Reviewed: Refugia, Elfie Shiosaki, Magabala Books

My favourite tarot card is the Magician, the first card in the Major Arcana sequence. In the ubiquitous Rider-Waite design, the figure on the card points one hand skyward, while the other points to the ground—its symbolism has been widely interpreted as invoking the Hermetic axiom ‘as above, so below’.

Elsewhere, Jeanette Winterson in her oneiric novel Gut Symmetries (1997) lays her chapters out as one might a divination spread: a sequence of tarot cards charting the course for the love triangle’s journey that has already been mapped by the stars. In the prologue, she describes the ‘entrail-minded’ practice of medieval physician Paracelsus, who integrates ‘diagnosis by cosmology’, where ‘the zodiac in the sky is imprinted in the body’. Winterson quotes from his medical philosophies—‘the galaxa goes through the belly’—but the original continues: ‘not only the stars or the moon etc. constitute the heavens, but also there are stars in us, and these which are in us and which we do not see constitute the heavens also… the firmament is twofold, that of the heavens and that of the bodies’. To Paracelsus, the zodiac represents ‘linea lactea’—that there is a direct line from the gut to the galaxy and therefore to the heavens; as above, so below.