Mysteries and Tarot In Elka Ray’s ‘Killer Coin’

Guest post by author Elka Ray

Toby Wong, the main character of my Vancouver Island mystery series, is a divorce lawyer. She’s practical and highly skeptical of everything paranormal or New Agey. This leads to tension with her mom, Ivy, who reads tarot cards for a living.

This mom-daughter duo grew out of my own love-hate relationship with all things esoteric. My dad’s a scientist, as were most of my parents’ friends when I was little. Anything vaguely spiritual was suspect. Going to church would have been the ultimate act of teenage rebellion. Or maybe taking up crystal healing.

Strangely, my dad had a deck of tarot cards. Maybe he got them as a gag gift. Or maybe, despite himself, he found them oddly intriguing. I did. The images were both beautiful and creepy. Whether or not you believe in divination, these cards’ lasting appeal shows they tap into the human psyche.

Tarot cards didn’t start out as fortune-telling devices but as a parlor game in Italy in the late 1300s. This game involved suits that remain in the Tarot deck today – wands, coins, swords, and cups. By the mid-1400s, rich families were commissioning artists to paint personalized cards featuring portraits of family and friends.

By the late 1500s, the cards were being used to make simple predictions. Nothing helps a trend ignite like a conspiracy theory. In 1781, a French Freemason published an essay about Tarot, claiming it was based on ancient esoteric Egyptian secrets that the Catholics wanted to suppress. A lack of evidence didn’t stop anyone from believing. The Victorians loved all things occult. Tarot’s popularity exploded.

Today, the best-known Tarot deck is the Rider Waite deck, devised by the paranormal researcher AE Waite and painted by artist and clairvoyant Pamela Colman Smith in 1909. Like the Asian concept of Yin and Yang, these cards depict a balance of opposites – light cards like The Lovers and the Sun, and dark ones like The Devil and Death. Yet the meanings are less literal than they appear. Death, for instance, rarely represents a literal death, but the end of a relationship or phase, clearing the way for new initiatives and interests.

Carl Jung claimed the cards represented “archetypical ideas” that present “a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.”

This balance of opposites is key to my fiction. There’s always a dark mystery, which is solved thanks to hope, love, friendship, and community. Tarot gives us insight into life, human nature, and our deeper selves. And so do mystery stories.

Killer Coin releases on November 17th.