Twenty-Two Impressions by Jessica Friedmann - An Interview

We’re very excited to host an event tonight, May 1st,

5 PM, with Tarot expert and writer Jessica Friedmann, who is currently part of a discussion panel at the Warburg Institute to mark the closing of their wonderful Tarot exhibition. Jessica's involvement with the Tarot is deep and visceral, and her research is both original and compelling. She explores the cultural memory embedded in the medium, shedding light on overlooked authors and artisans within the vast landscape of divination. Her work also extends the conversation initiated by Kaplan’s classification of Tarot history, as she proposes the emergence of a sixth phase, one shaped by self-publishing and the reimagining of traditional symbols and archetypes.

Jessica’s contributions to literature are diverse and introspective. She is the author of the essay collection Things That Helped (Scribe, 2017), and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Lifted Brow, Smith Journal, Dumbo Feather, ArtsHub, The Age, and other publications.

0. Hello Jessica, nice to meet you! Could you please introduce yourself? 

Hello, Watkins! It’s lovely to meet you as well. I’m Jessica Friedmann, an Australian

writer and the author of Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana. I’m currently in London for few weeks’ study at the Warburg Institute, and to attend their Tarot: Origins and Afterlives exhibition and symposium. The research for Twenty-

Two Impressions sparked a major interest in Warburg, which is now becoming a PhD, so the opportunity seemed too beautifully synchronous to miss.

1. What inspired you to write this book? Did you feel there was a gap in Tarot

literature?

I think it was less that I felt that there was a gap in the literature, than that my

relationship with the tarot was steadily deepening, to a point where it was beginning to

get into my writing. There was an underlying rhythm that seemed to inflect everything

else I was trying to do.

During the pandemic I started practicing my own reading by writing a tarot advice

column for friends, and I also spent a lot of time talking about with the cards with my

then-seven-year-old son. He used to play with them in the form of taking them off for

quests and adventures, and I often found them scattered around the house.

When it became clear that we were going to be in suspended animation for a while, I

started playing with language around the tarot in a more immersive way. It was

something I could do in the moments between home-schooling and walking the dog and

doing the dishes and trying to keep everything else afloat. I still have a fragments in my

Notes app.

I was reading a lot too, but despite there being a lot of really excellent writing around,

books seemed to fall into the category of straight historical round-up or ‘how-to’. I’ve

always been interested in the texture of thought, and I found the idea of practitioner-

divination compelling. What does it mean to inhabit that space? And how do you write a

‘why-to’?

2. Reading through your book, you mention that the first deck you bought was

Marseille Tarot, and that you kept distant from Tarot in the past: how has your

relationship with this deck grown over time? 

The Marseille was the first deck that ever clicked for me, and threw me into the world of

the historical tarot, which I had previously not known existed. 20th-century decks had

always felt quite alienating to me. I’ve come to appreciate them more through delving

into the origins of tarot, but it’s the early Italian and French decks I feel close to.

I’ve retired the deck I used while writing this book, and am now using a new one – the

Jean Dodal 1701, which is a Type I deck, instead of the Nicolas Conver 1760, which is a

Type II. That very slight difference has opened up a lot, and I’m finding the creative

tension between the decks quite generative.

3. Your book is an interesting exploration of the major arcana and its occult

background, and a great starting point for people who haven't read the Tarot

before. In particular, I appreciated your deep  & diverse dive into history: are

there any Tarot-related historical facts that fascinate you in particular? Any

historical figures that left a mark on you?

I’m less interested in those historical figures we know, than in the many many people

whose hands must have passed over the tarot anonymously throughout the years. How

many card-makers, wood-cut artists, watercolourists, ink-makers, merchants, publicans,

and game players have handled the tarot? And what might they contribute to the sum

total of our knowledge if they could speak?

The exciting thing about the tarot as a research area is that things do turn up from time

to time that shed entirely new viewpoints on established histories. You find bits of

playing cards stuck to the wax seals on documents, or uncut card stock used to pad out

the cloth bindings of books. Cards turn up in the plumbing during the renovations of

castles. And then everything is rearranged into something new.

4. Did writing this book deepen or transform your connection to the Major Arcana

in any surprising ways? 

One thing that really struck me when I began writing about the tarot was how

infrequently certain cards appeared when I was reading for myself. I very rarely drew

the Star, or the Chariot, or World. So when I wrote about them, I wasn’t coming from a

place of familiarity or intuition. It was a very different experience to come to the cards

‘cold’.

These cards became some of my favourites in the deck. I still don’t draw them very often

for myself, but when they appear for other people, I feel much more confident

interpreting them. They’re cards that appear to build a bridge with the querent when

it’s needed.

5. To quote a sentence from your book (page 75),"The Tarot has changed again",

and you mention a "6th phase in Tarot developmen". Could you please walk our

readers through this concept? How do you think contemporary Tarot differs from

older classical decks?

One of the grandfathers of tarot history, Stuart Kaplan, identified four overlapping

phases of tarot’s history. These were: its invention in Italy and the culture of hand-

painted decks; its removal to Marseille’s industrial hub, and adoption through the

burgeoning printing press as a widely-played game; its revival by 18 th -century French

occultists as a divination tool; and its transformations via the English esoteric societies

of the fin de siècle.

The tarot scholar Emily Auger, whose work I greatly admire, has proposed a fifth,

psychologically-driven 20 th -century phase, where images shift ‘from allegory to

archetype’. She looks at Jung in her work, and examines how popular understanding of

the tarot’s images went from being from specifically related to the visual culture of

Italian culture, the Church, popular storytelling, and astrology, to being understood as

representative of a collective unconscious.

In Twenty-Two Impressions I’ve suggested a sixth phase, which has sprung up out of

21st -century self-publishing and crowdfunding. It’s easier than ever to publish your own

deck, but where decks like the Motherpeace radically revised the tarot’s imagery to fit

progressive ideas, a lot of the most popular contemporary use the images of the Rider-

Waite-Smith, with a queer, diverse, ‘modern’ spin to the artwork. The Modern Witch

tarot is probably the epitome of this trend.

I’ve called this ‘recuperative tarot’ because it works to recover and revise the symbols of

a deck with some problematic roots, which is still treated as authentic and authoritative.

Readers who embrace these decks want to see themselves reflected in the cards in

explicit and intentional ways. I think it’s a fascinating shift, and one that is semantically

quite complex.

6. Each essay in the book feels very intimate, touching on your personal

relationships, home life & emotional events: how did you navigate writing from

such a personal standpoint while working with such complex archetypal figures? 

I’m not very good at being objective, insofar as I believe all writing comes from and is

filtered through the self. The tarot, in particular, doesn’t exist for me in a vacuum, but

comes to life in an ongoing and constantly-changing way. Laying the cards out is an

intimate act; I didn’t want to draw a veil over that intimacy, or pretend that my personal

circumstances weren’t affecting the direction of the book.

I think part of what is special about the tarot is that each reader comes to the

relationship with their own experiences, their own viewpoints, and their own ideas of

what makes a reading work. And I didn’t want to set myself up as an authority, which I

think is sometimes antithetical to trust. I’m as immersed in the process, and as liable to

changing my mind, as anyone using the cards.

7. Tarot & self-development: many readers and Tarot enthusiasts use the cards as

a means of self-reflection, creating a deep relationship with its figures - they

become real guides to them. Thinking of this, what is the card you call upon the

most in times of need? How does the Tarot guide you? And also, which card from

the Major Arcana do you identify with the most?

I tend to call less on specific cards than to keep an eye out for resonances where they

appear. Recently I was on the train going to a friend’s house after having a conversation

with someone else in my life that had left me feeling exasperated and furious. I was just

reaching the station when I saw that they had put a sign up that read CAUTION:

SWOOPING BIRDS.

For me, the Lover is always caught up with magpies, who in the swooping season can

almost ruin your life. But the sign wasn’t just a reminder to duck and cover; it felt like a

reminder not to be impetuous or act when feelings are heightened, as the Lover, in the

older decks at least, has to live with the consequences of his choice. I didn’t need to

swoop down like a bird or shoot my mouth off like an arrow. I could simple walk

steadily past what I construed as a threat.

8. In your book you reference other decks, such as the classic Rider-Waite-Smith,

Etteilla's Tarot, all the way through the Lilien deck and other contemporary

reproductions of classics (Meneghello, Rinascimento, and so on) - do you have a

favourite one in particular beyond the classic Marseille, and why? 

Recently I’ve been drawn to handmade decks, and decks with annotations scribbled in

as a person’s knowledge grows. I write in all my recipe books, crossing out cooking

times and making substitutions, and I love seeing cards that have been treated the same

way. Someone in an online tarot group I’m part of recently shared images of a deck that he

had made in prison, using a biro and some cracker boxes. He’d recreated the cards from

memory; they were travelling with him before they took physical form. I think that deck

maybe is my favourite at the moment, in the way it seems to sums up what tarot is and

can do.

9. In your previous book Things That Helped you tackle the subject of depression

from an honest, deep, and raw point of view. Twenty-Two Impressions is

different, however it feels connected - would you agree?

They are absolutely companion volumes, and I’m so glad that you’ve noticed, because

superficially they come from very different places. But both books are about making

sense of the world through symbols and talismans. Both are about navigating the world

without a verbal language. And both are about the various kinds of stillness in which

meaning eventually comes.