A Conversation with Rachel Pollack

The Monthly Aspectarian: Rachel, to say that your career is eclectic is an understatement. You've done a lot of different types of writing, although I think you'd say that there's a common thread that runs through it all.

Rachel Pollack: I would say the common thread that runs through my work is the power of the imagination and the power of images to open up and transform our lives. To give you the range, I've done twenty books, five of which are novels. Most of my other books are about interpreting tarot cards. My most recent book, The Body of the Goddess, extends my non-fiction interests to early religion. And I've written comic books, including a comic book called Doom Patrol and most recently, Timebreakers.

TMA: I've read by both Doom Patrol and Time Breakers and for those of our readers who are interested in comics, I'd highly recommend that they find those.

Do you have plans for more comic books to be published?

RP: I'm working on a script now for a Vertigo [a division of DC Comics] revision of Tomahawk. That comic came out in the 1950s and was a frontier story, sort of Daniel Boone during the American Revolution. I've got this kind of one-shot revision of his origin.

TMA: Just to finish up the comics/Vertigo line of things, you did the the tarot deck based on Vertigo?

RP: Yes, I helped design the deck and then wrote a text for it.

TMA: Which I looked at and found interesting. You used primarily Vertigo characters?

RP: Well, the concept was to do a deck that would be using the Vertigo characters for the major arcana, for the trump card, the ones with names like Magician and the High Priestess. And then the minor arcana was left up to the artist, to do as he wished. He used his very unique style to do that. But for the major arcana, the attributions were kind of hashed out in a group meeting with myself and Neil Gaiman, the author of The Sandman, and the Vertigo editor, and the woman who first came up with the concept. We all sat down together in a hotel room and made choices of which characters would be which cards.

TMA: That must have been fun.

RP: It was a lot of fun, something that tarotists often do . . . and the playful mood is to take a favorite subject and make a tarot deck out of it -- seeing which one of your favorite rock musicians would be which card, for instance, or your favorite movie stars or cartoon characters or something. Using the Vertigo characters is doing that, but in a little more serious way.

TMA: Who did you use for the high priestess?

RP: I think it was Mad Hettie from the original Death series.

TMA: This whole phenomenon of decks -- it seems like there's a new deck coming out every other day.

RP: Yes it's really quite amazing because there are not that many new books on the tarot. There are some, but there are a great many new decks, which is kind of interesting. I think there must be a lot of people collecting.

TMA: Some of the decks that are coming out are tarot decks with people's own takes on them . . . and then there are so many decks that aren't even tarot cards anymore.

RP: Yes, well, I think people have realized that because of the prestige of tarot or just because people like to shuffle cards, that's a good system for using other things such as angel decks and dolphin decks. What's curious is that there are other systems of divination, particularly the I Ching and the runes, and now people are doing decks on them -- when, in fact, you don't need them. If you have the runes, you have the runes. You don't really need to have picture cards of them.

TMA: We ran an article a few years back about people constructing their own decks, tarot and otherwise, because if you realize that it all works by analogy anyway, and if you know your analogies, you can read anything. There's no reason why people can't produce their own decks.

RP: Absolutely not. A lot of people are producing decks for their personal use, particularly using collage -- taking pictures of things in their life and pasting them onto cards.

TMA: Cutting them out of catalogs and magazines.

RP: Yes. I did a deck called the Shining Woman Tarot, which was published a few years ago, and that coincides with my work on the body of the Goddess and all my travels and research. The pictures in Shining Woman Tarot are based on prehistoric and tribal art from around the world.

TMA: I haven't seen that deck. Sounds fascinating. Tell us a little bit more about the various aspects of your work.

RP: Well, the tarot work I've done has focused on exploring the cards as images rather than, say, as an occult system or as magic fortune telling. So I spend a lot of time exploring images and analyzing them and talking about their history and their symbolic meaning and their psychological interpretation.

The first books I did was a two volume set called 78 Degrees of Wisdom, published in 1980 and 1983. Those have been sold all around the world. And I think by now it's probably somewhere close to 200,000 copies in about eight different languages. They're being reissued in a few months in a new version, a one volume edition.

TMA: Who's the publisher of the new edition?

RP: HarperCollins. And then there are the books I've done books for different decks. I did the more or less official text for the Salvador Dali tarot, and several other individual decks that have been done, such as the Vertigo tarot.

My work in fiction, the novels, are not really science fiction or fantasy. They're more kind of magic realism, or what I sometimes call shamanic realism. Unquenchable Fire, for instance, and its sequel, Temporary Agency, create a vision of a transformed America in which magical storytelling and spirits, shamanic journeying and rituals are part of everybody's daily life, but everything else is the same. For instance, people go to the shopping mall and in the middle of going to Sears, they might also take part in a mass food ritual in the Food Court. Or the housing development will have a woman's menstrual hut in the middle of it. It's kind of satirical, kind of wild and strange.

My most recent novel, Godmother Night, is based on Grimm's fairy tales, but it's a contemporary story that weaves a lot of themes and plots and images from Grimm's into the lives of the main characters. And the stories about two women and their daughter and death, who is portrayed in the book as a kind of a kindly middle aged lady.

TMA: Not Death in Neil Gaiman's Sandman? [laughs]

RP: No, Death in The Sandman is sort of a dream date for a teenage boy, and my Death is a middle aged lady -- but she's attended by five redheaded bikers on motorcycles wearing leather clothes. So that's kind of the things that I do. Skewing reality in some way, taking it into a realm of mystery or strangeness.

What I like about the tarot is its mythic connections, these archetypal connections rather than necessarily fortune telling or the occult systems that it's most famous for.

TMA: Do you find that a lot of people mistake the tarot cards as a fortune- or a future-telling tool when really it tells more about the present than the future?

RP: I think they're best used to illuminate and understand who we are and what our lives are about. They can lead into "things are going to happen", but are more an extension of what's going on now than a hard and fast prediction. People get worried about free will, for instance, and they say, "Well, if this is predicted, then that means there's nothing I can do about it." What I mean is that it's really saying things are going in a particular direction from where they are now and, of course, you have the possibility to change that.

TMA: Yes, exactly. This shows how it is now, and how it will go if things stay on their present course.

RP: One of my favorite kinds of readings is one that was first developed by a Danish woman named Anita Jensen, a student of mine when I was visiting Denmark, and she gave it to me to use. It's based on the human body and, in fact, in classes I'll often have people lie on the floor and we put the cards right on their body. But the different positions on the body are really not about anything predictable at all, it's just about eliminating what's going on with us. For instance, on the forehead it's what you're thinking about; over the mouth it's what you're saying; over the heart it's what you're feeling, and over the solar plexus is what you're knowing. You look at the contradictions between all those things, and you start getting a real sense of what you're doing. I was doing this for some time before I realized that there's nothing of fortune telling at all about that; it's purely psychological self knowledge.

TMA: I'm an astrologer myself, and yes, we know where the planets are going to be in the future and where they've been in the past, but it's not about predicting the future, it's about self understanding. Your newest book, The Body of the Goddess -- that's about early religions?

RP: Yes, it begins with a kind of meditation about the whole concept of the body and what it means to us in terms of religion . . . but then it goes into the concept that religion originally was an extension of the basic cycles of nature, of our human body and its experiences and the landscape and animals and so forth . . . and then somewhere religion became detached from bodies. It became transcendent and the gods were seen as immortal as compared to human beings -- who were mortal and therefore limited. And so there became a separation of ourselves from religion. The book looks at the idea of restoring that original connection between the physical reality and the spiritual reality. It begins in the Stone Age, carries through to the ancient Greeks and then takes a leap into this new scientific theory called the Gaia Theory, Gaia being the Greek name for the earth goddess. In writing that book, I traveled to, I think, seven countries to visit mostly prehistoric sites ranging from Stonehenge to the caves in France to Greek temples to the temples in Malta that are 6,000 years old.

TMA: I recently read about Malta. There's definitely something unusual there.

RP: The Maltese temples are quite amazing. They're very, very old. The oldest one is said to be the oldest freestanding building in the world. They have an incredible power, and part of that power lies in the fact that the basic form that they used is a kind of sculpture of the female body. You would enter at the feet -- and then there's a kind of rounded chamber for the hips and a narrow waist and another chamber for the breasts or torso, then there's this rounded end for a head. You can compare these to some of the statues of goddesses, and the form really is quite similar . . . so it seems that there really was a deliberate attempt to model the shape of the temple on the shape of a goddess's body.

TMA: What conclusions did you come to from this study?

RP: Well, it was more exploration than conclusion, but one of the conclusions I came to was that if we do base our religious awareness on the facts of our own bodies and the body of nature, then we tend to heal certain splits that we have, including, for instance, the fear of death and the fear of nothingness -- because we become more aware of the cycles of nature and the cycles of our own bodies.

TMA: What would you say would be the essence of your work at this point? What direction do you see yourself going in?

RP: I see myself going in the direction of the power of stories of mythology, of images. In Unquenchable Fire there's a moment at which the heroine meets a kind of divine messenger who takes the form of a chocolate chip cookie salesman on the street in New York City. He tells her that the only two things that exist in reality are ecstasy and suffering. A lot of my work is about exploring the pain of human existence and suffering and how we open up beyond that into a kind of joyous, ecstatic vision of reality.

Rachel Pollack has published 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. Her five novels include Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Godmother Night, recently nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Her thirteen books on Tarot include 78 Degrees of Wisdom, long considered a classic, the texts for Salvador Dali's Tarot and The Haindl Tarot, and the Shining Woman Tarot, which she designed and drew. Rachel has also written poetry, criticism and comics. Her work has been published all over the world, in nine languages.

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