Can These Dots Find Connection?

I don't know if you are familiar with Italo Calvino's 1973 novel "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" (Il castello dei destini incrociati). It's the story of several travelers who meet at a castle for a night. They cannot use their voices to communicate, so they tell their stories to eachother through decks of Tarot cards. Somewhat like the Richard Wilhelm translation of the "I Ching," which has a couple of different versions of the Book of Changes within it, Calvino's story is told with two different decks, the Visconti pack and the Tarot of Marseilles.(On a slightly non-sequitur note, in Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," Childermass creates his own version of the Marseilles deck on the backs of receipts, business cards and the like, and teaches himself to read Tarot.) Calvino's book explores how meaning is created and how events can be interpreted through words and symbolic imagery like tarot cards. And like Tarot cards, Calvino's work can be read on many levels, achieving different intepretations to suit the mindset of the reader.


Calvino's "Castle of Crossed Destinies was influenced by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" which was in turn inspired Boccaccio's "Decameron." Boccaccio was familiar with numerology systems like isopsephy and featured it in his "Decameron." Isopsephy is the ancient practice of assigning numerical values to words and adding the numbers up to discover the number the word represents. In Hebrew, its correlation is Gematria, which uses the Hebrew alphabet. Scientific theories are sometimes labeled numerology if their inspiration appears to be a set of patterns, like atomic triads (which denote elements mostly in the same group or column of the periodic table).
Many alchemical theories also closely related to numerology...I wonder if any of this can be used in American Decameron...