By Melanie Harris
Well-known Tarot artist Robert M. Place is a vegetarian, but he has a fondness for blood-drinking monsters. The Vampire Tarot, out this month from St. Martin’s Press, is Robert’s latest creation, a dark and beautiful deck based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Creator of The Alchemical Tarot (Thorsons, 1995), The Angels Tarot (HarperCollins, 1995), The Tarot of the Saints (Llewellyn Publications, 2001), and The Buddha Tarot (Llewellyn Publications, 2004), this award-winning artist and illustrator is recognized around the world for his stunning and visionary work. He’s the author of The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), and the author of three books in the Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena series published by Chelsea House: Astrology and Divination, Shamanism, and Magic and Alchemy. A full-time professional illustrator, his art has been featured on television as well as in countless books and magazines. It’s amazing this busy man ever has a chance to play, but yet he takes time each day to meditate, read, and enjoy a run with his greyhound. On some days, he might kick back and watch a vampire movie or two from his large DVD collection. He even found time to let us interview him. Robert M. Place must be magic.
Tarot Reflections: You’ve created quite a few Tarots. Which of your decks are you most proud of and why?
Robert M. Place: I like all of the decks that I have done but The Alchemical Tarot, which was my first, was the most magical in its inspiration. When I started I had no idea that I was going to make a deck. It was not a conscious decision. The Tarot reached out to me through dreams and visions.
TR: Can you tell me about one of these dreams?
RMP: The first happened in 1982. I had a dream that startled me with its clarity and intensity. In the dream, I received a phone call from a dream law firm in England. The ringing of the phone is what brought on that intense clarity. Even now I can easily visualize that dream. When the phone rang, I remember thinking, “how can someone call you in a dream? I didn’t know that that could happen.” When I answered the phone, a dream operator verified that I was Robert Place and then connected me with a woman from the dream law firm. Essentially, she told me that I had an inheritance coming from an ancestor in England, an inheritance that had great power. It was called “the key,” and I was told that I would recognize it when I saw it. Within a few days, my friend Scott came to my house to show me his new Waite-Smith Deck. I immediately recognized it as my inheritance. In a few more days another friend spontaneously gave me a Tarot of Marseilles deck and I went to New York City to buy my own copy of the Waite-Smith deck. With these decks, I started on my study of the Tarot and Western mysticism.
TR: So, how did these experiences lead you to actually creating a Tarot deck?
RMP: Well, let’s jump ahead to 1987. By this time my study of mysticism and the occult had become obsessive. Although I was making my living as an art jeweler, I was spending more and more time reading and less and less time on my work. One day in August, I was reading The Picture Museum of Sorcery, Magic, & Alchemy, by Emile Grillot de Givry and I became fascinated by a 17th century symbolic alchemical engraving representing the Philosopher's Stone. The design depicted a heart in the center of a cross with images of the four elements assigned to each corner, an arrangement called a quincunx. As I looked at this image, I realized that the heart in the center was symbolically interchangeable with the dancing nude in the center of the World card and that the symbols of the elements assigned to the corners were also interchangeable with the symbols of the four evangelists in the corners of the World.
This realization acted like a key opening a door in the back of my mind and out of this door came a flood of images. Within seconds, I saw that all of the trumps in the Tarot were interchangeable with alchemical images and that when that interchange was complete it was evident that the Tarot’s trumps were telling the same story as the alchemical great work, the Magnum Opus. The Magnum Opus is a mystical chemical process in which the prime material that the alchemists work with is put through a series of chemical operations in which it is killed and resurrected in a purer form. Then it is cleansed until all that remains is the essential spirit, which is what the Philosopher’s Stone is composed of. The Stone is a magical catalyst that can change any thing or person to a higher improved form. It can change lead to gold, it can cure any illness, prolong life indefinitely, and transform one’s consciousness to a higher level.
This revelation started me on a process of study, contemplation, and drawing that lasted seven years. The end result was The Alchemical Tarot, which was first published in England by Thorsons, in 1995.
TR: Do you feel that the Tarot preserves and conveys the teachings of alchemy or other mystic sciences?
RMP: The Tarot does convey an alchemical message but I do not believe that it was designed to be an alchemical text. The alchemy in the Tarot is simply part of the mystical visual vocabulary of the period in which it was created. Similarly, modern works of art often make use of psychological terms and ideas. Alchemy was just part of the worldview when the Tarot was created the way psychology is part of the modern worldview.
My study led me to a deeper understanding of the origins of the Tarot. The Tarot was first created in the fifteenth century in northern Italy. It was not an alchemical text. Its main purpose was to play a game that is the ancestor of Bridge. So, I wanted to know why with such a seemingly humble beginning this deck was designed to express a profound mystical philosophy that could be related to the Magnum Opus. What I learned is that in the Renaissance people did not look at games as trivial pastimes but believed that they could be a place to express a mystical truth. Also, artists in the Renaissance had elevated the visual arts to a higher status. Enigmatic symbolic designs were seen to be a more powerful means of communicating a profound philosophy than mere words and just as the fantastic illustrations found in alchemical texts were based on this belief, the Tarot was also the child of this belief.
TR: Tell me about your latest creation. How did The Vampire Tarot come about?
RMP: After I completed The Alchemical Tarot, I had an inspiration for The Vampire Tarot. I saw that just as the alchemist was searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, which was described as a red elixir, able to prolong life indefinitely, and as likely to be a liquid as a solid, the vampire sought eternal life by drinking blood, the elixir of life. I saw that the vampire’s quest was the shadow of the alchemical Magnum Opus. The search for immortality is the true mystical quest, the hero’s journey as Joseph Campbell called it. But in its highest form it is the identification with the part of the individual that is beyond the physical and does not die, an identification with the soul. In the vampire myth the vampire seeks immortality in the body by stealing life from others. He misunderstands the quest and turns it into a horror story.
TR: So, The Vampire Tarot has been in the works for a while now, and is just now coming out this month. What caused the delay?
RMP: When I pitched the vampire idea to publishers at that time no one was interested. Instead HarperCollins asked me to do The Angels Tarot and because angels were such a fad that year I had to work very quickly and it came out the same year. I didn’t have another deck published until 2001 when, Llewellyn published my Tarot of the Saints. While I am proud of both of these decks, because the trumps in both of them are each assigned to an appropriate angel or saint without a unifying story that relates to the entire allegory the way the Magnum Opus does, I was disappointed. I knew that from then on I wanted to do justice to the allegory placed in the trumps by its Renaissance creators. My next deck, The Buddha Tarot, did just that. By relating all of the trumps to standard Buddhist icons it demonstrated that the story of Siddhartha’s birth and quest for enlightenment can be equated with the story in the Tarot. They are both illustrating the hero’s journey.
For my next deck I wanted to live up to the high standard that I had set. I was lucky that my proposal for The Vampire Tarot finally found a publisher willing to go with it, St. Martin’s Press. When I reread Dracula, I realized that here was a story that dealt with the same issues of life, the quest for immortality, and the purification of the soul that the Tarot embodies. According to Barbara Belford, who wrote a biography of Dracula’s author, Bram Stoker, he even based many of the characters in the story on Tarot trumps. Again it was a natural fit and one that had been overlooked by most Tarot authors. There was also the close relationship between Stoker and Pamela Colman Smith and his connection to the Golden Dawn, an area of Tarot history that had not been explored by other Tarot authors.
TR: What else about The Vampire Tarot is different from the other vampire-themed decks on the market?
RMP: Well, the main difference is that it is not just a Tarot deck with a vampire depicted on each card. I connect the Vampire story with the story illustrated in the Tarot. That is why I based it on the story of Dracula. I believe that the primary influence that Stoker drew inspiration from for the book was the Grail legend. After all, the Grail is a cup of blood that has the power to prolong life. In the earliest versions of the legend it is actually Queen Guinevere who is stolen by an evil knight from the land of the dead. Arthur’s knights are charged with the task of bringing her back. Later the story changed and it was Guinevere’s cup, symbolizing her soul, that was stolen. And after that, her cup was transformed into Christ’s cup to give the story a Christian veneer. These legends were actually part of the mythology that influenced the first Tarot decks.
In Stoker’s novel, the heroine, Mina, because Dracula drinks her blood and in turn forces her to drink his, has her soul stolen by Dracula, a noble representing the land of the dead. Arthur Holmwood, who inherits the title Lord Godalming, represents King Arthur, who heads a team of heroes who will retrieve the lost soul by killing Dracula. Van Helsing is his advisor, like Merlin is to Arthur, and Jonathan Harker is Perceval, the fool, who enters Dracula’s castle in the beginning of the story and not realizing what he is witnessing has to spend the rest of the story getting back there to kill Dracula. The minor suits are represented by the four tools of the vampire hunters: garlic flowers, knives, stakes, and holy water. Also, it represents some of my best artwork.
TR: Considering vampires are blood-drinking monsters, it’s amazing how they never go out of style. What makes vampires so cool?
RMP: Although the vampire is supposed to be a monster who lives on the blood of his victims, the vampire’s bite is a metaphor for sex and in later movies and books Dracula is depicted as a handsome ladies’ man. My deck and book definitely focuses on this aspect as well. To explain this paradox in the vampire’s nature, first, it is my opinion that the vampire of legends and folk belief has little to do with the vampire created by writers and filmmakers. The European folk vampire is a disgusting, smelly corpse that gets out of his grave to feed on the local population, usually his own family. He is so dumb that you can protect yourself from the vampire by leaving a pile of beans outside your door. The vampire cannot help himself and he has to count the beans. If there are enough, the sun will come up before he is done and he will have to return to his grave. The act of staking a vampire was originally intended to nail his body to the coffin so that he could not get up at night. They would also turn the body face down to disorient him.
Now, in contrast, the literary Vampire we are familiar with is suave, handsome, and intelligent. Dracula attracts woman with his hypnotic power, is a cunning adversary, and able to travel great distances. This vampire was first created by Romantic poets in the mid eighteenth century in Germany. The theme quickly spread to England and France and was taken up in prose as well. It is this tradition that Stoker was drawing on. This vampire is actually more akin to an ancient moon god and personifies the archetype that Jung calls the animus or the anima in the case of a female vampire. The animus is a personification of the unconscious that usually appears in dreams as alluring but threatening at first. But as we interact with this archetype it transforms into a lover and eventually a spiritual guide. This is what the vampires have been doing in books and movies over the last century, evolving into ideal lovers and heroes.