some have already reached their destination. Others still wait upon the ancient stones of the Castle walls, wings folded, ready to leap into the wind.

Soon, they will arrive at your door. And then another journey will begin.

While preparing every package, I often found myself wondering what would happen when you finally opened the Gates of the Castle. Which room would you enter first? Which corridors would you choose to follow? Which forgotten staircases would you discover? Above all, I wondered what kind of architecture you would build.

As I imagined those first moments, I also found myself wondering what your eyes would notice... Throughout the Castle are scattered countless details, recurring figures, forgotten objects, echoes from one room to another, and symbols that quietly reappear in unexpected places. Some tell stories across only a handful of cards; others wander through the entire Castle like silent inhabitants, waiting for someone to recognize them. There are mysteries whose threads are deliberately left untied, questions that receive no explicit answer, and doors that I intentionally chose not to open. You may discover that a seemingly insignificant object appears again several rooms away, transformed by a new context. You may begin to suspect that certain characters are following invisible paths through the Castle, or that two distant chambers are engaged in a silent dialogue. Perhaps you will notice meanings I never consciously intended, for symbols have a remarkable habit of becoming wiser than the hands that drew them.

The accompanying booklet was written to be a companion rather than a catalogue. It offers guidance, historical context, symbolism, and many of the keys I believe are essential to begin exploring these halls. Yet it is not, and was never meant to be, an exhaustive compendium. Had I explained every recurring symbol, revealed every hidden connection, or solved every mystery concealed within these walls, I would have stolen from you one of the greatest pleasures that any symbolic work can offer: the joy of discovery.

A castle is not explored by reading its floor plan. It is explored by wandering through its rooms, opening forgotten doors, climbing towers without knowing what view awaits at the top, and occasionally becoming delightfully lost. I wanted this deck to preserve that same sense of exploration. Every reading should feel like another expedition, every return visit revealing a passage that somehow escaped your notice before.

That is why I believe the Castle will never truly be finished. Once it leaves my hands, it will begin to grow within yours. You will notice correspondences I overlooked, invent theories I never imagined, uncover hidden narratives between distant cards, and perhaps reveal secrets that even I, as its creator, have yet to perceive. More than anything, I hope you will tell those stories. I look forward to seeing the architectures you construct, the interpretations you develop, the mysteries you unravel, and those you choose to leave unsolved. For every explorer who enters the Castle walks different corridors, and no two journeys through its halls can ever be exactly the same.

Because I believe The Tarot of Crossed Destinies is not simply a deck. It is a place. A place to explore, to inhabit, to rearrange, and perhaps even to lose oneself within.

As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”. In many ways, I hope this Castle becomes such a house; a symbolic dwelling where intuition can wander freely.

The first way to explore the Castle is perhaps the most familiar. You may build spreads. Every room may hold a specific meaning. Every floor may represent a different layer of time. Towers may become aspirations or possible futures. Foundations may reveal hidden causes. Walls may stand for obstacles. Corridors may echo with memories of the past, while windows open onto possibilities yet unseen. The Castle becomes an architecture of meaning. Instead of laying out isolated cards, you are constructing a symbolic building. This delights me. One of the greatest gifts of a Myriorama deck is precisely this freedom. Every card connects to another. Every doorway invites another path. The reading is no longer confined to individual images but becomes a landscape through which the eye, and the imagination, can travel. Stories emerge naturally. Concepts begin to converse. Symbols illuminate one another. I cannot wait to see the remarkable structures you create. I shall build many of my own as well, experimenting with new layouts, assigning meanings to different wings of the Castle, allowing each floor to speak with a different voice, simply to discover where the architecture itself wishes to lead me.

Yet there is another possibility, one that fascinates me even more. You may abandon the architecture altogether. No predetermined positions. No fixed meanings. No strict sequence. Simply build. Lay room beside room. Tower beside chapel. Library beside courtyard. Allow the Castle to grow as though it were remembering itself. Then read it; not as a spread, but as a place. Walk through it. Pause before a doorway. Turn unexpectedly into another corridor. Return to a room you thought you had already understood. Just as we never experience a real castle in a perfectly linear fashion, perhaps a divinatory landscape should not always be explored in a straight line. Sometimes the most revealing discoveries occur when we take an unexpected turn.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus reminds. Meaning is often born not from fixed positions but from relationships, movement, and transformation.

Those familiar with Lenormand may discover yet another way of reading. Rather than asking what a position means, ask how the cards speak to one another. Choose a significator, a room that represents yourself, your question, or the heart of the matter. Then observe. Which rooms surround it? Which towers overlook it? Which symbols approach? Which retreat into the distance? What lies directly above, beneath, beside, or diagonally across?

Distance itself may become meaningful. Just as in the Grand Tableau, proximity suggests immediacy while remoteness hints at hidden influences, forgotten causes, or futures still unfolding. Clusters of symbols may begin to form narratives of their own. Entire wings of the Castle may resonate with a single emotional tone. Empty spaces may become as eloquent as occupied ones. The Castle is not merely arranged. It is inhabited. Meaning emerges from geography.

There is, perhaps, an even deeper lesson hidden within these walls. Tarot is often imagined as a tool for finding answers, but perhaps it is, first of all, an art of learning to ask better questions.

Carl Gustav Jung observed that “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”. Every reading is therefore less an act of predicting the future than one of illuminating the invisible architecture already shaping our choices. Perhaps destiny is not a fixed road waiting ahead. Perhaps it resembles this Castle, a place constantly rebuilt as we move through it. Every door we open changes the building. Every path we choose redraws its map. Every reading leaves behind a new corridor that did not exist before.

Italo Calvino once wrote that “The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand”… (Ah, The Invisible Cities! My favourite book ever written by Calvino! I keep coming back to it...it always inspires me)... I believe the same is true of the Castle. Its walls do not offer ready-made answers. They contain echoes, memories, possibilities, and questions waiting for someone willing to walk a little further.

So take your time. Do not hurry through its halls. Allow yourself to become lost now and then. The finest castles are never explored in a single visit, and neither are the richest tarot decks. Return to the same rooms months later. Rearrange them. Build new wings. Invent spreads no one has imagined before. Read freely. Read traditionally. Read as a storyteller, a philosopher, an explorer, or simply as someone willing to listen...

The Castle will always have another door waiting to be opened. And perhaps, if you listen carefully enough, you will discover that the greatest mystery hidden within its walls has never been your future.

It has always been yourself.

Welcome to the Castle

Andrea

We usually think a story begins with the first chapter, with the opening line, with the moment the words “once upon a time…” appear on the page. Yet not all stories begin in the same way. Some begin with “In ancient times and ages past…”, others with “Before the world became what it is today…”, or “There was, and there was not…”, or “Long ago and far away…”. Across cultures and traditions, storytelling has always been shaped by these coded openings, ritual phrases that signal a shift in reality, a passage from the ordinary into the symbolic, and a quiet announcement that time is about to behave differently.

A story needs a beginning just as it needs an ending. The final words, “The End”, appearing on the last frame of an old film, or “They lived happily ever after” at the conclusion of a fairy tale, tell us that the journey is complete. Every story requires its own ritual formulae. The incipit, the opening words, may be an invocation, an offering to the invisible forces of imagination. In ancient traditions, this was the call to the Muse, a plea to be guided in the telling, as Homer did when he invoked divine inspiration to sing of gods and heroes. In this sense, to begin a story is already to perform a small act of magic: a sequence of words that does not merely inform but transforms, shifting the axis of perception, bending time itself, often backwards, and carrying the listener away from the familiar into a distant land, a forgotten age, a place that may or may not exist.

These openings prepare us for something essential. They tell us, silently but firmly, that we are about to cross a boundary, and so we ready ourselves to receive what follows: events, beings, objects, and landscapes no longer bound by the logic of the everyday. We prepare ourselves to enter a space where what appears is often marvellous, sometimes unsettling, always extra-ordinary, that is to say beyond what we call ordinary reality. This is the threshold condition of storytelling. We must leave behind what we think we know about the world, loosen our grip on certainty, and become willing to enter a space where imagination is the only limit to what we can experience. Every myth, fairy tale, novel, and inner journey begins in this way, with words that beckon us towards departure, inviting us to step beyond the familiar and leave the known behind.

And thus, in truth, a story does not begin with words but with a crossing, a movement, a threshold.

But there is another threshold, once inside the narrative itself. Across human cultures, the beginning of a story is almost always marked by images of passage: doors, gates, bridges, forest paths, crossroads, rivers, and walls that can be crossed or must be crossed at great cost. Mythology is filled with these forms because the threshold is never only a place, but a moment, the fragile instant in which possibility becomes action, and imagination ceases to be abstract and begins to take form in lived experience. Most people imagine the adventure, but fewer step into it, because to cross a threshold is to accept transformation itself: to abandon stability in exchange for meaning, and to allow oneself to be altered by what cannot yet be known.

The threshold is never neutral. It is always charged. It is a point of tension between what has been and what is about to become, a space where identities are not yet fixed and reality is temporarily porous. This is why, in myth and story, thresholds are often guarded, enchanted, hidden, or feared, because they mark the exact place where the old world loses its authority and a new one begins to speak. To step across is never just movement through space. It is a crossing of states of being, a subtle but irreversible shift in perception.

This universal structure echoes in stories across traditions: Alice stepping through the looking glass into Wonderland, Dante entering the dark wood at the beginning of his journey, Dorothy carried away by a tornado from the flat certainty of Kansas into the impossible world of Oz. Each of these is not simply a narrative event, but a symbolic act of passage, a surrender of the familiar order in exchange for a reality governed by different laws. In each case, the threshold is not only external but internal as well. The moment the crossing occurs, something changes in consciousness, as though perception itself agrees to enter the story.

Thresholds are ubiquitous. They do not only exist in mythology or literature, but in lived experience. Every decision that alters the direction of a life is a threshold. Every moment of creative inspiration is a threshold. Every encounter with the unknown, whether in love, loss, discovery, or imagination, is a crossing from one state of self into another. The threshold is therefore not an exception to ordinary life, but its hidden structure. To stand before it is to feel hesitation, uncertainty, even fear, because what lies beyond cannot be fully imagined in advance. And yet it is precisely this not-knowing that gives the threshold its power. It asks for surrender rather than control, for openness rather than certainty. It is the point where identity becomes fluid again, where the story is not yet written but is already beginning to write itself through action.

In this sense, the threshold is not simply the doorway into the story but the mechanism by which story becomes possible at all. Without it, there is only stasis, repetition, and the closed circle of the known. With it, everything becomes movement, unfolding, and transformation.

And so we return to the deeper truth hidden in all storytelling traditions: a story does not begin when something happens, but when someone crosses. And that someone is, first and foremost, you, the reader.

When you begin shuffling a tarot deck, you, the reader, become the narrator of a story unfolding through the visual symbolism of the cards. If you read for yourself, you also become the main character of that story. But how does the story begin when using The Tarot of Crossed Destinies?

It does not begin with a question posed to the tarot, nor with a doubt, nor even with the first sentence of an inner dialogue with the cards. It begins with a threshold, of course. And this threshold takes the shape of a gate: the Gates of Magic.

Tarot boxes are usually just containers, simple vessels that hold the cards together, protect them from the world, and prevent them from scattering. They may be beautifully decorated with symbols, images, and intricate designs, but they remain, at their essence, boxes. I wanted something different. I wanted to go beyond the idea of a mere container. I wanted a symbol.

So I created a gate.

The infinite and ever-shifting architecture of esoterica that the card builds, the Castle, needs a physical as well as a symbolic gate: a threshold toward the unknown and magic itself, and, as we know, magic is a science of the imagination. It is a story-door, a symbolic opening towards a sacred place that is not located in space but in perception. It is like a Japanese torii gate standing in the middle of nowhere, silent, precise, almost suspended in reality. You do not need to know what lies beyond it; its presence alone announces that you are no longer in the ordinary world. It marks the passage between what is visible and the invisible that is about to reveal itself, between the known landscape and a reality that begins to shift as soon as you choose to step through.

And so the story begins not with a question, but with an entry.

The Gate of the Castle is like the wardrobe leading to Narnia, a magic door waiting to be opened. A door of thick wood and iron, forged with twisting vines that entangle its surface, framing a series of open eyes staring at you with intensity, with attention. “Do you dare to open me?”, it seems to whisper.

The door has no lock. No key can open it. Only your will to enter.

And when you do open it, when you move beyond the threshold, you see the barefoot traces of someone who has walked this path before you. If you follow them, you realise they lead towards the opposite side of a narrow vestibule, where the gate becomes an archway opening into a dark, thick, and mysterious forest.

It is the illustration I created to represent The Fool. Another symbol, another reference, another metaphor. We cannot begin any new adventure without embodying the Fool. We must transform ourselves and become the Fool entering the Castle. We must leave behind our old self and be ready to discover, or even build, a new one, forged through the experience of the journey itself.

The destination is not a place. It is the journey itself.

We cannot grow, change, or experience ourselves fully without giving ourselves unconditionally to the adventure, to the exploration of something that lies beyond our safe and comfortable zone. We must cross the chasm, even when we do not see a bridge. It is a leap. A leap of faith in our destiny, in ourselves, in our ideas, in our dreams, in whatever brings us here, standing before the Gate.

What happens when the Fool enters?

When we enter the deck, when we live it, explore it, feel it, the images begin to become narratives. The Castle represents imagination, memory, symbols, stories, and the unknown self. Once the threshold is crossed, rooms appear. Characters emerge. Stories intersect. Choices become consequences. Possibilities become destinies.

The Castle only becomes alive because somebody has entered it, because you have opened the Gates of Magic and crossed the threshold. What it becomes from that moment onward is entirely in your hands, shaped by your choices and by the power of your imagination. Let the rooms speak to you. Let them envelop you. Let them be. And the story, your stories, will unfold.

The Gate contains many other images, symbols, ideas, and mysteries to explore and decode, but I will leave that to you.

Only one final note.

Its back shows a peculiar illustration depicting a hot-air balloon leaving a room so vast that it contains an entire world, floating towards the dawn of a new day rising over a golden-domed city of radiant buildings with majestic façades. It is an image full of meaning. I used it here, and also to open the book of magic accompanying the deck. I leave you to explore its many layers.

I would like to draw your attention to a smaller detail: two seagulls flying, gliding through the vibrant sky. This is a reference to one of my favourite quotes by Calvino, whose work deeply inspired me:

“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.”

Feathers can only float for a moment, carried by a gust of wind. They are passive, moved by external forces. But a bird… ah, a bird can fly. It is free to go wherever it wishes. It is active, moved by will, and the power of its wings carries it in the direction of its own dream.

Till the next time,

May magic always be with you

Andrea

I have always been fond of automata and mechanical devices, especially those that come from ancient times. When I opened the door, I cannot say I was disappointed, but I was certainly surprised.

In front of me, a little dragon was flying around, beating its membranous bat-like wings. How fascinating, how spectacular. It fluttered here and there like an oversized insect, occasionally spitting tiny bursts of fire onto the stone floor. A baby dragon having a tantrum.

I was not afraid. During my long stay within the walls of the Castle, I had learned that this Fortress of Esoterica never harms you, never hurts you. When my attention moved away from the fantastic creature, I began examining the room itself.

At first glance it looked like a cabinet of curiosities. No, I must correct myself. It looked more like a hunting lodge. Trophies, sad and unsettling, hung from the walls. Skulls of strange animals, perhaps other fantastic beasts, perhaps creatures of myth. I could not say to whom those yellowed bones had once belonged. Stuffed animals stood frozen in time. Colourful birds. A hydra, easy enough to recognise. An aurochs, the gigantic wild bull of prehistoric Europe. Even a particularly grumpy-looking fish. On the floor lay something even sadder. The skin of a bear.

I have never liked hunting. I have always found it cruel, unfair. There is no pleasure in killing, at least not for me. I prefer taming. I have always been attracted to animals. When I was a child, I tried to tame every bird that landed on my balcony. I spoke with every dog and cat that crossed my path, much to the despair of my mother, who jokingly began calling me Saint Francis because of my conducting long and very serious conversations with animals… Anyway, that was a long time ago. Yet I never lost the habit of speaking to animals, asking them questions, attempting conversations as if they might one day answer.

I observed the room in silence, well, apart from the constant flap, flap, flap produced by the little dragon, trying to understand inside which Tarot card I had found myself.

Then came a moment of epiphany.

Strength.

I smiled.

I almost shouted with happiness.

This was a challenging room. A challenging hall for an even more challenging card.

Strength is one of the virtues most discussed in ancient philosophy. The Greeks called it andreia, courage; the Romans transformed it into fortitudo, a word that contains not only bravery but endurance, steadfastness, the capacity to remain standing when every force around you is trying to make you fall. I have always been fascinated by the Stoics and their image of the wise person as a rock in the middle of a raging river. The current crashes against it, foams around it, screams its fury, yet the rock remains. Not because it is stronger than the water, but because it refuses to become what the water wants it to be.

Yet the Strength card speaks of a very different kind of strength from the one we usually celebrate. When we think of strength, we often imagine Heracles: the hero who strangles serpents in his cradle, who wrestles lions, who performs impossible labours through sheer force of will and muscle. This is the strength of conquest, of domination, of overcoming resistance through power.

The woman in the Tarot card offers another vision entirely. She does not defeat the lion. She does not kill it. She does not even subdue it through violence. Instead, she places her hands upon the beast and enters into a relationship with it. The lion remains a lion. The danger remains present. The teeth are still sharp. Yet something extraordinary happens: force gives way to trust. The animal is not broken; it is transformed through contact.

This is why the card is so psychologically profound. It suggests that the greatest battles are not fought against external enemies, but within ourselves. The lion is rage, fear, trauma, resentment, instinct, desire, the wounds that refuse to heal. The strongest person is not necessarily the one who can dominate others, but the one who can remain present in front of their own inner beast without fleeing from it and without becoming it.

The Stoics understood this. For them, strength was not aggression but self-mastery. It was the ability to remain faithful to one’s principles when circumstances invited compromise; to preserve one’s humanity when suffering encouraged bitterness; to choose dignity when humiliation seemed easier. The truly strong person was not the one who shouted the loudest, but the one who could endure without surrendering their integrity.

This is a difficult idea because it overturns so many of our assumptions. Physical strength can break a body. Moral strength can break a cycle. Physical strength can impose obedience. Moral strength can create freedom. One conquers an opponent; the other transforms a life.

But when I think about Strength, I see my childhood. My traumas. The Monster. My father, himself a victim of his own parents, was unable to break the cycle of psychological violence. I loved him and I hated him. Deeply, both emotions. He wanted to represent strength, to embody it. For him, it was what today we call toxic masculinity.

He was wrapped in the idea that a real man is monolithic, a rock, but not the rock of the Stoics. I wish it had been that kind of rock. No, this was the dull rock, without marks, impenetrable, dark, opaque to every scrutiny. Impossible to chisel. Boring. Useless. A stone standing firmly in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing. Not supporting a structure. Not making a space more beautiful, like a statue would. Just there, like a boulder in the middle of the road. Annoyingly there.

The man who never cries, who never shows emotion, who never says “I love you” or “I miss you”. The father who must be feared and obeyed.

We never had a relationship built on trust, affection, or even respect. Growing up, I clashed with him tremendously. Furiously. Rejecting everything he stood for. It was a constant war.

I refused to bow my head. I answered back.

The more he tried to subdue me, the more I fought.

I wish that instead of trying to destroy each other we had sat around a round table. It really was round. Ah, King Arthur would have loved our round-table discussions. I wish we had talked honestly. But I was a teenager then, lacking the wisdom and peace I possess now.

What is done is done.

The rift was never bridged, even though we occasionally tried. In old age, he worsened. He became increasingly abusive, verbally and psychologically. He ended up representing everything I do not want to be, everything I reject.

One night my brother called me. It was during Covid. I had just received my vaccination and was lying in bed with a particularly unpleasant fever. “Father passed away. I just received the call from the hospital.”

We spoke for a while.

When I ended the call, I felt relieved.

“He could not hurt us anymore.” I thought.

The wrong idea of strength had finally disappeared. The strength of a panzer crushing everything in its path. The belief that being strong means being aggressive, that it means being an alpha male, like a chimpanzee asserting dominance over the troop. In my case, over his family.

Maybe this is why I have always refused physical confrontation. Any competitive sport. Any sport involving physical contact. My refusal is practically absolute.

This card is difficult for me.

I decided to speak without a veil. Honestly, it is as liberating as it is frightening. I have never shared these thoughts in this way. I have never written about them before, never like this, at least. And still, while writing and correcting, a part of me would like to delete strong sentences, to change the tone… It requires strength to do it. There is a strange reticence to opening up like that, an inner voice that asks me not to speak, a part of my soul that feels ashamed of everything, that feels guilty for everything.

I have had to, and I constantly have to, rationalise this urge while writing, to rationalise the feeling of guilt for actions that never depended on me. I understand why it is so incredibly difficult to break the cycle of domestic violence. One side of us, as “victims” (how I hate this word!), keeps feeling responsible for everything: “If only I had been silent”, “If I had obeyed”, “If I had pretended that everything was fine”… or worst “he will change”, “yet, he love me….”

There is a heavier part of the soul that feels unworthy of anything other than that violence. A voice that, at that time, was counterbalancing the rebellious part of me, but not in a kind way. A voice that urged me to be quieter, to accept that every slap was deserved, that was still searching for affection, love, recognition from a father who was, I see now, still living inside the same cage he forced us into. He never broke the cycle.

The psychology of victims of abuse carries this horrible burden: a constant feeling of guilt, and worse, the belief of deserving everything that happened. It is a very tough thought to confront.

But I am sure I needed to write everything I did. Especially today, when we live in a society still afflicted by the consequences of a distorted idea of manhood: toxic masculinity, patriarchy, the abuses of the domestic tyrant, the endless performance of the alpha gorilla.

But there is the other side of the coin.

The strength of those who endure this violence. The children. The women. Those who are different and are abused because of that difference. Gay people. Trans people. Autistic people. Those with physical differences. They, we, are often the first to pay the price.

And then I think again about Strength, our card, and how it speaks of the resilience of women who must protect their children from the violence of their husbands. The silence. The courage. The endless endurance of abuse. The immense strength required to break free, to report, to denounce, to save.

Strength is a heavy card.

In many readings I have witnessed, and in many discussions I have watched online, it is transformed into something Disney-like. Sugar-coated. Plastified. Beautified. Emptied of its dramatic content. Emptied of the immense burden involved in being strong, in enduring, or in breaking apart what must be undone, dismantled, destroyed.

This card speaks to everyone who must break a chain so heavy that lifting it even for a moment seems impossible.

This is a dramatic card that speaks of dramatic action in the here and now of everyday life.

When I drew this card, I had an idea that I did not fully understand, but I felt it was the right one: the hunting lodge filled with the skulls of mighty beasts and the living, fire-breathing dragon.

Why the dragon?

Only now, while writing these words, do I begin to understand.

The dragon in the room, that baby dragon, is like a bird in a cage. It is a metaphor for what I lived. But also a universal metaphor for anyone trapped in a situation of abuse, violence, or profound injustice. A situation requiring immense courage and immense strength to escape.

This card does not say:

“Look at me. I am strong. I have fortitude. I am Strength.”

It says:

“Look at yourself. You are stronger than you think. One day you will discover it. Have faith. Believe in yourself. Free your strength.”

I want to close this painful text with a story that has always inspired me. It inspired me for the first time when I was a teenager. A story of immense strength, one to which I return whenever life becomes difficult...

...I imagine her as an old woman with a gentle face and a tired smile. Eyes filled with sadness. Filled with that quiet resignation that settles in the soul when one grows tired of fighting.

She was waiting at a bus stop. I do not know for how long. I like to imagine one of those afternoons that never seem to pass quickly enough. She was tired after a long day of work. She was more than tired, she was exhausted. The bus finally arrived with a hiss.

The doors opened.

She stepped inside.

She paid her fare.

At the back of the bus, all the seats were occupied. A few remained free at the front. But she was not supposed to sit there. Those seats were reserved for white people. Her skin was a different colour. She was a Black woman. She took one of the forbidden seats. And she stayed there. She refused to move. The police were called.

Her name was Rosa Parks.

With that simple gesture, with that refusal, she ignited a fire that helped change the world.

I often think about what it must have cost her. The internal struggle. The doubts. The fear.

But she had simply had enough.

She sat down.

It was a heroic act because she did what was right, refusing an injustice, fully aware that she might have to pay the price for that refusal.

I have always loved her.

I have always admired her.

This is what the card is talking about.

Until next time, with my best wishes to find your own strength...

Andrea

Corridors, first of all, are perhaps the most honest image we have for thought in motion. We often imagine thinking as linear, almost mechanical; one idea following another in orderly progression. Yet lived consciousness rarely behaves like that. It drifts, detours, doubles back, is interrupted by sensation, memory, emotion, and sudden, inexplicable associations. The Castle’s corridors embody this process. They are not neutral passages, but fields of relation, where one space secretly remembers another. A corridor that begins in clarity may end in confusion; another that seems ordinary may suddenly widen into something vast, almost infinite, as if it had been waiting for the right internal state to reveal itself.

This is close to what cognitive anthropology suggests when it describes human thought as fundamentally situated and embodied: we do not think as disembodied logic engines, but as beings moving through environments, both external and internal. Our cognition is spatial because our experience is spatial. We remember in places, we imagine in landscapes, we orient meaning through relational position. The Castle externalises this truth. Its corridors are not simply architectural features; they are the visible form of association itself.

Yet there is perhaps something even deeper at work. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that consciousness is never detached from the world but always immersed within it, woven into a fabric of perception that precedes abstract thought. We do not first think and then inhabit space. We inhabit space, and from that inhabitation thought emerges. The Castle gives symbolic form to this insight. Its architecture is not constructed by thought after the fact; it is the very condition through which thought becomes navigable. To walk through its corridors is to witness consciousness becoming aware of its own movement.

This may explain why labyrinths and palaces appear so frequently in mythology, religion, and literature. They are not merely settings for stories. They are models of the way human beings encounter meaning. The ancient pilgrim winding through a sacred maze, the hero descending into an underworld, the seeker wandering through a magical city, all are participating in a symbolic grammar that equates knowledge with movement. To know something deeply is not simply to possess information about it. It is to have travelled through it, to have become changed by the journey.

The Castle therefore resists the modern fantasy that the mind is a machine. Machines process. Castles remember. Machines execute instructions. Castles accumulate histories. Every room contains traces of previous visitors, interpretations, previous selves. In this sense the Castle is closer to memory than to intellect. It resembles what Carl Gustav Jung described as the psyche: not a single, unified structure, but a layered landscape populated by forgotten contents, recurring symbols, hidden passages, and autonomous figures that seem to possess lives of their own.

Italo Calvino was fascinated by this displacement of thought into space with extraordinary precision. In Invisible Cities, he writes: “Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist”. Memory, in Calvino’s sense, is not storage but structure, an architecture that persists through repetition and variation. The Castle behaves in the same way. Each return through its corridors is a variation within a pattern that is slowly revealing itself. As Calvino also writes, “The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand”. The same could be said of the Castle: it does not narrate the mind, it contains it.

And perhaps this is why the Castle continues to expand. Every genuine encounter with a new idea creates another room. Every memory rediscovered opens a forgotten door. Every contradiction generates a hidden staircase between levels that once seemed unrelated. The architecture grows because consciousness grows. It is never finished because the self is never finished.

To explore the Castle, then, is not simply to wander through an imaginary structure. It is to engage with a particular philosophy of mind, one that understands consciousness as a living architecture of relations. We do not stand outside this architecture and observe it. We inhabit it. We are among its rooms, its corridors, its towers and hidden chambers. The Castle is not merely a representation of thought. It is what thought feels like from the inside.

If corridors are association, then locked rooms are what association cannot freely access.

Every Castle contains such spaces. Some are deliberately sealed, others forgotten, others so quietly avoided that their absence becomes a presence in itself. Psychologically, these rooms correspond to repression, not understood simplistically as “removal”, but as structural exclusion.Freud described repression as the necessary condition of consciousness: what cannot be held in awareness is not destroyed, but displaced into another region of psychic life, where it continues to act indirectly. Jung deepened this idea, suggesting that what is excluded becomes the shadow, a living psychic counterpart that resists integration yet constantly seeks expression.

In the Castle, this becomes architectural reality. A locked door is never just a door. It is an area of the psyche that cannot yet be entered without destabilising the structure that surrounds it. And yet, paradoxically, its influence is everywhere. One corridor feels colder near it. Another bends away from it. Certain rooms seem to forget what lies in that direction. The Castle organises itself around its exclusions, as if absence were also a form of structure.

This intuition reaches beyond psychology and into philosophy itself. We often imagine knowledge as an accumulation of what is known, yet many thinkers have suggested that identity is shaped just as profoundly by what remains inaccessible. Every worldview contains blind spots. Every system of thought defines itself through boundaries as much as through content. The locked room reminds us that consciousness is not a transparent chamber illuminated from within. It is a selective architecture, constantly deciding what may enter and what must remain behind the door.

Here Borges becomes almost unavoidable. In his story The Library of Babel, he writes of an infinite library containing every possible book:“Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library”. But this totality is not liberating; it is overwhelming precisely because meaning becomes buried in excess. The locked rooms of the Castle are not infinite like Borges’ library, but they operate on a similar principle; what is hidden is submerged in a field of overwhelming psychic density.

Elsewhere, Borges repeatedly returns to the idea that every closed space conceals another space behind it. In The Aleph, a single point contains all points. In The Garden of Forking Paths, every decision opens into a labyrinth of alternative realities. His fictions suggest that mystery is not the exception within reality, but one of its fundamental conditions. The Castle’s locked rooms participate in this Borgesian logic. Behind every sealed door lies not merely undiscovered content, but the possibility that the architecture itself may be larger than we imagined.

Calvino approaches the same mystery from another direction. In Invisible Cities, the places described by Marco Polo often appear less like geographical locations than states of consciousness. Each city reveals something about memory, desire, language, or loss. They are not destinations but ways of seeing. The Castle’s hidden rooms function similarly. They are not simply locations waiting to be explored. They alter the meaning of the entire structure around them. A city, for Calvino, is defined as much by its invisible relationships as by its visible streets. The same is true of the Castle. What cannot be entered still shapes the experience of what can.

Anthropology offers a parallel insight here as well. In many traditional cultures, architecture is never merely functional. Houses, temples, and sacred enclosures often encode cosmological or psychological order. The structure of space becomes a diagram of the unseen world. The Castle continues this archaic function. It is not only a private mind-space; it is also a symbolic cosmology, where interiority and world mirror each other. What is “inside” is never only personal; it is also archetypal.

Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher whose work explored the relationship between imagination, memory, and inhabited space, observed in The Poetics of Space that houses become repositories of dreaming. Cellars, attics, staircases, cupboards, and hidden corners acquire a psychological reality that exceeds their practical function. We do not merely inhabit spaces; spaces inhabit us. The Castle extends this principle to the entire landscape of consciousness. Every chamber possesses both an architectural and a symbolic life. Every threshold is also a threshold of meaning.

This is why Tarot feels so naturally at home in the Castle.

A Tarot spread is not a reading of fixed symbols, but a temporary architecture of meaning. Each card behaves like a room whose significance shifts depending on what it is connected to. One image illuminates another; one position transforms the emotional temperature of the whole structure. The spread becomes a living building of correspondences, not unlike what Renaissance thinkers once called the theatrum memoriae, the theatre of memory, where thought itself was staged spatially in order to become intelligible.

The memory theatres of Giulio Camillo, the Renaissance philosopher and visionary who dreamed to create a physical architecture capable of containing the entirety of human knowledge, were founded on a remarkable premise: that wisdom could be organised spatially and walked through rather than merely studied. The Castle inherits something of that Renaissance dream. It proposes that meaning is not a collection of isolated ideas, but a landscape of relationships through which one travels.

In this sense, the Castle is not an invention. It is a recognition.

We are not describing how imagination works. We are noticing that imagination already works this way.

Even perception itself seems to follow architectural logic. Neuroscience today increasingly describes cognition in terms of networks, pathways, and relational activation rather than linear processing. But long before this language, symbolic cultures already intuited that consciousness is structural. What we now call “mind” was once imagined as palace, labyrinth, garden, temple, library, and city.

The Castle belongs to this lineage of symbolic cognition. It is what remains when we stop treating thought as abstraction and begin to experience it as inhabited space.

And in that space, nothing is ever truly closed. Even locked rooms continue to speak through atmosphere, repetition, intuition, symbolic return, and the subtle pressure of what has not yet been acknowledged. They are not endpoints, but invitations delayed in time.

Perhaps, this is why the Castle never becomes familiar in the way physical places do.

It does not stabilise.

It reveals.

And every time I enter it again, I realise the same unsettling thing; I am walking through a structure that is still thinking me.

My dear readers and fellow explorers,
may Magic always be with you

to the next week
Andrea

Every time I return to it, I find myself as if I were exploring a different Castle, even if nothing within it has truly changed. The same corridors unfold beneath my steps. The same staircases climb toward silent towers. The same dust rests upon forgotten furniture. The same windows open onto landscapes suspended somewhere between dream and memory. And yet the meaning of these spaces changes continuously, as though the Castle were not an architecture made of stone but an architecture built from perceptions, illusions, mirages… Is it a hall of distorting mirrors? This is an unsettling thought that sometimes, I have to be honest, emerges in my mind, leaving me uneasy. When this happens I keep repeating to myself that I cannot doubt the Castle… it has always been kind, even when I was not able to understand, at first, what it was doing. It never plays with my mind… even if it uses many tricks to make me understand what it thought I needed to understand. The Castle is not exactly… democratic. It is more like a tyrant… but perhaps a wise one.

A room that once appeared welcoming suddenly feels oppressive. A corridor once filled with unease acquires an unexpected melancholy. Certain chambers seem to grow larger or smaller according to invisible emotional tides. Sometimes the Castle feels ancient and sacred, like a monastery abandoned by time. Other times it resembles a prison, a labyrinth. At times I feel I am inside a dream slowly forgetting the dreamer who imagined it.

It took me a long time to understand that what was changing was not the Castle itself, but my relationship to it. The Castle was not rearranging its rooms. It was rearranging… me. Or perhaps, more precisely, it was allowing me to perceive the hidden architecture through which my own consciousness continuously rearranges reality.

This idea began to haunt me gradually, like one of those intuitions that first appears almost accidentally, then slowly expands until it begins to illuminate everything around it. I started wondering whether the Castle could be understood as a symbolic model of the mind itself. Not simply as a metaphor for imagination in a generic sense, but as something far more intimate and structurally profound: an image of consciousness wandering through its own invisible architecture.

Human beings have always instinctively imagined thought spatially. We speak of “mental blocks”, “inner chambers”, “deep memories”, “levels” of understanding, “corridors” of thought. Even memory itself has historically been conceived architecturally. The ancient ars memoriae, the art of memory practised by Greek and Roman rhetoricians, relied on the construction of imaginary buildings within which thoughts, concepts, and memories could be placed and later retrieved. To remember something was to walk mentally through a structure populated by symbolic images. A technique I always found incredibly fascinating, even if I never experimented with it myself… and now I find myself living it, exploring the Castle.

At first glance this may appear merely as an ingenious mnemonic technique. But perhaps it reveals something more fundamental. Perhaps the human mind naturally organises experience spatially because consciousness itself behaves architecturally. We do not think in straight lines nearly as much as we pretend to.

Rational language gives us the illusion of linearity, of orderly sequences moving from premise to conclusion. Yet beneath language thought moves differently. One image unexpectedly evokes another. A smell opens an entire forgotten decade. Does it sound familiar? Do you remember the point of origin of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)? Proust, at home in Combray, dips a madeleine into tea, and suddenly an unexpected flood of memories rises within him like a wave. From that small sensory moment, the entire vast architecture of the novel unfolds… A sound becomes grief. A room becomes childhood. A face glimpsed in the street awakens an emotion whose origin remains inaccessible. Thought proceeds associatively, symbolically, emotionally. It folds back upon itself. It creates hidden passages between apparently unrelated things.

Dreams reveal this truth mercilessly.

In dreams we move through impossible architectures with complete naturalness. Endless corridors. Houses larger inside than outside. Underground chambers hidden beneath familiar homes. Staircases leading nowhere. Doors opening into childhood memories, future fears, places we have never visited and yet somehow recognise. The logic governing dreams is not rational but symbolic. Spaces transform according to emotional resonance rather than physical laws. One room becomes another because some invisible affinity links them beneath conscious understanding.

Perhaps this is why so many writers and philosophers instinctively turned toward labyrinths, libraries, and impossible architectures when attempting to describe consciousness.

Jorge Luis Borges created his narrative universe around these concepts. His stories are populated by infinite libraries, branching labyrinths, circular ruins, books that contain all books, mirrors multiplying reality into endless reflections. These were never merely literary inventions. Borges understood that the mind itself behaves labyrinthically. Consciousness is not a stable room illuminated by reason, but a structure of infinite corridors where symbols endlessly generate further symbols.

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”, Borges wrote. But Borges’ libraries are terrifying precisely because they exceed human orientation. They contain too much meaning. Too many possible paths. The labyrinth becomes both knowledge and bewilderment simultaneously.

The Castle belongs to this same territory.

Like Borges’ labyrinths, it seems to contain more rooms than should logically exist. It expands inwardly. Certain corridors return to places they should not reach. Some rooms appear only under particular emotional conditions. Others remain inaccessible despite repeated attempts to find them. The Castle behaves like memory itself: selective, unstable, recursive, haunted by repetitions and omissions.

This is also why I began thinking about Tarot differently.

A Tarot spread is not simply a sequence of images laid flat upon a table. It resembles a temporary architecture assembled from symbols. Every card becomes a chamber connected invisibly to the others through emotional and symbolic relationships. Meaning emerges less from isolated cards than from the tensions and resonances between them. One image alters another. One symbol illuminates a hidden passage inside a neighbouring card. The reading unfolds less like an argument and more like an exploration.

Perhaps this is why Tarot often feels uncannily alive. The cards do not behave like static illustrations. They behave like rooms within a structure of meaning continuously rearranging itself according to the consciousness moving through it.

Italo Calvino sensed something similar in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, where stories emerge through combinations of Tarot cards arranged upon a table by travellers who can no longer speak. What fascinated me most about Calvino was never simply the literary experiment itself, but the deeper intuition beneath it: that images think.

Or perhaps, more precisely, that thought itself is partly made of images.

“The Tarot”, Calvino wrote, “is a machine for constructing stories”. But the more I reflect upon this sentence, the more I suspect that consciousness itself operates similarly. Human beings continuously arrange fragments of memory, emotion, fear, desire, and symbol into provisional narratives capable of giving shape to experience. We are storytelling creatures not because stories entertain us, but because narrative is one of the primary ways consciousness attempts to orient itself within chaos.

The Castle becomes, in this sense, not merely a fictional place, but an image of the psyche attempting to navigate itself.

And like every psyche, the Castle possesses subterranean regions.

Beneath its visible rooms lies another architecture entirely: buried chambers, flooded crypts, sealed archives, forgotten catacombs extending beneath the foundations into darkness. Every ancient structure eventually develops an underground mythology. The hidden chamber no one speaks about. The corridor sealed generations ago. The room beneath the room.

These spaces immediately evoke the unconscious.

Freud imagined the unconscious archaeologically, as something buried beneath civilisation and repression. Jung expanded this vision further, describing the psyche as a living symbolic territory populated by archetypes older than the individual self. In Jung’s vision, the unconscious was not merely a repository of personal trauma, but a vast collective landscape inhabited by primordial images continuously shaping human perception from beneath awareness. Jung, like Plato, belongs to that narrow circle of thinkers whose visions are more lyrical and poetic than cold and logical. Maybe this is why I keep returning to them… or perhaps why they keep returning to me. It depends on the perspective from which one observes the encounter.

The Castle’s underground chambers contain both dimensions simultaneously. Here reside forgotten memories, unresolved griefs, childhood fears, abandoned identities, ancestral residues, dreams that never completely disappeared. These chambers may contain treasures or monsters, revelations or terrors. Often they contain all these things intertwined so deeply they become impossible to separate.

Like Frankenstein’s creature, what is hidden is not necessarily evil, yet it is often condemned as monstrous simply because it emerges from darkness. The real monster in Mary Shelley’s novel is not the creature itself, but the inability to recognise humanity within what appears unfamiliar or frightening. Are we all monsters? I think we all possess a shadow. A dark side. We are Faust and Mephistopheles at the same time.

Like dreams, these rooms rarely communicate directly. They speak through atmospheres, distortions, symbols. A corridor flooding slowly with black water. A locked archive containing unreadable books. A child standing silently inside an abandoned room. The unconscious communicates poetically because symbolic language allows contradictions to coexist without resolution.

Tarot enters these subterranean regions carrying a small lantern.

Not to abolish darkness, but to illuminate fragments of it temporarily.

This is why certain cards return obsessively in readings. They behave like messengers emerging repeatedly from hidden chambers demanding recognition. The psyche repeats symbols whenever something unresolved continues moving beneath consciousness…

And then there are the mirrors.

Every Castle contains mirrors, but mirrors are never innocent.

In myths, dreams, Gothic tales, and esoteric traditions, mirrors rarely function as simple reflective surfaces. They distort. Reveal. Multiply. Conceal. They expose dimensions invisible to ordinary sight. Sometimes they show not who we are, but who we might become, or who we once were before forgetting ourselves.

Alice enters another world by passing through a mirror… it is not accidental. In the world behind the mirror everything is inverted. And Alice notices this immediately. When she sees a bottle of milk, she asks herself pensively: “I wonder if the looking-glass milk is the same as the real milk”.

When I was studying philosophy of language, I remember a sunny afternoon in the classroom discussing with my colleagues and my professor the meaning of this little statement and all its philosophical implications. We spent a long afternoon talking about logic and language, starting from sentences taken from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass…

The mirrors within the Castle resemble self-perception itself: unstable, fragmented, perpetually shifting.

Jacques Lacan believed that identity emerges through a mirror illusion. The self first appears as an image: coherent externally, fragmented internally. Perhaps this is why self-knowledge remains perpetually incomplete. We never fully encounter ourselves directly. We perceive ourselves through reflections, narratives, memories, projections, symbolic constructions.

The Castle understands this instinctively.

Its mirrors may reflect younger versions of ourselves, unrealised possibilities, emotional truths we carefully avoid in ordinary life. They reveal the unsettling instability beneath identity itself. The recognition that the self is not fixed, but continuously rearranged by memory, imagination, fear, and desire.

Tarot functions similarly.

Every reading becomes an encounter with symbolic mirrors. The cards do not simply predict events; they reflect hidden psychological structures already active within us. They reveal contradictions that the rational mind struggles to articulate directly. They expose invisible tensions shaping perception from beneath awareness.

Sometimes what they reveal feels disturbingly intimate, as though the cards had discovered a hidden room within us before we ourselves became aware of its existence.

Perhaps this is why the Castle continues haunting me.

Because every time I walk through its corridors, I increasingly suspect I am not exploring a fictional place at all… I am exploring my own mind. Myself… seeing the dark places I pretend do not exist…

I am wandering through the invisible architecture through which consciousness continuously constructs the experience I call reality.

Next week we will continue with Part II.

Stay tuned.

May Magic always be with you.

Andrea

Magic resembles a crystal of impossible complexity. Each of us sees only a few facets at once, illuminated by the angle from which we stand. Others help us perceive what lies beyond our view. Through their thoughts, their questions and their imagination, new faces of the crystal slowly turn towards the light. What once seemed solid and complete reveals itself as something vast, multifaceted and alive.

The desire to create a place where this exchange could happen has lived with me for many years. That desire became The Discombobulator; The Esoteric Magazine of the Unseen and the Unexpected. Bringing it into existence has been a demanding journey: curating content, creating illustrations, searching for images, editing, printing, organising distribution. Every issue asks for time, energy and devotion. And yet none of this effort feels heavy. What I never expected was the extraordinary constellation of minds that would gather around the project. Each collaboration has opened doors I did not know existed. The magazine has expanded my horizon towards landscapes I had never imagined.

With every conversation, with every reader and contributor, new ideas begin to form. The magazine is slowly becoming an imaginarium of esoterica, something that feels as if it has started to grow a life of its own. While working on Volume N.1, it became clear that the richness of the content could not remain confined within the quiet boundaries of printed pages. The conversations behind the articles often carry a magic of their own: spontaneous, deep and generous exchanges that deserve to be shared.

This realisation led to an experiment. For the first time, this issue opens doors into other media. Three articles were chosen for this small alchemical transformation. Among them is the piece by Janet Piedilato, a profound journey into dreams, storytelling and the porous frontier between the mystical and everyday life. Her work evokes the ancient figure of Scheherazade, the storyteller who understood that stories themselves can be bridges between worlds.

According to legend, the king Shahryar, betrayed and wounded by grief, had fallen into a terrible vow. Each night he would marry a new bride, and at dawn she would be executed, as though repetition could protect him from betrayal. Fear settled over the kingdom. No family wished to offer their daughter to such a fate.

Scheherazade chose to step forward. She did not carry weapons or arguments. She carried stories. On the night of her wedding, she began to tell a tale so captivating that when dawn approached, she stopped at the most suspenseful moment. The king, eager to hear the ending, allowed her to live one more day. The following night, the story continued, unfolding into another and then another, each one opening the door to the next.

Night after night, story after story, the chain continued. One thousand and one nights passed in this suspended dawn. Through imagination, wonder and narrative, Scheherazade slowly transformed the heart of the king. By the time the final story ended, the vow of death had dissolved. The storyteller had saved not only her own life, but the life of countless others.

Stories became a bridge between fear and understanding, between isolation and connection. And perhaps this is why dreams and storytelling feel so closely related: both open passages between different worlds, between what we know and what we have yet to discover.

It is such an extraordinary article that I wanted not only to accompany it with a series of special illustrations, images able to capture the magic of the night as the space of storytelling, both waking and dreaming, but to add something more. While speaking with Janet, I discovered our shared love for Islamic storytelling, art and culture. From Scheherazade to Sufism, the leap felt immediate and natural. When I asked whether she had ever seen Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul, directed by Nacer Khemir in 2005, she almost shouted with joy. We realised that we not only admired the film, but that it is one of our favourites.

The film unfolds like a tale whispered by the desert itself. An old dervish, Bab’Aziz, travels across the vast sands with his granddaughter Ishtar. They are searching for a great gathering of dervishes that takes place only once every thirty years. Bab’Aziz is blind, yet he walks with certainty, guided by an inner vision that surpasses sight. Along the journey, they encounter travellers, mystics and storytellers, each sharing fragments of stories within stories, until the desert becomes a tapestry of parables woven together.

The narrative does not move like a conventional plot. It drifts, circles and unfolds like a dream. Encounters appear and dissolve. Meanings emerge through poetry, music and silence. The destination matters less than the transformation that occurs along the way.

This is why the film feels so deeply connected to the idea of magic as a science of the imagination. It reminds us that imagination is not escapism but a mode of knowledge. Through story, symbol and image, it reveals truths that logic alone cannot reach. Like dreams, like myths, like the tales of Scheherazade, it shows that imagination can guide us through the desert of uncertainty towards an inner place of recognition.

Thus, I decided to “connect” the soundtrack of the film to the article via a QR code. It becomes a truly mystical experience to read Janet’s words while listening to that incredibly evocative music. I am very curious to know what you think about it, and if you have seen, or will see, the film in the future, please do share your thoughts; I would be delighted to hear them. I will not speak about the other two articles with multimedia content. I will leave you the pleasure of discovering them.

Every article carries a story that extends far beyond the borders of the printed page. To allow these ideas to breathe, move and truly reach their readers, I decided to expand the magazine into a series of online live events. These gatherings will be spaces where stories can unfold in real time, where questions can arise naturally and where ideas can be shared directly between creators and readers. Most importantly, they will allow conversation. Readers will be able to ask questions, respond, challenge and explore the themes of each issue together with the authors and artists.

This live dimension feels essential. Written words can inspire reflection, but dialogue creates a living exchange. It allows curiosity to guide the discussion, unexpected questions to open new paths, and shared enthusiasm to generate fresh insights that could never emerge in isolation.

This vision resonates strongly with Plato, who believed that knowledge and philosophy are fundamentally dialogic. His works take the form of conversations because, for him, truth evolves through a continuous process of asking and answering, of minds meeting and refining ideas together. Understanding grows not as a monologue, but as a shared journey.

The first event has already been scheduled, and it marks an important step forward. If you would like to know more, please follow my social media channels, where I will share updates and announcements as the programme develops.

This new chapter excites me deeply. Watching the magazine, its ideas and the world slowly forming around it attract more and more interest is both humbling and inspiring. It feels like the beginning of a much larger adventure. I already have many ideas to make it even more audacious, experimental, profound, entertaining and visionary.

But this volume has even more to offer. For the first time, I have managed to bring together a series of articles orbiting the same theme, each approached from a completely different angle. Three pieces, in particular, explore the relationship between landscape and tarot: the landscape as it appears within the cards, but also the landscape we inhabit every day, the space that shapes our perception and is shaped by it in return.

If we return to the metaphor of the crystal, each contribution catches the light from a different facet. No single perspective is complete on its own, but together they begin to form a more complex and living geometry of meaning.

With Anna Willatt (The Esoteric Isle, whose wonderful writing you can also find here on Substack), we are also preparing a very engaging game: an exploration of our surroundings using tarot as a kind of compass. It is a playful way of re-seeing the world, of letting the cards guide attention towards what is already present but not yet noticed.

We will share more about it soon, as it has become such an enjoyable experiment that we would love you to take part as well, if you feel inspired.

There is one last theme I would like to draw your attention to: the cover. Covers are never accidental; they are thresholds, carefully chosen to frame the way we enter a world of meaning.

For Volume 0, I chose to explore the image of a blue eye: the eye of the abyss of the occult, staring back at us precisely at the moment we begin to look into it. It is a visual echo of a famous line by Friedrich Nietzsche: if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.The meaning is not simply that we observe the unknown, but that the act of observation transforms us. What we seek to see begins, in turn, to see us.

For Volume 1, the focus shifts entirely. The question is no longer the abyss, but destiny itself. What does it mean? Are we bound by invisible structures, or are we in some way co-authors of what we become? Fate, freedom, necessity and imagination all collide in this question, and I wanted the cover to hold that tension.

I chose an image of The Left Hand of Destiny, also known as The Hand of the Witch, a magical prop I created a couple of years ago, originally inspired by a short story I wrote and have yet to share. The image places destiny directly in the hand: not as something imposed from above, but as something we touch, shape and perhaps even negotiate with. It suggests that destiny is not only what happens to us, but also what we are already in the act of holding.

This idea resonates deeply with The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, a book that continues to shape how we think about identity, society and possibility. Set on a distant planet where inhabitants are neither permanently male nor female, the novel follows an envoy attempting to understand a world where difference itself is fluid. It is a story about communication across radical otherness, but also about how perception shapes reality, and how what we assume to be “natural” may simply be unfamiliar structure.

What makes the book still so important today is precisely this: it refuses fixed categories. It asks us to rethink what we take for granted about human nature, and in doing so it quietly opens a space where other forms of being become imaginable. Like the cover itself, it does not offer answers, but transforms the way we look.

Dear friends,
until next time.

May your day be magical,
Andrea

We often believe that understanding is achieved through logic alone. We classify, label, organise, and categorise reality with relentless precision, convinced that if everything is placed in its proper box we will finally grasp the world as it truly is. Yet in doing so, we sometimes lose sight of the very thing we are trying to understand. There are other instruments available to us: intuition, feeling, memory, the unconscious, and above all imagination.

My own moment of revelation arrived when I connected the scattered threads of my life as an artist, author, and independent researcher. It condensed into a single sentence that reshaped my way of thinking:

Magic is the science of imagination.

At first glance, this statement may seem poetic, even metaphorical. Yet the more one reflects upon it, the more it reveals a profound truth about human nature. Imagination is the ability to perceive what is not physically present. You can close your eyes and picture a sailing ship you saw days ago. This simple act already demonstrates a remarkable faculty: the mind’s capacity to summon an absent reality.

But imagination does not stop at recollection. The ship in your mind can be transformed. Its sails can become crimson. Its hull can grow deeper or more streamlined. You can imagine it travelling faster, carrying more, exploring distant oceans. In that moment, you are no longer remembering reality, you are reshaping it. This process lies at the heart of every invention, every work of art, every scientific breakthrough. Before any object exists in the world, it exists in our imagination. From the simplest daily plan to the spacecraft that carried humanity to the Moon, every creation begins in the same invisible laboratory of the mind.

Through imagination, we transform what already exists into what does not yet exist. We do not create from nothing, but we reshape the world through vision and action. This extraordinary faculty has long been associated with the divine, not in a theological sense, but in a mythological one. Humanity has often described itself as created in the image of a creator. Perhaps this resemblance lies in our shared capacity to think, imagine, and bring new realities into being.

Unlike other animals, humans can reflect on their actions, question their consequences, and wrestle with moral dilemmas. We ask what is right and what is wrong. We attempt to understand the mystery of existence and our role within it. Whether we succeed is uncertain, but the ability itself marks a profound shift in the history of life.

To understand the roots of imagination, we must travel far back in time to the earliest traces of human culture. The cave paintings of prehistoric Europe are more than depictions of animals and hunts. They are evidence of the first symbolic interpretations of reality. These images mark the moment when observation became meaning, when the human mind began translating experience into symbols that could be shared and remembered.

From these early symbols emerged writing, one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. Early civilisations required systems to record trade, relationships, and stories. Over time, complex pictorial symbols evolved into alphabets representing sounds. The Phoenician alphabet, with its small set of characters capable of representing an entire language, revolutionised communication. From it grew the Greek and Latin alphabets that shape modern writing today. Writing made imagination visible. A mark became a sound, a sound became a word, a word became an idea, and an idea became a world.

Imagination, therefore, is not escapism. It is the birthplace of meaning itself. Through imagination we create systems of value, culture, ethics, and society. Nations, currencies, traditions, and laws exist because we collectively agree to imagine them into being. These shared fictions allow millions of people to cooperate and coexist.

Yet here lies a paradox. What begins as a tool of liberation can become a structure of limitation. The systems we build to understand the world can solidify into rigid frameworks that restrict our capacity to imagine beyond them. Social norms, taboos, and institutions may gradually confine the very imagination that created them.

As children, the world is alive with mystery. Toys possess souls. Shadows hide creatures. Thunder is the voice of something vast and unknown. Growing up teaches us rational explanations. The creaking wardrobe becomes expanding wood; thunder becomes electrical discharge. Knowledge replaces wonder. We gain certainty, but we lose enchantment.

When imagination is suppressed, it does not disappear. Instead, it returns in unexpected and sometimes distorted forms. Conspiracy theories, myths, and fantastical narratives can be seen as attempts to reintroduce mystery into a world that feels overly rational and controlled. They reflect a deep human need for meaning and wonder, even when expressed imperfectly.

A similar tension exists in esoteric traditions. These fields have often been misused or commercialised, yet beneath the noise lies a rich philosophical landscape exploring consciousness, symbolism, and the nature of reality. When approached thoughtfully, they invite us to re-engage imagination as a tool for meaning-making rather than deception.

This perspective profoundly transforms practices such as tarot reading. The cards are not fixed answers but catalysts for interpretation. Their power lies in the stories we create through them, in the associations and insights that emerge when imagination is allowed to speak. The question is not whether the symbols are objectively real, but what realities they reveal within us.

Even questions that appear simple, such as whether ghosts exist, change when viewed through this lens. The issue is no longer a binary yes or no. Instead, we ask what it means to exist. Ideas exist. Symbols exist. Fears and hopes exist. The images we create reflect psychological and emotional realities that logic alone cannot fully capture.

There comes a moment when our compulsion to categorise must pause. When explanation must step aside so that listening can begin. To practise the science of imagination is to allow mystery to coexist with knowledge, to accept that not everything meaningful can be reduced to definition.

Magic, in this sense, is not the denial of reality. It is the recognition that reality begins in the imagination. And once we understand this, the world becomes larger, deeper, and infinitely more alive.

There are so many aspects I would love to explore and expand, deepening the analysis of this concept that has changed so much of my thinking and creative process. I will write more and more about it. This concept inspired me to create my tarot decks, The Discombobulator: The Esoteric Magazine of the Unseen and the Unexpected, and more… far more.

I would like to share more, because the ground is shifting and things are changing dramatically on my side. You have seen just the tip of the iceberg with The Tarot of Crossed Destinies, and I am incredibly eager to know what you think and what you feel. There cannot be magic without sharing, without exploring together, without collectiveness.

Till the next timeline,
Andrea

A thin trail threads through the grass, twisting and turning until it reaches a corroded gate left slightly open. From the dim soil, skulls surface like pale roots pulled toward the light. One still carries a crown.

Death…

Here lies the final levelling of every ambition. In the upright world we spend our days arranging ladders of status, climbing, measuring, comparing. In this place the Angel of Death performs her last transformation, tipping the painted scene until monarch and labourer lie along the same horizon. Before such stillness, every script falters. The crown ceases to promise authority; it becomes evidence of how little can be kept. What we once called sovereignty reveals itself as a temporary loan from the earth.

We must be attentive to the words we choose, because the Tarot card Death is so often misunderstood in relation to what it truly expresses. In the grammar of the soul, Death does not indicate a brutal physical ending. It is the most powerful metaphor for profound change, for a transition we would often sacrifice almost anything to avoid. We fear the closing of a great love story as though the final page could somehow erase the beauty of the chapters that came before it. We so often say, “unfortunately the holidays are over”. That small word, unfortunately, slips out almost automatically when we speak about something cherished coming to an end, and in doing so it quietly reveals how deeply rooted our resistance to endings really is. We behave as though a joy that ends must somehow have been flawed, or as though a relationship that concludes cannot have been genuine or meaningful.

But why should an ending diminish magnitude? The worth of a kiss, a shared laugh, a season of friendship, or a cherished dream is not measured by its duration, nor by the simple fact that it eventually ended. Its value lies in its intensity while it lived, in the reality of the experience as it unfolded. Everything arrives and everything departs. When we pour our anxious energy into trying to prevent the ending of what we love, we gradually lose the lightness that made that love possible in the first place. In this sense, the Death card is not a threat but a welcoming presence. It does not menace; it reminds. It invites us to savour. It asks us to cherish every friend, every song, every luminous moment precisely because they are destined to pass.

We are wise enough never to mourn the passing of what has hurt us. When a painful chapter ends, we greet the ending with relief, even gratitude. Yet when a period of deep happiness draws to a close, we often collapse into nostalgia, into a paralysing sense of loss that keeps us facing backwards. Perhaps true wisdom lies in learning to dance for every ending. Each completed cycle is not a diminishment but a transformation, an opening into the unknown. The mystery of destiny is always preparing a new chapter, a new landscape, a new adventure. To honour the Death card is to greet completion with gratitude, to look forward with curiosity, and to allow life to move without clinging to what has already fulfilled its time.

Death as the Rhythm of Life

We often imagine death as a catastrophic interruption, a violent snapping of the thread mid-story. Yet the Death card suggests something far more subtle and far more essential: death as the rhythm that allows the music of life to be heard at all. Without the decisive cut of an ending, existence would stretch into a single, deafening, eternal note, a forest so dense with growth that it suffocates beneath its own relentless abundance.

Every day we witness how modern culture has constructed an elaborate myth of permanence to shield us from this transition. We speak of endings as system failures, as glitches in the fantasy of infinite progress and uninterrupted expansion. Within this perspective, completion feels like collapse. Yet the card proposes another image entirely: death as the perfect cadence in a musical score, the resolving silence that allows the next movement to begin. It is not the opposite of life, but one of its most intimate expressions, the winter that quietly safeguards the secret promise of spring.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker proposed that human civilisation itself can be understood as a network of “immortality projects”. We build monuments, write books, form institutions, create art, and devote ourselves to causes in an attempt to achieve symbolic continuity. We long to leave traces that will outlast the fragile span of the body. At some level, we are always trying to bypass the rite of passage that demands the dissolution of an old form so that a new one may emerge.

The Death card gently but insistently holds a mirror to these projects and asks a disarming question: what are you building in order to avoid being changed?

Death teaches the sovereignty of the void. Most of our fears are not truly fears of death itself, but fears of the dismemberment required for transformation. We cling to identities, titles, traumas, achievements, and possessions as though they were lifeboats, never noticing when they have quietly become anchors. In this light, Death appears not as an executioner but as a physician performing the necessary surgery of separation. She cuts the tether not to drown us, but to allow us to float.

Banishment of the Threshold

The historian Philippe Ariès traced how Western culture gradually banished death from the visible world, moving it from the communal hearth to the sterile, medicalised corridor. We fear death more intensely now because we have lost our intimacy with it. We treat ageing as a technical error to be corrected rather than a sacred transition. We have replaced the memento mori with a frantic memento juventutem, a desperate remembering of youth that turns the present into a site of anxiety.

But the person you were ten years ago has already died a thousand small deaths. Your cells have turned over; your certainties have evaporated; your old loves have been composted into new wisdom. You are already a ghost of your former selves. The Death card simply restores the honesty of this process. It invites us to step through the rusted gate, not because we are being forced, but because we recognise that the room we are currently in has nothing left to teach us. To refuse to die is to refuse to grow.

The Threshold of the Great Beyond

Standing at the broken arch, I see a long shadow stretch across the grass. I turn, expecting the scythe, but there is only the unmoving night. The shadow is my own.

Death is not “out there” waiting to catch us; she is the shadow that our life casts upon the ground. She is the force that clears the field after the harvest, ensuring that the soil is not exhausted by the demands of the past. Beyond the unseen hill, something new is preparing to be born, not as a repetition of what was, but as a reconfiguration of the energy released by the ending.

The gate is open. The path is winding. The landscape has become a metaphor for the courage required to be finished. The rest is silence, and the silence is not empty; it is a pregnant, fertile night, dotted with so many stars.... For now, it is enough...

to the next time

Andrea

Reading it properly is an expedition in itself. Every page opens corridors into other texts, other myths, other languages. You stop to check a word, then a footnote, then a reference, and before you realise it you have fallen into another rabbit hole. I read with my iPad beside me, dictionaries open, tabs multiplying, the modern scholar’s lantern illuminating an ancient labyrinth.

I do not remember what thread I followed, but somewhere along that wandering path I landed, unexpectedly, on a book I had not thought about for years: The NeverEnding Story by Michael Ende.

The discovery struck me with the force of sudden recognition.

I loved that book as a child. I loved the film even more, that particular alchemy of image and music that lodged itself so deep in my nervous system that certain notes of Klaus Doldinger‘s score can still, decades later, produce something uncomfortably close to grief. When the book arrived in my hands, I devoured it in a time far too short, because the best books never last long enough. They end before you are ready, and you are left holding something that is no longer quite a book, but not yet entirely a memory.

And then a thought struck me with a small internal thunderclap: I had never truly returned to its meaning.

As children, we read stories as adventures. As adults, if we dare return to them, we discover they were always mirrors.

The NeverEnding Story is not, at its heart, a fantasy novel. It is a novel about the death of fantasy, and about who is responsible for it. The world of Fantasia, that boundless kingdom of stories and creatures and impossible geographies, is dying. But it is not dying because of any villain, any dark army, any conquering force with a name and a face. It is dying because of the Nothing: a spreading, encroaching void that swallows everything it touches, leaving not destruction but absence, a blankness where colour and form and meaning used to be. And the Nothing, the Childlike Empress explains with a quietness more terrifying than any declaration of war, is spreading because human beings have stopped imagining.

Fantasia does not exist independently of the human mind that dreams it. It is sustained, moment by moment, by the act of human imagination: by every child who invents a world before sleep, by every adult who dares to ask what if, by every person who refuses to accept that the visible is the full extent of the real. When that act of imagination stops, when the inner life closes down under the pressure of practicality and exhaustion and the slow, grinding insistence of the literal, Fantasia does not merely shrink. It is erased. And with it goes something that cannot be recovered by any external means, because it was never external to begin with.

Bastian Balthazar Bux, the small, bookish, bullied boy who reads the story we are also reading, is the only one who can save Fantasia. Not because he is exceptional in the conventional sense. Not because he is brave or strong or gifted with any particular power. But because he still believes. Because he is sitting in an attic with a stolen book pressed against his chest, and he is so completely, so helplessly inside the story that when Atreyu, the young hero of Fantasia, looks up from the pages and seems to look directly at him, Bastian does not step back from the fourth wall. He steps through it. He enters. And in entering, he saves an entire world.

Ende understood something that philosophy has been trying to articulate since Plato and has perhaps never said quite so clearly: that the imagination is not a luxury, not a childhood indulgence to be surrendered at the border of adulthood. It is a faculty of perception. It is the capacity to see what does not yet exist, to hold the possible alongside the actual without one cancelling the other, to inhabit a world that is larger than the one that presents itself to the senses on any given Tuesday morning.

When we lose it, we do not become more realistic. We become less real.

When we are young, our lives are surrounded by futures. Every possibility feels equally real. We dream without friction. We imagine without apology. The world is not yet a fixed quantity; it is a negotiation, a conversation, a territory still being mapped. We live, in those early years, very close to Fantasia. Its borders are permeable. We cross them in sleep, in play, in the particular quality of attention a child brings to a puddle or a cloud or a beetle making its way across a stone.

Yet adulthood arrives with its ledger of responsibilities. Survival becomes the dominant narrative. We provide for ourselves, then for others. Time becomes measured in bills, schedules, obligations. Life begins to resemble a train journey we never consciously chose, moving along tracks laid down by necessity, stopping at stations whose names we did not select. Many of us spend the largest hours of our days in roles we may like, sometimes even respect, but rarely love. The distance between the life we imagined and the life we inhabit quietly, steadily widens.

The Nothing spreads.

Into that widening gap, escapism enters. Each of us invents a way to survive the tension between desire and reality: books, films, games, hobbies, social media, daydreams, the sudden fierce attachment to a television series, the particular consolation of a long walk with music in your ears. These are not failures of maturity. They are not weaknesses to be ashamed of. They are symptoms of a deeper hunger, the hunger for Fantasia, breaking through the pavement of everyday life like grass through concrete, insistent and renewable and impossible to permanently suppress. We call it escapism, but perhaps that is the wrong word entirely. Perhaps it is not escape from reality that we seek, but escape from the impoverished version of reality that has been handed to us as if it were the only one on offer.

I often describe magic as the science of imagination. Not fantasy as childish illusion, not the supernatural as a retreat from the rational, but imagination as a disciplined, serious, and irreplaceable faculty of human perception: a way of seeing possibilities that do not yet exist, a way of re-enchanting the world by refusing to accept that the visible is the whole of reality. The magician, in this sense, is not someone who defies the laws of nature. The magician is someone who remembers that the laws of nature, as we currently understand them, are not the ceiling of what is possible. They are simply the current extent of what has been mapped.

This is where the Tarot enters the story. And it enters it, I would argue, at precisely the point where Bastian enters Fantasia: at the threshold between the world that is given and the world that is possible.

The Tarot is not, in this reading, a divinatory tool. It is not a mechanism for predicting the future or decoding the hidden intentions of the universe. It is something both simpler and more extraordinary: a device for re-entering Fantasia. A technology of the imagination, designed to do what Ende’s book does, what Homer’s book does, what every great story has always done, which is to create the conditions in which the imagination can do what it does best: make connections, find patterns, generate meaning from the encounter between an image and a life.

Each card is a doorway. Not a doorway to somewhere outside the self, but to somewhere inside it that daily life has not recently visited. The forgotten room. The unopened letter. The question you have been carrying so long that you have stopped noticing its weight. When you lay the cards on the table, you are not escaping reality. You are insisting on a larger version of it, the version that includes your inner life alongside your outer circumstances, your symbolic understanding alongside your practical intelligence, your intuition alongside your reason. You are doing what Bastian did: entering the story, and in entering it, changing it.

The Tarot works, in other words, for exactly the same reason that The NeverEnding Story works. Because Fantasia is real. Not literally, not spatially, not in the way that a chair or a tax return is real, but in the way that a dream is real, in the way that grief is real, in the way that hope is real: as an experience that shapes behaviour, generates meaning, and constitutes a dimension of human life without which the rest of it makes significantly less sense.

Tarot is a Castle of Crossed Destinies, as Calvino would say, with its endless halls, its staircases that lead to unexpected floors, its silent chambers that smell of another century, waits empty until we walk through it. Its architecture reshapes itself according to the questions we dare to ask, the way Fantasia reshapes itself according to the imagination of whoever enters it. No two people move through the same castle. No two readings of the same spread produce the same rooms. The cards are fixed; the meaning is not. It emerges, as all genuine meaning does, in the encounter between the symbol and the self.

Perhaps this is what Ende was really writing about. Not a boy who saves a fantasy kingdom, but a boy who saves himself, by remembering that he has an interior life, that it matters, that it is not separate from reality but the most intimate dimension of it. The Nothing could not touch Bastian because Bastian was, at the critical moment, fully inhabiting his own imagination. He was, in the most precise sense, present to himself.

The Tarot asks the same thing of us. Not belief. Not surrender of the rational mind. Simply presence. The willingness to sit with an image and ask, honestly and without predetermined answer, what it is showing us about ourselves right now, in this moment, in this life.

Perhaps Fantasia never truly vanished. Perhaps it retreated, as wild things do when the noise becomes too much, into the quieter interior spaces, waiting with the patience of something that knows it cannot be permanently extinguished. Perhaps it has been there all along, like an unopened book on a rainy afternoon, certain that eventually we would sit down, turn the first page, and remember.

Our imagination has always been there, waiting to be saved.

What are we waiting for?

To the next week

Andrea

The entire scene seems suspended between ritual and revelation. One cannot help but wonder whether this is a spell, an ancient rite, or the residue of a magical act that has already taken place. And yet, there is something more intimate at work here. The sword is clearly magic, but not in the sense of illusion or spectacle. It is magic in its most essential form: the moment in which something invisible takes shape, when an idea becomes form, when thought condenses into presence.

Throughout history, the sword was never merely a weapon. It always stood at a threshold between matter and meaning, between the visible and the invisible, between action and intention. It was not simply an object held in the hand, but a symbol that carried within itself authority, destiny, and a strange, almost sacred presence.

Among the most enduring legends, the story of Excalibur emerged as one of the most powerful. It was not just a blade, but a sign of legitimacy, a manifestation of kingship itself. The traditions surrounding it, however, are not entirely uniform. In some versions of the Arthurian cycle, the sword drawn from the stone is Excalibur itself, the very act of lifting it revealing the rightful king. In others, the sword in the stone is a different blade altogether, a test of sovereignty, while Excalibur is later bestowed upon Arthur by the mysterious Lady of the Lake. This multiplicity does not weaken the myth, but rather deepens it, suggesting that the sword is not a fixed object, but a symbolic function that can take different forms.

Whether drawn from stone or gifted by unseen hands, Excalibur did not belong to the world of ordinary objects. It chose, or perhaps revealed, its bearer. Its power was not only in its sharpness or strength, but in what it represented: the alignment between the individual and a higher order. To wield Excalibur was to embody a role, to become the axis through which justice and order could flow. The sword was not simply used. It was answered.

This idea of the sword as something more than matter finds an equally profound expression in the tradition of the Japanese katana. In Japan, the sword was never a mere tool of war, but the soul of the samurai, an extension of his being. The creation of a blade was a process that bordered on the sacred. Master swordsmiths such as Masamune approached their craft with a discipline that was both technical and spiritual. The forging of a katana involved purification, repetition, and an almost meditative attention to detail. Steel was folded again and again, impurities removed, structure refined, until the blade achieved a balance that was not only physical, but symbolic.

The relationship between the creator, the sword, and the one who wielded it formed a triad of meaning. The swordsmith did not simply produce an object, but transmitted into it intention, knowledge, and a form of silent presence. The warrior who held it did not merely use it, but entered into a relationship with it, one that required respect, discipline, and awareness. The sword, in turn, became a mediator between the two, carrying within itself both the gesture of its creation and the possibility of its use. It was said that a blade could reflect the soul of its maker, and reveal the spirit of its bearer. To draw it was never a trivial act.

Across cultures and narratives, this symbolic weight persisted. In the medieval chansons de geste, the sword Durendal, wielded by Roland, was not simply a weapon of war, but a relic infused with sacred meaning. It was said to contain holy fragments, linking it directly to the divine. Roland’s bond with his sword was so profound that, facing death, he attempted to destroy it to prevent it from falling into unworthy hands, striking it against stone with all his strength. Yet the blade endured, as though it possessed a will beyond his own. The sword, once again, was not an object, but a vessel.

From the blades of myth to those of history, the sword consistently appeared as an instrument of decision, of division, of revelation. To wield a sword was never merely to strike, but to judge, to separate, to define. It introduced a line where before there had been continuity. It cut not only through matter, but through ambiguity. In many traditions, it became a symbol of justice, of truth, of the capacity to discern what must be severed from what must remain.

And perhaps this is why the sword, more than any other object, came to embody a paradox. It was both destructive and clarifying, both violent and illuminating. It could end a life, but also reveal a truth. It could divide, but in doing so, it could also make visible what had been hidden.

A sword, in this sense, never simply acted. It revealed.

Even its creation echoes something deeper. The forging of a blade is an act that borders on the alchemical: raw matter subjected to fire, repetition, precision, until it becomes something balanced, sharp, alive. A sword remembers the force that shaped it, the intention that guided its making, and perhaps even the hand that will one day raise it. It is never entirely neutral. It carries within it the possibility of action, the inevitability of consequence.

Within the symbolic language of tarot, the Ace of Swords emerges as the beginning of this force. It is the first incision into confusion, the first moment in which something becomes clear, defined, undeniable. It is the birth of thought, not as abstraction, but as a cutting edge. This is not the gentle unfolding of intuition, but the sudden appearance of clarity that divides illusion from perception. The Ace of Swords does not soothe. It reveals. It introduces a line where before there was only ambiguity, and once that line exists, it cannot be undone.

And yet, in this room within the Castle, the presence of the three spectres complicates everything. They do not act, nor do they resist. They stand as silent witnesses, their dissolving forms suggesting a connection to what lies beneath, to what has already passed. Perhaps they are not guardians, but memories. Perhaps they are the echoes of what has been severed in the very moment the sword emerged. Every act of clarity, after all, leaves something behind. Every decision excludes. Every truth, once spoken, renders other possibilities silent. The sword reveals, but it also removes.

One cannot help but wonder what has been cut away here. What has been sacrificed so that this blade could rise into the air, luminous and precise? The Castle does not answer. It never does. It offers only the scene, the tension, the fragments of a story waiting to be assembled.

And so the question turns inward. What is this sword, for you? Is it an idea that has finally taken form after lingering too long in uncertainty? Is it a truth you can no longer ignore, no matter how uncomfortable it may be? Is it a decision that demands to be made, even if it divides your path irreversibly? And those silent figures, watching from the edge of dissolution, are they fears, memories, or versions of yourself that cannot follow where this clarity leads?

The Ace of Swords is often described as a beginning, but not all beginnings arrive gently. Some emerge like a blade, precise and unforgiving, asking us to see clearly even when we would rather remain in shadow. Some demand that we choose, that we cut, that we define. In doing so, they reshape not only our understanding of the world, but our place within it.

In the silence of the room, the sword continues to float, suspended between what has been and what is yet to come. It does not ask to be taken. It does not impose itself. It simply exists, waiting to be recognised for what it is: not a weapon, but a threshold. And perhaps, when the moment arrives, it will not be a matter of wielding it, but of understanding what, within us, is ready to be cut away.

Till the next time

Andrea

In this sense, tarot acts as a mirror: of society, of culture, of imagination, and of the mind itself. It reflects our wishes, our fears, our desires, our anxieties, and the shifting structures through which each era has attempted to understand fate, morality, psychology, identity, and mystery. If we trace the history of writing about tarot, from Court de Gébelin and Etteilla, through the occult syntheses of Éliphas Lévi and Papus, to A. E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, and more recent thinkers such as Rachel Pollack, we can observe a fascinating evolution. Tarot changes because we change. Each generation projects onto it its obsessions, its metaphysics, its spiritual needs, its theories of the self.

This alone reveals the extraordinary richness of tarot. It has been used as a storytelling machine, one cannot help but think of Italo Calvino and his brilliant understanding of tarot as a narrative device. It has been used as a tool for divination, for meditation, for artistic experimentation, for fashion imagery, for design, for occult speculation, and for psychological reflection. Tarot is many things at once. It is rich precisely because it is fragmented. It has survived because it has never been confined to one stable function.

And yet, too often, what we encounter in mainstream discourse, on social media, on YouTube, in commercial trends, is only the tip of the iceberg. We are shown surface meanings, simplified formulas, pre-packaged interpretations. Few are willing to dive into the cold water beneath, into the submerged world of tarot as a truly complex symbolic language. Few descend into its depth, where images become unstable, meanings proliferate, and what first appeared decorative reveals itself as philosophically, psychologically, and culturally dense.

What interests me most is not the predictive use of tarot, though that is certainly one of its historical and living dimensions. What fascinates me more deeply is tarot as a mirror of the collective mind, of society, and of our own individual interior life. Tarot as a projection of the psyche.

When I created The Tarot of Crossed Destinies, I wanted to make a deck capable of sustaining many different uses. But above all, I wanted to create a deck able to generate infinite architectures of esotericism, better still, infinite configurations of the mind. I wanted each card to function not only as an image to be interpreted, but as a space to be entered. A psychological chamber. A symbolic environment. A fragment of interior architecture.

This is why there are no human figures in the deck.

I wanted each tarot card to appear as an empty room. The human presence, though central in most traditional decks, would in this case have been distracting. I wanted the reader to become the figure in the card. You are the protagonist. You are the consciousness moving through the Castle. You are the one who shuffles, draws, observes, connects, imagines, remembers, trembles, questions. Had I populated these rooms with bodies, those bodies would already have begun to direct meaning. Their gestures, expressions, ages, attitudes, costumes would have imposed a narrative in advance. By removing them, I wanted to leave open a deeper possibility: the possibility that the reader might enter the image entirely.

When I made this decision, I had in mind a passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, one of the most penetrating philosophical meditations on consciousness, presence, and the effect of other people upon our experience of the world. Sartre describes, in one of his phenomenological examples, the situation of a person alone in a public place, a solitary consciousness inhabiting and organising the world around itself. Before the arrival of another person, the subject is at the centre of their own perceptual field. The park, the bench, the trees, the sky, the objects in the world all radiate meaning in relation to that person’s consciousness. They are the one who sees. The one who interprets. The one around whom the visible world is arranged.

But then another person enters.

This new presence is not simply another object among objects. The other person appears as another subject, another centre of consciousness, another being through whom the world is also organised. And suddenly the first subject is displaced. The world is no longer entirely “theirs”. It has been, in Sartre’s terms, altered, destabilised, “stolen” by the arrival of another gaze. The crucial moment occurs when one becomes aware that one is being looked at. Under the gaze of the Other, we are no longer pure subjects; we become objects. We become visible, fixed, judged, external to ourselves. This is Sartre’s famous analysis of “the Look”: the moment in which our freedom is interrupted by the realisation that we exist also for another consciousness. We are transformed from a being-for-itself into a being-for-others.

This is the deeper meaning behind the famous and often misunderstood phrase, “Hell is other people” (L’enfer, c’est les autres). Sartre does not mean simply that other people are annoying. He means that the presence of others alters our experience of ourselves at the most fundamental level. Their gaze can solidify us. It can imprison us in an identity. It can reduce our fluid possibilities into something observed, interpreted, and perhaps judged.

This is one of the reasons why it was so important to me that the reader be, symbolically speaking, the only person in the deck.

In The Tarot of Crossed Destinies, each card is an empty room, a space in which something has happened, or is happening, or is just about to happen. We do not see the action itself. We encounter traces. Evidence. Residues. A fireplace still warm but recently extinguished. A cauldron still bubbling. A cup fallen from a shelf. Paintings hanging slightly askew, as if some invisible storm has just passed through. Curtains disturbed. Doors left ajar. Shadows leaning where no body stands. Each room is a symbolic aftermath.

And because it is empty, we are compelled to respond.

We do what human consciousness always does in the face of fragments: we begin to build a story. We ask what happened here. We search for causes, intentions, symbols, connections. We weave a narrative that binds together the visible elements. Why is the fire out? Why is the potion still warm? Why has something fallen? Why are the objects arranged in this unsettling way? Since we know that this room is not just a room but an Arcana, a tarot card, our mind immediately begins to oscillate between external observation and internal resonance. The card becomes less a scene than an invitation. Less a statement than a question.

In this sense, the tarot image functions very much like a Rorschach test.

The Rorschach test, developed in the early twentieth century by Hermann Rorschach, consists of a series of ambiguous inkblots presented to a viewer, who is asked to say what they see. The logic behind the test is simple and profound: when confronted with an ambiguous image, we do not merely decode it, we project into it. We organise the uncertainty according to our own patterns of association, our memories, our emotional preoccupations, our fears, our desires, our cognitive habits. The image becomes a screen upon which the psyche reveals itself.

This is why free association is so revealing. It bypasses, at least partially, the rational censor. It allows material to emerge before it has been tidied, moralised, or domesticated by conscious explanation. One person sees menace where another sees tenderness. One sees collapse, another liberation. One sees loneliness, another sacred silence. The ambiguity of the stimulus is precisely what makes it powerful: it does not dictate content, but draws content out.

Tarot, especially when approached through atmosphere, symbol, and suggestion rather than fixed keywords, can work in a very similar way. In the case of The Tarot of Crossed Destinies, the cards are not prescribing a reaction; they are eliciting one. The room waits. The psyche answers.

This connection has deep roots in both classical and modern psychoanalysis. Freud taught us that the mind speaks in displacements, condensations, substitutions, and symbolic formations. Dreams are not random nonsense: they are coded expressions of latent content. Images stand in for conflicts, desires, anxieties, and unresolved material. Jung, in turn, expanded this approach by exploring symbols not only as masks for repressed wishes but as gateways to archetypal structures of the collective unconscious. For Jung, an image can be deeply personal and transpersonal at once. It may evoke one’s own private memories while also participating in ancient symbolic patterns inherited across culture and myth.

Both perspectives are useful when considering tarot. A single card may trigger an entirely personal chain of thought; a childhood memory, a recent loss, an unspoken fear, a desire one had hidden from oneself. At the same time, it may resonate with broader symbolic structures: the house, the threshold, the shadow, the vessel, the flame, the locked chamber, the broken mirror, the stairway, the garden, the tower. Tarot speaks to us because it inhabits that fertile territory where personal association and collective symbolism overlap.

This is why the same card can mean something radically different to different people, or to the same person at different moments of life. Interpretation is never only about the card. It is about the meeting between the card and the consciousness that beholds it. The image is stable; the psyche is not. Or rather: the image is never fully stable either, because each act of seeing reactivates it differently. Tarot becomes a mirror not because it passively reflects us, but because it invites us to participate in the creation of meaning.

This is one of the central ideas behind The Tarot of Crossed Destinies: that tarot can be used to generate shifting structures of thought. The deck is not a rigid sequence of isolated emblems. It is a myriorama, a fluid combinatory system in which each card flows into the next, where borders are porous, where rooms echo one another, where meaning migrates across thresholds. The cards connect, bleed, converse. Their edges are fuzzy. Their architecture is continuous. And this too reflects the mind.

The psyche is not composed of sealed compartments. Memory leaks into desire; desire into fear; fear into fantasy; fantasy into symbol; symbol into narrative. One sensation can awaken an image; one image a forgotten grief; one detail an entire landscape of emotion. The mind is a Castle, but not a static one. It shifts as we move through it. Doors appear where walls once stood. Corridors loop back on themselves. Forgotten chambers reopen. Familiar rooms become uncanny under new light.

A tarot card can therefore bring to the surface aspects of ourselves that lie deeper than immediate conscious intention. An object in a card, a chalice, a cracked window, a staircase, a mask, a birdcage, a candle guttering in the dark, can awaken a chain of ideas, memories, feelings, and associations with astonishing speed. This immediacy matters. Before analysis comes resonance. Before explanation comes impact. Something strikes us, and only afterwards do we begin to ask why.

And this is where the real work begins.

The importance of tarot as an introspective tool does not lie only in what we first associate, but in the questions we ask afterwards. Why did this image disturb me? Why did I immediately think of abandonment? Why did this room feel safe to me, while another felt unbearable? Why did I see threat where someone else saw revelation? Why does this detail return me to a memory I had not thought about for years? What in me responds so strongly to this symbol?

To ask the right questions is to descend.

The first spontaneous association is only the surface. Beneath it lie structures: emotional habits, internalised narratives, unresolved tensions, desires we have disguised, wounds we protect, values we have inherited without examining, fears we have named incorrectly. By challenging our own spontaneous associations, by asking not merely what we saw, but why we saw it, and why now, we begin to use tarot not as an answer-machine, but as an instrument of self-knowledge.

In this process, tarot becomes a mirror in the deepest and most demanding sense. Sometimes what it reflects is beautiful. Sometimes it is uncomfortable. Sometimes it unsettles us, embarrasses us, frightens us. But often it is precisely in strong feeling that the key lies. What disturbs us tends to matter. What fascinates us tends to reveal us. What we resist may contain the outline of something we need to understand.

A room in the Castle may appear silent, but in fact it is speaking. Not in words, but through atmosphere, arrangement, absence, symbolic tension. And our reaction to that room, our attraction, our aversion, our interpretations, our invented stories, becomes a means of listening to ourselves.

This, perhaps, is the deepest reason why I conceived The Tarot of Crossed Destinies as a Castle of empty rooms. Each card is not only an Arcana: it is a psychic chamber, a mental theatre, an interior landscape awaiting projection.There are no figures because the figure is you. There is no fixed story because the story is born in the encounter. There is no final meaning because meaning is always negotiated between image and observer, symbol and memory, silence and interpretation.

The Castle is the psyche.

Or rather: it is one way of imagining the psyche, not as a diagram, not as a diagnosis, but as an inhabited architecture of traces, absences, thresholds, echoes, and possibilities. To move through the cards is to move through symbolic rooms within oneself. Some are luminous, some abandoned, some ceremonial, some broken, some playful, some haunted. Yet all belong to the same structure. All are connected. All form part of that strange and shifting totality we call the self.

Tarot, then, is not only a language of destiny. It is a language of interiority. Not merely a means of foretelling, but a means of perceiving. It gives form to what is vague, image to what is felt, narrative to what is otherwise difficult to approach directly. It helps us see how meaning arises. It reveals the stories we tell in order to make sense of fragments. It shows us, with exquisite subtlety, that our interpretations are never neutral.

And perhaps this is where its true magic resides.

Not in telling us what will happen, but in showing us who is looking.

P.s.
I would like to thank Tiffany Lazic, an insightful writer and thoughtful voice, for a conversation that proved to be a true spark. What began as a two-hour exchange on tarot as a tool for healing the mind and the soul unfolded into a rich and stimulating dialogue, one that set in motion a much longer chain of reflections that eventually became this article.

It is incredibly rewarding to see how The Tarot of Crossed Destinies is entering the imagination of those who took part in what has been a truly magical Kickstarter campaign. Our conversation was part of that wider movement, an exchange where ideas were tested, reshaped, and expanded.

Although that moment was not recorded, its echo remained. It opened a path of thought that I would like continued to explore independently, and Wirth her marvellous company, deepening the connections between philosophy, art, and symbolic language that underpin this work.

So, my thanks to Tiffany, for the spark that helped ignite a much larger fire.

How is meaning itself built?

It is tempting to believe that meaning resides within things, as if it were embedded in stone, painted on walls, inscribed in symbols awaiting only to be uncovered. But meaning is not found, it is made. Or more precisely, it emerges in the encounter between what is seen and the one who sees.

Every image we perceive is not merely received by the eye, it is interpreted by the mind. The brain does not passively record reality, it actively reconstructs it. Lines become contours, shadows become volumes, fragments become forms. More importantly, the brain does not interpret these elements as new each time. It recognises them through the archive of what it already knows. We see by remembering.

This is why, as children, we delighted in searching for shapes in the clouds. A drifting vapour becomes a lion, a ship, a face. The game seems innocent, playful, yet its roots are profoundly psychological. It reveals a fundamental mechanism of perception, the tendency to impose familiar patterns upon ambiguous stimuli. What we call imagination is, in part, recognition displaced, or perhaps recognition liberated.

The same mechanism explains why, when looking at old photographs, we sometimes perceive ghosts. A stain becomes a figure, a fluctuation of light becomes a presence. Occasionally something truly unexplained may linger in the image, but more often it is the mind completing what is incomplete, resolving ambiguity into form.

This process has a name in modern psychology, pareidolia. Yet the term alone does not capture its depth. This is not a mere curiosity of perception, it is an evolutionary inheritance. There was a time when survival depended on the immediate recognition of shapes, the curve of a predator’s back in tall grass, the outline of danger concealed within shadow. To hesitate was to perish. It was safer to mistake a shadow for a beast than a beast for a shadow.

We are no longer prey in that immediate sense. The forest has become the city, the predator has become abstract, systemic, often invisible. And yet the mechanism remains. We still seek patterns. We still complete forms. We still interpret the unknown through the known.

From this capacity arises one of the most extraordinary faculties of the human condition. We do not merely recognise, we transform. We turn perception into symbol.

A symbol is not a simple representation. It is a bridge between the visible and the invisible, between the material and the conceptual. It is the moment when a form ceases to be only itself and begins to stand for something else. This transformation marks a decisive threshold in human history.

In prehistoric caves, early humans traced animals upon stone, not merely to depict them, but to invoke them, to bind them into ritual, to enter into a relationship with what they represented. These were not simple drawings, they were acts of meaning-making. From these gestures unfolds the long evolution of symbolic systems.

Glyphs, pictograms, hieroglyphs, each step reflects an increasing abstraction. The image of a bird becomes not only a bird, but a sound, a concept, a divine attribute. Writing emerges when the image detaches from its immediate referent and begins to operate within a system of relations. This is the birth of language, not only as communication, but as structure.

Philosophy of language has long explored this transformation. A word does not resemble the thing it denotes. Its power lies in convention, in shared agreement, in a system of differences. Meaning arises not from intrinsic essence, but from relation. A sign signifies because it is not another sign. Difference becomes the foundation of meaning.

And yet, even within these abstract systems, the ancient power of the image persists. Symbols accumulate force through repetition, belief, and history. They become charged.

Consider the Roman eagle, an image of dominion and imperial authority, carried across continents as both emblem and warning. Or the cross, transformed through centuries from an instrument of execution into a symbol of salvation, sacrifice, and transcendence. Or the swastika, an ancient sign of auspiciousness and cosmic order, present across cultures for millennia, later violently appropriated and distorted in the twentieth century, becoming a symbol of terror and ideology.

These examples remind us that symbols are not fixed. They are living entities, subject to transformation, reinterpretation, and sometimes corruption. Their power lies in their instability, in their capacity to carry multiple meanings across time.

Symbols do not only reveal, they also conceal.

Throughout history, knowledge has often been encoded within symbolic systems designed to obscure as much as they disclose. The alchemists wrote in images and riddles, their texts filled with strange creatures, impossible processes, and cryptic diagrams. To the uninitiated, these were obscure or meaningless. To the adept, they were precise instructions.

This is the domain of esotericism, knowledge that is hidden, reserved, veiled. The word derives from the Greek esōterikos, meaning inner. It stands in contrast to exōterikos, the outward, the accessible, the public. In ancient philosophical schools, teachings were often divided in this way, the exoteric for the many, the esoteric for those prepared to understand.

This distinction is not merely about exclusion. It reflects an awareness that knowledge can be dangerous. Power resides in understanding, and power in the wrong hands can destroy. Knowledge is therefore protected, not always through force, but through obscurity.

From this principle arise the great traditions of hidden knowledge, the initiatory structures of the mysteries, the symbolic architectures of the Freemasons, the allegorical writings of the Rosicrucians. Each constructs a language that must be learned, a code that must be deciphered, a path that must be walked.

And yet, paradoxically, we now live in an age where symbols are more pervasive than ever before, and often more immediate.

Our daily communication is saturated with icons. Emojis condense emotion into a single sign. Symbols guide us through cities, through systems, through interfaces. The digital world itself is built upon layers of symbolic abstraction, binary code translated into visual forms, interfaces that mediate our interaction with invisible processes.

We navigate this world not through words alone, but through images that must be instantly understood. The symbol has become ubiquitous, yet its depth is often flattened by speed.

And here we return to the Castle.

Within the Castle, symbols are restored to their full complexity. Alchemical signs coexist with mathematical diagrams. Constellations unfold across ceilings. Narratives are painted upon walls and columns. Each fragment belongs to a larger and intricate system. Every image contains other images. Every detail opens onto another layer.

The Tarot cards themselves are not simple illustrations. They are architectures. Each card is a room, a chamber within the Castle, constructed through the layering of symbols. A gesture, a colour, a background detail, a barely visible object, all contribute to the total meaning.

This meaning is not dictated.

I have never attempted, and I never will attempt, to explain every symbol, every element, every hidden corner of these images. Meaning, like the Castle itself, must be explored. It must be built by the one who walks its halls.

Each explorer brings their own memory, their own cultural references, their own emotional landscape. What one sees, another may overlook. What one interprets as a warning, another may read as an invitation. This is the essence of the system.

The Castle is not a closed structure. It is not a rigid set of correspondences, a fixed dictionary of meanings. It is an open system, a living architecture that invites reinterpretation, association, transformation.

This is its true power.

An unsolvable mystery is not a failure of understanding, it is the condition for continuous discovery. Each return to the same Arcana reveals something new, not because the card has changed, but because the observer has.

A closed system offers certainty, but it limits imagination. An open system demands participation. It asks the explorer not only to read, but to create meaning.

And so the Castle remains.

Not as a place to be mastered, but as a space to be inhabited.

Not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a language to be spoken, one symbol at a time.

to the next time

may Magic always be with you

Andrea