Page 24: Tarot and the Popular Culture Association

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as the Popular Culture Association, though they are more formally known as the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA).  And yes, they do have an annual panel/track each year devoted to Tarot and other methods of divination. Here is the current Call for Papers for their 2016 conference.

I’ve been a conference presenter on popular culture three times:

• twice on the Tarot panel at the PCA/ACA annual meetings in 2009 ("Examining the Collaboration and Innovation of the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot") and 2013 ("The Thoth Tarot Deck and Its Appearances across Forty Years of Popular Culture"),
• and once in 2006 for a general session of the regional Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association or MAPACA...not to be confused with the similarly-named Mid-Atlantic Alpaca Association.

Here is a complete list of Tarot presentations and presenters at PCA/ACA over the years. My two presentations on the Thoth Tarot are part of the two-volume multi-author anthology Tarot in Culture (2014), edited by the Tarot section’s long-time organizer, Emily E. Auger, who is also the author of Cartomancy and Tarot in Film 1940–2010 (in press), Tarot and Other Meditation Decks (2004), Tech Noir Film (2011), and The Way of Inuit Art (2005).

The two-volume anthology Tarot in Culture (2014) edited by Emily E. Auger contains my paper
"The Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot: Collaboration and Innovation," vol. 1, p. 129-186.
The appendix of my paper, which lists appearances of the Thoth Tarot in mainstream media,
has a virtual and continually-updated web presence at the Thoth Sightings page.

For the record, my colleague Dr. Auger is awesome and I would never ditch her session for a paper on comic books. I can’t say the same for Niels Belanger, though. He’s pretty quixotic.