A hand is holding a Tarot card, Five of Pentacles by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. The card depicts two people walking in the snow, wearing rags and visibly downtrodden. One is on crutches. Behind them is a glowing yellow church window with stained glass, including five pentacles. Behind the card is a desk, next to a window with three plants in variously sized pots, from left to right terra cotta, plastic and ceramic.
I’ve been thinking about ritual because we’re coming up on Spring. Ritual is structural by definition. It evolves with changing contexts, but is closed in a certain sense. Through repetition, it involves a degree of fidelity to another time and place.
I’ve been working to form some simple seasonal rituals that would align with what I understand ritual to be: Involving symbol, tied to earth cycles, and connective of the small self with something greater. Last year at Spring Equinox I invited friends over and told the grail legend around a fire. I’m thinking of doing something similar this year.
Because I’ve been studying narrative, I’m paying closer attention to the different kinds of stories that I like to work with. A personal narrative is distinct from the stories I collectively refer to as “old stories”—folktales, fairytales, myths, and legends—which I write a lot about. With old stories, I also love the ritual of oral telling.
I worry about these stories, though, too. Most of the ones I’ve worked with from western Europe and the northwestern Mediterranean are at the very least patriarchal, classist, often anti-Black, ableist and tend to glorify war and violence.
I’m able to work with these stories because I have a sense—as you may have noticed—that images and symbols, which are the language of things like old stories and Tarot are always up for interpretation. I generally don’t believe in predetermined meanings, and I see meaning itself as context-dependent. I’ve been this way since before I knew this was an entire worldview, with lots of precedent.
People tend to understand this perspective as meaning that something like a Tarot card or a symbol in a story can mean whatever you want or need it to mean. I definitely lean into post-structural practices that reject set meanings and universal truth claims, but I also bristle at comments like this. I hold on to the importance of having some degree of structure, and am curious about why that is.
In his book The Disappearance of Rituals, philosopher Byung-Chul Han is critical of excess openness, which he sees as posing problems for community and shared meaning. Too much openness renders closure impossible, and closure is important, writes Han, because it curbs the modern impulse to wander endlessly as well as the “continual escalation of expectations.”
His book is overtly anti-capitalist, and argues that both of these things—lack of closure and the “continual escalation of expectations”—are problematic because they make way for the unfettered circulation of “capital, commodities and information.” We exploit ourselves best, he writes, when we “remain open to everything.”
Before I name what I find useful about Han’s critique I have to counter it with this absolutely genius line by Judith Butler—from their preface to Gender Trouble—which says that “One might wonder what use ‘opening up possibilities’ finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is ‘impossible,’ illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.”
So while at times too extreme for my politics, I think critiques like Han's help me to understand why I find symbol-laden structures like old stories and Tarot so valuable despite the fact that they are so often saturated with problematic imagery.
Han is arguing for the value of structure and shared meaning. If you think of a story as linear, with a beginning, middle, and end—which you certainly don’t have to—then a story itself is a structure. And a structure could be valuable if it helps us to see what’s inside and what isn’t. A story—like a structure—has openings; holes where what’s outside can get in, and vice versa.
Say what you will about how problematic old tales tend to be, in narrative therapy a problem-saturated story is seen as a fertile starting point. Slowing way down and trying to get a real feel for a problem, by narrating—what the problem looks like, where it came from, how it makes someone think and feel about themselves, how it affects their relationships—is an important part of the process of untangling from problematic narratives and aligning with those we’d prefer.
This is because if you listen long enough and close enough to someone telling a story about a problem they’re wrestling with, there are going to be anomalies. Openings, moments that don’t match up with the assumption that the problem is dominant, one hundred percent of the time.
I might be telling a real juicy tale about what a control freak I am, for instance, but if you’re listening close enough to catch an easy-to-miss detail about how my routine got messed up yesterday and I laughed about it, that’s an opening. It’s a hole in the story about how the problem is all-encompassing, or who I am as a person. Problem stories are often studded with holes that lead to other worlds, worlds that are themselves forged and fortified by stories about how we’d prefer things to be.