Detail of the Magician. The American Renaissance Tarot.
Thea Wirsching and The American Renaissance Tarot
By Mark Storer
For Thea Wirsching, literature has always been a way to connect to others, to “bridge social divides,” as she writes in the introduction to her work, The American Renaissance Tarot. Wirsching has created a uniquely American tarot deck that seeks to bridge social divides while also ringing with an American spirit that she believes has been long forgotten.
Wirsching said her adolescence included several fortunate classroom experiences that led her on the path toward creating the new tarot deck. In high school, her English teacher provided her a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and it connected to other female African-American writers she’d read, like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Wirsching was led to the UCLA library by the same teacher, where she read more about Hurston and her use and sometime practice of Hoodoo and Voodoo. “Little did my teacher know that I had grown up in the city adjacent to Eatonville, Florida, the town whose early twentieth-century history Hurston tells in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” wrote Wirsching in the introduction to The American Renaissance Tarot. “Here again I was transported to a different time and a different worldview by a book…”
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Wirsching said her adolescence included several fortunate classroom experiences that led her on the path toward creating the new tarot deck. In high school, her English teacher provided her a copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and it connected to other female African-American writers she’d read, like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Wirsching was led to the UCLA library by the same teacher, where she read more about Hurston and her use and sometime practice of Hoodoo and Voodoo. “Little did my teacher know that I had grown up in the city adjacent to Eatonville, Florida, the town whose early twentieth-century history Hurston tells in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” wrote Wirsching in the introduction to The American Renaissance Tarot. “Here again I was transported to a different time and a different worldview by a book…”
Subscribe to the New PRS Journal to read on...
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