If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
It would be the person who invented tarot cards. Mainly so that I could apologise to them for this.
One of my friends gave me a set of black cat tarot cards for my birthday, and each one looks like Louis Catorze, with the alien eyes and the creepy stare. When I unwrapped the gift, my friend went through every card to see if any cats had fangs, and wouldn’t you just know it:
I don’t need a tarot reading to predict Catorze’s behaviour – I always know that he will do the last thing I expect or want – so I decided to make this his own personal set, for him to do with as he pleases. What could possibly go wrong?
(Well, there’s opening a portal to hell and being damned for all eternity but, other than that, all good, non?)
I wanted to do this properly, so I had Catorze sleep with the cards under his autumn-winter igloo for a few for a few days. Don’t worry, I made sure they were all even and flat so that la personne royale wouldn’t feel any bumps, à la Princess and the Pea. I would have had some explaining to do when the cleaner lifted up the igloo to clean underneath, so I made sure I hid the cards during her visit and put them back after she’d gone. That said, had she found them, tarot cards under a cat bed wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing she’s seen in this house.
Naturellement the little sod can’t shuffle or cut the deck, so I did this for him and went for a straightforward three-card spread. Part of me was expecting everything to go all American Horror Story with a triple whammy of Death cards (even though there is only one Death card in each pack), but it didn’t go quite that way. Don’t get me wrong; it was still bad. Just bad in a different way.
After sleeping on my lap all day, when it was time to do the reading he disappeared outside. When he came back and I was finally able to begin, this was what ensued:
Furthermore, the three that I drew contained two consecutive cards of the same arcana (arcana are a bit like suits), demonstrating that even through shuffling, spreading the cards under Catorze’s igloo and then gathering them and shuffling again, I hadn’t been thorough enough. So I shuffled once more … and got two consecutive ones of the same arcana AGAIN, demonstrating that my third shuffle had been just as shit as the first two.
At that point Catorze’s screaming and bouncing around were such that I gave up. But I haven’t given up forever. Meanwhile, here are my favourite cards from the Catorzian Arcana. Tarot-loving friends, what does my future hold?
louiscatorze.com 
Leave a comment