Beautiful Bullshit by Enrique Enriquez – Artisan Tarot

We recently sat down with Enrique Enriquez to talk about the Tarot de Marseille and his new pocket notes Beautiful Bullshit.

Beautiful Bullshit is a collection of essays that were written over the last 10 years and are brought together in these notes for the first time. They have in common a speculation about presence as a magical event.

You can read the full interview with Enrique below:

Hello Enrique! Can you share why you were first drawn to the tarot?

I’ve told this many times, but there was a teacher at the design school I studied at who read tarot to his students. The school was made up almost entirely of beautiful women and this man spent whole afternoons alone with them looking at the cards.

For me, the beauty of images, sacred only insofar as they have passed from hand to hand for centuries without dissolving in the ego of their makers, is intrinsically linked to their ability to fascinate others and, through that fascination, generate intimacy. This teacher and I never spoke to each other and yet he taught me that there are deeper eroticisms than sex.

Why do you prefer the Tarot de Marseille?

It’s not that I prefer it. It’s just that the Marseille tarot is wet while all other tarots are dry. Each one of its images anticipates the others. It instills in us an analogical game that echoes the poetic brightness of the world. In that sense, the Marseille tarot exceeds itself, and the anecdote of its images that have, from any other point of view, expired.

Your notes, Beautiful Bullshit, are a collection of essays from the past 10 years. How did you come up with the title?

Life has exceeded all its parodies. The absurdist urge outlined by Alfred Jarry a hundred years ago has been outdone by the materialization of a pataphysical reality. Magic today is all rattle and no fangs because it is no longer possible to sabotage daily life. Now it is daily life that sabotages us. We plunge into a tailspin trying to cling to increasingly empty meanings because, in our language crisis, words no longer name what they name. To the friction of that fall—which has become deafening—I oppose a movement towards harmony through language—visual, verbal—which dissolves as soon as it materializes. Namely, BEAUTIFUL BULLSHIT.

Do the essays have a common theme? If so, what is it?

Rather than discerning the meaning of a man hanging upside down, what interests me is the meaning of a person that carries in their pocket the image of a man hanging upside down. Can we read the reading? Can we interpret the presence of the cartomancer as a sign in the world?

For 15 years I have read the tarot to the same woman almost every day, and each day we get one day closer to the present. One day, we will recognize in the cards the exact moment of recognizing ourselves in the cards.  The next day they will show us yesterday, and the day after, the day before yesterday. Beyond its fulfillment, every promise lives two lives, anticipation and remembrance. After reaching the future, the tarot will show us an increasingly distant past.

The notes show work with the tarot that does not focus on the operational aspects of a card reading but rather approaches that event from the point of view outlined in the previous paragraph.

Is there a takeaway that you’d like people to understand after reading the notes?

The notes begin with a method for reading playing cards that will free your memory and make your imagination supple.  Moreover, this is a method you can use to read anything, from fallen eyelashes to seashells. From then on, the essays amplify that gesture of lifting our eyes from the table to look at the world. The point is to impress that a deck of cards is a physical object whose cultural expectations override its symbolic content. The most significant image of all my essays is that of the tarot as a wedge that is inserted into reality to make it tilt.

We understand that Beautiful Bullshit is lecture notes. Can you share more information about the lecture?

The content of the notes, what I would be interested in developing in future lectures, is the idea of post-cartomancy, the practices that occur through a gesture of contagion magic, as our sustained exposure to the cards will eventually have our presence incarnate the tarot, and thus, we become the wedge that tilts reality.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. We look forward to working with you on future projects. We are also happy to support you by making Beautiful Bullshit available in our store!

We hope you enjoyed our interview. In the following weeks, we will share a new project with Enrique that will be the perfect companion to these notes. So, be sure to pick them up while they are still available.

Happy reading!

William Rader
Krisztin Kondor

About Enrique Enriquez

Enrique Enriquez is a rumor based in New York City whose work explores the magical value of language, birdsong, dreams, and the Tarot de Marseilles. He is the author of Tarology, (2011), considered the strangest book ever written about tarot, two interview books: EN TEREX IT & EX ITENT ER (2012), and Linguistick ( 2013), a volume of pataphysical poetry. His ideas are the central theme of TAROLOGY, the Poetics of tarot (2011), an independent feature film directed by Chris Deleo.