The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

that I wasn’t confident I would be able to survive in a job that demanded I live in the present.

One showed a woman in a golden dress clutching two bottles; the title read: Woman Dispensing Poisons from the Legend of Saint Germain of Paris, 1245–47.

I learned that the earliest extant record of tarot cards came from a 1442 accounting record from the d’Este family in Ferrara, and that Marziano da Tortona, the secretary and astrologer to Duke Filippo Maria Visconti of Milan, had been one of the first to write about the symbolism of the deck. I also discovered that while it was true that tarot had originally been a card game, it had been recorded as a divinatory device in Venice by 1527.

🔮

Seeing Leo be so joyously lawless had unlocked something in me: an enjoyment of chaos that had been building long before I came to New York. It was easy for someone like Rachel to look down on what Leo had done. The rules bent for people like her. There was invariably a workaround that could be bought or fixed with influence. It was, I thought, cowardly. What Leo had done took guts.