Phantasmagoria and Tarot
The word phantasmagoria was born in the 18th century, originally describing magic lantern shows where ghostly images were projected onto walls and smoke. Crowds gathered in darkened rooms to witness a theater of specters—visions that shimmered between dream and nightmare. Over time, the meaning expanded to describe any shifting sequence of illusions, visions, or hallucinatory imagery.
Tarot, too, is a kind of phantasmagoria. Each card is like a lantern slide projected onto the psyche—archetypes and symbols that flicker, overlap, and dissolve into one another. To lay out a spread is to invite a procession of phantoms to pass before you, revealing not fixed truths, but ever-shifting images shaped by perception and intuition.
A tarot reading is not unlike stepping into one of those old shadow-shows: you are guided through a gallery of archetypal figures—the Lovers, the Hermit, the Devil—whose meanings transform depending on the light and context. The deck itself becomes a moving panorama of the inner world, a conjuring of both fear and wonder.
By naming this work the Phantasmagoria Deck, the intention is to honor tarot’s dreamlike quality—the way it gathers fragments of myth, memory, and imagination into a sequence of living images. It is a reminder that the cards are not static objects, but living visions, constantly shifting in meaning, forever blurring the line between illusion and revelation.
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