King of Wands. Art by Celeste Pille, from The American Renaissance Tarot.
Herman Melville
“For all of the project’s Kings we’ve created elemental fantasy scapes — we put Poe in outer space (Air) and indulged Hawthorne with a mermaid (Water). For this image, I was inspired by Melville’s ‘Encantadas,’ essays about the Galápagos Islands. After making a literary inventory of the inhospitable terrain and its chief inhabitant — the Iguana! — Melville concludes, 'In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist.' Melville’s Gnostic sensibility is balanced by the rich humor he finds in the absurdity of the human experience: what else can it be but a joke to house an immortal soul in a mortal body? A Leo with a Sagittarius Moon, Melville’s creative fire birthed the epic Moby-Dick. But he was most famous in his times for a novel called Typee, based in part on his own experience 'going native' in the Marquesas islands. We sought to visually free Melville of the repressive sexual mores of his times, and represent that he was most “himself” when not in America. Melville shocked his mid-nineteenth-century American audience by finding much to praise about the Pacific Island culture of Nuku Hiva.” — Thea Wirsching
