Arcanum 17

André Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Percé 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 breathtaking in their passionate underlying belief in the indestructibility of life and the freedom of the human spirit.