Alice and the Pack of Cards
Eight moments from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland where Alice is lost — and what happens when she asks a deck about it.
This is the book we already publish, read down to the eight places where Alice genuinely does not know where she is, who she is, or which way to go. At each one she throws three cards and reads them. Then the Cat turns up and reviews the reading.
The cards are really cast. Nothing here is chosen in advance — the deck is shuffled when the page loads and Alice takes whatever falls. That matters, because it is the Cat's whole case: shuffle again and watch her be just as certain about three different cards. If her reading works no matter what turns up, it was never the cards doing the work.
You can also hand her a different deck. The picker at the top reaches the open tarot library at tarot.recursive.eco — six centuries of them, from the 1440s Visconti-Sforza painted for a Milanese duke to the Golden Dawn's. She will read whatever you give her with exactly the same confidence, which is rather the point.
Carroll's words are Carroll's, from this book's own text. Alice's readings and the Cat's reviews are ours, and are marked as such throughout.
Shuffling…
"You're nothing but a pack of cards!"
Which is, as it turns out, the most accurate thing anyone says about a tarot deck in the whole of Wonderland — and Alice says it to a jury, at the top of her voice, on the last page, just before she wakes up.
She is right, and the decks in that picker mostly agree with her. Conver's Marseille was cut in 1760 to play tarot, a trick-taking card game with trumps — the ancestor of the French Tarot people still play on a Tuesday. The Visconti-Sforza was painted for a ducal family who played games with it. Not one of those cards was made to tell anybody anything; the fortune-telling arrived three centuries late, in Paris, from men whose names and dates we have.
So the pack really is just a pack. What it can still do — and this is the only claim this edition makes for it — is put pictures in front of you that you did not choose, at a moment when everything you would have chosen has stopped working. What you then do with them is entirely your affair, and the Cat will be watching.