Arcane 17

Andre Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Perce Rock - its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty - as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream. In the 17th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, a naked woman beneath a sky of stars pours water from two urns into water and onto land. This card represents hope, renewal and resurrection - the themes that permeate Arcanum 17. Considered radical at the time, Breton's ideas today seem almost prescient, yet still breath-taking in their passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit.