Tarot

If only Florence was closer I would mark my calendar with a trip to the Uffizi to see Francesco Clemente's new exhibit featuring my favorite divining tool, the tarot.  The Seventy eight cards were re-imagined by the artist, executed in his inimitable style, featuring his friends in New York City. 

The origin of the deck is as murky and mysterious as the cards themselves.  The first known tarot was created in the early 1400s in Northern Italy for the purpose of playing games.  It wasn't until the early 1700s that rudimentary divinatory meanings were given to the cards, thus beginning the long association of tarot with mysticism and magic.  In the 1900s Carl Jung was the first psychoanalyst to attach importance to tarot symbolism. He may have regarded the tarot cards as representing archetypes: fundamental types of persons or situations embedded in the collective unconscious of all human beings.

Sometimes I'm unnerved by the unknown, and if my life was a book I'd be tempted to read the last page first.  On those days I pull a tarot card from the deck, explore the hidden meaning in the symbols, and oddly, breath a little easier.