Bevan Atkinson's Blog

Bevan is scheduled to appear at Book Passage, 100 Bay Street in Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, at 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, January 30th.

She will be reading from books in The Tarot Mysteries series and conducting brief tarot readings with attendee volunteers, so if you’d like to learn more about the books or the tarot or yourself, please do join us next Tuesday.  As well as Bevan’s fast, fun Tarot Mysteries themselves, store manager Jeff Battis has stocked tarot decks and instruction books if you decide you’d like to learn more on your own.

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In each of The Tarot Mysteries Xana Bard or Thorne Ardall quotes Shakespeare. In The Fool Card the quote is from Hamlet: “The readiness is all.” In The Magician Card it’s “I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing,” from King Lear. A new quote, relevant to the new story, appears in all the subsequent stories.

I didn’t make an overt decision to include a 500-year-old phrase in each book; in the beginning I was just trying to write my first novel, and “the readiness is all” fit the meaning of the Fool Card so aptly that the quote went in that book and in fact was Xana’s last comment. The Fool is about to walk off the cliff’s edge, in spite of the warning barked by his little white dog, and he doesn’t care. He’s ready to the experience and he’s trusting in the net the universe will provide at some point, and here he goes.

But meanwhile, how unwitting could the Shakespeare references have been, when I named my protagonist Rosalind Alexandra Bard? And how lucky was I to set things up that way, intentionally or cluelessly, when the source material Shakespeare provides is so rich a motherlode to draw from?

People ask me where the idea for The Tarot Mysteries series came from. Here’s the scoop.

A long-time friend of mine in Santa Barbara passed away and I drove down from San Francisco to attend the funeral. As I passed the Earl Warren Showgrounds driving home afterward I thought of Sue Grafton and her wonderful series, in which each book uses a letter of the alphabet in the title: A is for Alibi, etc. She writes about “Santa Theresa,” which is based on Santa Barbara.

At the time she was at the letter “S,” and I thought, “She’s going to do it. She’s going to finish the alphabet. But then what? That’s 26 books and nowhere to go, although I’m sure she’ll figure something out. Janet Evanovich is using numbers for the Stephanie Plum series, so she’s not going to run out of those.”

And then I realized that I read tarot cards, and there are 78 cards in the tarot deck. I would run out of me before I would run out of tarot cards. If I just used the 22 Major Arcana, which tie to the Hebrew alphabet the way Ms. Grafton’s books tie to our alphabet, that would make a solid series, and it was feasible for me to tackle that many books, given my age at the time.

For the rest of the seven-hour drive home I thought about who my characters should be and how the tarot would figure into the stories. I dedicated the first book to my friend who had died, Hubert Schwyzer, and I named one of Xana’s dogs in honor of Sue Grafton’s detective, Kinsey. I named the other dog after Robert B. Parker’s character in the Spenser mysteries, Hawk.

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Tarot cards are just a collection of colored images on pieces of thick paper. How can pieces of colored paper possibly give someone information about the future?

The short answer is: they don’t.

But they do, when you’re trained to use them, trigger something valid but inexplicable, something that every tarot reader will tell you is real and reliable and useful: Intuition.

Some tarot readers study for years, using books and gurus and practice to hone their access to information that surfaces from the unconscious. Other readers are able to use the cards with less formal training. The cards serve the reader in the same way that holding a physical object such as a watch or other personal belonging can trigger a psychic’s clairvoyant (seeing things) or clairaudient (hearing things) information. The tarot reader is drawn to the cards as a tool for accessing intuition, and over time learns to rely on his or her trained intuition with or without using the cards.

Intuition is an innate human gift. Some people have more access to and reliance upon it than others, the same way some people have more musical or artistic ability than others. But pretty much everyone who isn’t physically disabled can pick up a pencil and draw a recognizable tree; most people can identify a known song even if they can’t sing it in tune. In just that way people have “gut” feelings, or they “just know” about something, and with practice those feelings can be evoked at will and trusted.

I know that whenever my intuition prompts me to do something I’m always sorry if I ignore it. And sometimes it’s positively odd what I get prompted to do: take a couple of large garbage bags to my sister’s house, for instance, only to get there and see that she’s spent the morning clearing out the garage and has run out of garbage bags, and the ones I brought are exactly how many she needs. And no, she hadn’t told me she was planning to tackle the garage.

How do you access your own intuition? Just ask. Seriously, that’s all it takes. Ask yourself, “What should I do?” or “How do I really feel about this?” or “Should I actually go ahead with this idea?” and see what your unconscious brings to the surface for you as an answer. And then listen to the answer and, most important, heed that inner voice. The more you practice asking and listening and heeding, the more your intuition will strengthen.

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In the late 1800s a trio of British Rosicrucians/Masons formed a society devoted to occult studies. The three men, Woodman, Westcott and Mathers, named their secret society The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The influence of this society drove an ever-expanding interest throughout Western civilization in pursuing spiritual paths that were not aligned with any formal religion. The Order’s members focused on theurgy (ritual practices) and individual spiritual development. Many of their studies formed the basis of modern practices such as Wicca and Thelema (“Love is the law; love under will”).

Unlike Freemasonry, women were admitted to the Order on an equal basis and membership included those of varying social backgrounds. Tarot divination, astrology, numerology, magic, geomancy (a form of divination using lines or geographical features), alchemy, scrying (using an object such as a crystal ball), Qabalah (Hebrew mysticism), all were studied by members of the Order. I believe the Order’s members would have been thrilled to sing along with “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”

The Order’s members, not surprisingly given their innate individuality and personal eccentricities, developed factions and sectarian offshoots, but even so the subsequent influence of the one hundred or so initiates at the Order’s peak in the 1890s reached far beyond their restricted Victorian circle. Today you can buy tarot cards and books on divination at your local bookstore.

One member of the Order was the poet William Butler Yeats. I’m headed off on a vacation to Scotland and Ireland, and hope to visit Yeats’s home while on my journey.

I get asked — a lot — how I come up with a new story. The answer is pretty simple: I do research and the research tells me the story.

Some years ago I was inspired to write a screenplay. I’d been an instructional designer and trainer for decades, during which time I’d written training video scripts and audio scripts. Those scripts were based on interviewing the target audience for the training, and what the nonfiction scripts have in common with the fictional ones is a specific architecture that dictates what the content and format of the text should be. What the writer has to do is populate the architecture with believable dialogue and character interactions.

For the screenplay, my research involved talking to enthusiastic young men, a couple of them missing important teeth, about paintball. I also called and spoke to a yacht salesman about what yacht chartering involved, and found out during the call that yes, Virginia, there really are pirates in the Caribbean. In case you ever encounter them, here’s what to do: Immediately give them everything they want and proceed to sail away still alive. Or don’t comply with their demands, and sail away dead after they take what they wanted after making you be dead. I also spoke to retired Navy personnel about what it was like to sit offshore on the carrier USS Essex and watch the Bay of Pigs invasion go all wrong.

So anyway, when I’m ready to start a new story, in the current case “The Hierophant Card,” I haul out my stack of tarot reference books and start typing notes. Page after page of notes. Then I go looking online for more information about the card in all its versions and interpretations around the world. Sooner or later a story idea emerges and I’m off and running.

Inspiration strikes. Our mind focuses on how to accomplish this new and challenging goal that has besieged our consciousness and won’t let us ignore it.

We marshal our resources and put into practice those techniques that we have learned over time will assist us in achieving our new objective. We take the first few steps, adjust our approach based on what we see in our results so far, ask for expert help, learn and practice new things that we believe will work better for us, and put our lifetime of skills and abilities to the test. We bring our capabilities into a state of observable competency.

The Magician represents our incipient mastery of available tools of every type and in every sphere of our being. Physicality, intellect, emotion, and creativity are welded into Will Power that can attain our intent.

You are expressing the meaning of the Magician Card when you use all of yourself to convert your inspired idea into reality.

The Fool Card is the great mystery of the Major Arcana. Its number is Zero, the all-encompassing circle, the whole, as well as the cipher. The Fool is a conundrum, a summary of opposites. He is the only Major Arcana card to survive into our modern playing cards, where he’s the Joker, and the Joker is wild.

Rather than belonging strictly to the Major or Minor Arcana in the 78-card tarot deck, The Fool is considered his own suit, belonging only to himself. In most decks he’s shown ready to walk off a cliff, despite the warning bark of his canine companion. His blithe disregard for obvious danger is the result of his faith that the path he’s called to follow is the right one, and that he will be taken care of by the universe as long as he is true to himself and his calling.

You’re under the influence of The Fool if you feel compelled to follow a path that others tell you is foolish. That path may indeed be strewn with dangers and difficulties that you will have to overcome. But there is a necessary lesson for you on that journey, and at your soul level you recognize the importance of pursuing this course of action, heedless of warnings and potential dangers. Everything could fall apart along the way; you know that and it doesn’t matter in the least. Joseph Campbell’s admonition to “Follow your bliss” is the motto of The Fool.

The 56 Minor Arcana in the 78-card tarot deck are the precursors of our modern playing cards. The four suits in the Tarot (Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles) are now called Clubs, Hearts, Spades and Diamonds, respectively. There are four face cards in each suit of the Tarot, and in the modern playing deck one of the face cards has been eliminated.

The Tarot’s Queen of Swords became the Queen of Spades. In some of the Tarot decks, but not all, this queen is shown seated on a throne with a sword in one hand and a severed man’s head in the other. Interpretations vary, as they always do with the Tarot, but one of the consistent nicknames for this card is “The Widow.”

If you look at the games we play with modern cards, you can see the through-line from the Tarot card’s meaning. The Queen of Spades is the worst card to get when playing Hearts, and the Queen of Spades is The Old Maid. Her Tarot-based reputation as a heartless or solitary woman dates back at least 500 years, to the popularization of the Tarot in southern France.

This Saturday, July 15, at 11:00 p.m. PDT host Afrikahn Jamal Dayvs, the inspiration for the DeLeon Davies character in The Tarot Mysteries series, will interview Bevan Atkinson on his KPFA Radio B.A.J.A.B.A. on JaZzLine weekly show. If only because Afrikahn is indeed the world’s coolest human, stay up late and listen to some great music and interesting conversation about the latest Tarot Mystery, The Emperor Card, out now and available online or at your local bookstore.

Here’s the link so you can listen to the online show live: https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=live