Mars Review of Books Podcast · Mars Review of Books

John Pistelli & Noah Kumin on Tarot, Magic, Poetry, US Election, & Academia

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Grant Morrison and Alan Moore describe their comics as "magical spells" aimed at society.

The phone setup is awkward. Somehow, that works. It gives the episode the right loose doorway into tarot books, mystical lineages, and why the major arcana keeps pulling writers back in. The host starts with books, including an early tarot text that claims ties to Kabbalah and maps cards onto Hebrew letters. Pretty quickly, tarot stops sounding like a parlor trick and starts sounding like a narrative machine. Each card carries initiation, worldly order, and private transformation all at once. Then comics crash the seminar. Grant Morrison and Alan Moore enter as writers who described their work as magical action aimed at culture. The claim sounds ridiculous until it starts to feel practical. Fringe superhero comics from the 1980s and 1990s later echo through Christopher Nolan Batman movies, so the spell lands less metaphorically than expected. The conversation never cleans that up too much. It keeps asking whether artistic form can change society, for better and for worse, while refusing a tidy answer. Tarot becomes the hinge because its still images can be placed beside each other, reordered, and read spatially. That makes it feel closer to comics than to the linear novel. McLuhan gets pulled in from the side, and a blog post about cool art and hot art opens another route into media theory and influence. The book pitch arrives late: Major Arcana, an intergenerational family saga about an occultist comic book writer whose dark superhero visions change culture. It sounds ridiculous on purpose. The episode's charm is that it takes the ridiculous seriously, then keeps poking holes in it before it turns into doctrine. By the end, Substacks get praised, the title's pronunciation gets tossed around, and the whole thing slips out like a literary event that accidentally became a late-night call.

As heard by us

A phone-only Mars Review of Books conversation links tarot, comics, and occult theory through a brisk series of cultural references.

A phone-only Mars Review of Books exchange begins in tarot and opens into a broader meditation on how esoteric systems travel through culture.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want tarot theory with comics, occultism, and literary mischief.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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