Mirror Tarot

A Machine For Constructing Stories: Portals Book

Mirror Tarot begins from Italo Calvino’s conception of the tarot as ‘a machine for constructing stories’ to present each card as a small world and a generative mirror.

Following the Major Arcana through centuries, a central essay contextualises the cards’ evolution within artistic, literary and intellectual history, from the Neoplatonist Renaissance to contemporary popular culture. Alongside the essay, the book offers a sequence of microfictions and creative writing prompts corresponding to the Major Arcana of the beautiful accompanying artist’s deck. Emerging from Mirror – an ongoing collaborative worldmaking act by Sammy Lee and Sarah Shin that spans game, ritual and performance – each card and its reading invites readers to step inside the landscapes of the tarot and discover stories of their own.

From the Fool’s first step to the World’s completion, Mirror Tarot turns the tarot into a creative companion for play, divination and storytelling. Rather than fixing meanings, it draws on the tarot’s architecture of symbols and correspondences to make each card not only a site of interpretation, but a point of departure for narrative invention.