tarot project
Jun. 6th, 2003 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashI'm committed, to some degree, to this little Tarot project - I've spent actual money on it now.
After getting home from work today, I wandered out to look for reference. First I hit one of the used bookstores; they had a shelf for Tarot books in the magic/mysticism section, but none of them appealed to me - they were either big thick guides to a particular modern interpretation, or seemed to be pretty much a watering-down of the Crowley book and other Golden Dawn Tarot-hacking. My intended method is to use references that disagree, not ones that imitate each other.
So I wandered over to Borders and went to the magic/religion section there. Most of the books seemed to be the same, except that when they're new, the books on a particular modern Tarot deck are packaged with their deck. Then I found one called 'Magical Tarot, Mystical Tao' that met my criteria: it covered all the cards, not just the Major Arcana or just the court cards; it was not terribly pricey; the introduction contains a brief overview of the history of the cards, and the section on Golden Dawn Kabalah/Tarot connecting politely suggests that this connection is a load of hooey.
This book relates each of the 78 Tarot cards to one of the 81 poems in the Tao Te Ching. The first, forty-first, and final poems of the Tao are not coupled with a card. The author is careful to note that the connections she draws are not set in stone; she's merely arranging these two philosophical mirrors to face each other.
I also decided to pick up William Gibson's new book, "Pattern Recognition". Though I would normally wait for the paperback, it seemed like an appropriate pairing.
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prickvixen has said she has a deck of Tarot cards, and offered them for my use, but I think I will decline: almost every book I flipped through emphasized that you must not ever allow anyone to handle your deck, save perhaps for cutting it when you're doing a reading for them. There's a component of performance in this project, since I will be trusting my choice of cards to illustrate to randomness/synchronicity/et cetera rather than choosing several whose meanings appeal to me; if I'm going to do that, I feel that taking the whole thing seriously is important, at least for the space of time in which I select the cards.
Thus, I will be buying a couple packs of common playing cards some time tomorrow, throwing away half the second pack, editing the remaining half into Knights and Major Arcana, and giving an orientation to the entire set. This will be accomplished by writing things like 'XXI WORLD' or 'KNIGHT' with a black Prismacolor marker, and adding an upwards-pointing arrow to every card. This, I feel, is walking the proper line between reverence and irreverence.
I looked at the selection of Tarot decks available at Borders and was bemused. There's an endless proliferation. Tarot of the Witches. Tarot of the Dwarves. A reproduction of the Visconti-Sforza deck from the Renaissance tempting but $22 due to a single-atom-thin gold leaf. Mary Hansen-Roberts' Tarot. Tarot of the Dragons. The Waite version. The Crowley version. Arthurian Tarot. A superhero tarot. Tarot of the Magic Nose Goblins. Okay, I'm lying about that one. Maybe I should suggest that to Kevin as a totally absurd piece of R&S merchandise. And then you get into the hybrids - Brian Froud's Faery Divination Cards. Two varieties of Medicine Cards. Mayan Divination Cards. All ranging from sixteen to twenty-five dollars a deck. All, with the exception of ones that were mass-produced before the days of mechanical four-color separation, little paintings of various levels of quality. If I did go mad enough to make a Tarot deck, it would be as out of place as my work is on Epilogue - same subject, completely alien interpretation.
Also, while i was contemplating the use-roomie's-deck/buy one/make my own decision at the bus stop on the way home, a bird shat on my head.
After getting home from work today, I wandered out to look for reference. First I hit one of the used bookstores; they had a shelf for Tarot books in the magic/mysticism section, but none of them appealed to me - they were either big thick guides to a particular modern interpretation, or seemed to be pretty much a watering-down of the Crowley book and other Golden Dawn Tarot-hacking. My intended method is to use references that disagree, not ones that imitate each other.
So I wandered over to Borders and went to the magic/religion section there. Most of the books seemed to be the same, except that when they're new, the books on a particular modern Tarot deck are packaged with their deck. Then I found one called 'Magical Tarot, Mystical Tao' that met my criteria: it covered all the cards, not just the Major Arcana or just the court cards; it was not terribly pricey; the introduction contains a brief overview of the history of the cards, and the section on Golden Dawn Kabalah/Tarot connecting politely suggests that this connection is a load of hooey.
This book relates each of the 78 Tarot cards to one of the 81 poems in the Tao Te Ching. The first, forty-first, and final poems of the Tao are not coupled with a card. The author is careful to note that the connections she draws are not set in stone; she's merely arranging these two philosophical mirrors to face each other.
I also decided to pick up William Gibson's new book, "Pattern Recognition". Though I would normally wait for the paperback, it seemed like an appropriate pairing.
prickvixen has said she has a deck of Tarot cards, and offered them for my use, but I think I will decline: almost every book I flipped through emphasized that you must not ever allow anyone to handle your deck, save perhaps for cutting it when you're doing a reading for them. There's a component of performance in this project, since I will be trusting my choice of cards to illustrate to randomness/synchronicity/et cetera rather than choosing several whose meanings appeal to me; if I'm going to do that, I feel that taking the whole thing seriously is important, at least for the space of time in which I select the cards.Thus, I will be buying a couple packs of common playing cards some time tomorrow, throwing away half the second pack, editing the remaining half into Knights and Major Arcana, and giving an orientation to the entire set. This will be accomplished by writing things like 'XXI WORLD' or 'KNIGHT' with a black Prismacolor marker, and adding an upwards-pointing arrow to every card. This, I feel, is walking the proper line between reverence and irreverence.
I looked at the selection of Tarot decks available at Borders and was bemused. There's an endless proliferation. Tarot of the Witches. Tarot of the Dwarves. A reproduction of the Visconti-Sforza deck from the Renaissance tempting but $22 due to a single-atom-thin gold leaf. Mary Hansen-Roberts' Tarot. Tarot of the Dragons. The Waite version. The Crowley version. Arthurian Tarot. A superhero tarot. Tarot of the Magic Nose Goblins. Okay, I'm lying about that one. Maybe I should suggest that to Kevin as a totally absurd piece of R&S merchandise. And then you get into the hybrids - Brian Froud's Faery Divination Cards. Two varieties of Medicine Cards. Mayan Divination Cards. All ranging from sixteen to twenty-five dollars a deck. All, with the exception of ones that were mass-produced before the days of mechanical four-color separation, little paintings of various levels of quality. If I did go mad enough to make a Tarot deck, it would be as out of place as my work is on Epilogue - same subject, completely alien interpretation.
Also, while i was contemplating the use-roomie's-deck/buy one/make my own decision at the bus stop on the way home, a bird shat on my head.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 12:11 am (UTC)Tell me when you start finding the connections between Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Rosicrucians, and the Animal Liberation Front. We have much to talk about...
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 12:25 am (UTC)All of the connections should be self-evident, especially when you remember that the ALF is known to chant "OO EE OO AA AA, TING TANG WALLA WALLA BING BANG". The symbolism is absolutely transparant to the Adept.
Actually, I haven't read either of the books I picked up today. I had pizza and engaged in some enthusiastic, and quietly kinky TS with my wolfy.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 11:46 am (UTC)I hadn't ever gone looking for stuff on their history before; I just vaguely knew that they were related to 'normal' playing cards, and that the Greater Arcana were chock full of archetypal meaning, or have accreted said meaning over the ages.
They were probably made as entertainment for the rich in the Rennaisance, as far as I can tell.
Around the turn of the century, they became hip with a bunch of English mystics, who proclaimed them to be Ancient Egyptian Secrets on (as far as I can tell) very little evidence. Egyptian history was in vogue then. These guys remixed the things obsessively, making overt the deep symbolism they claimed to see at a subliminal level in the cards, crossing it with the annoyingly complex Kabala, numerology, proto-psychology, and whatever else they thought was Deep Secret Meaning.
That's pretty much the history, as I understand it. Like anything mystical and magical, there's a lot of exaggerated claims of importance and ancientness. I'm sure there's someone out there who claims that not only do they predate the Egyptians, they predate the entire history of life on Earth.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 11:02 am (UTC)But I like the card pack idea.
Why not get FLUXX blanks or some such?
Wait, that would be more expensive. Never mind!
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 11:26 am (UTC)We make more money that waySomeone else touching it will interfere with the link between you and your deck.I was thinking about blanks for an expandable card game, but couldn't find any in immediate reach, and suspected that seventy-eight blanks would cost a lot more than any pre-made solution.
I'm also tempted to just write a tiny little program that will spit out non-repeating random numbers from one to seventy-eight... I could do it fairly easily, I'm sure, but that just feels wrong.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 08:45 pm (UTC)He never had any qualms about letting other people play with them. Generally you seemed to do better the longer you handled them. He'd just wrap them up neatly in a scarf afterward to store them. How you kept them when not in use was apparently more important than who touched them. The only thing that he got flaky about with them was you couldn't use them near, or keep them by, another set of tarot cards. Apparently they interfered with each other.
The other odd thing he came up with was you should never buy yourself Tarot cards. Either make them or have someone else give you a set, they'll be more accurate.
He was a strange man. I make no claim to accuracy here.
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 11:56 am (UTC)Now re-reading the above, I sound, to me, like one of those crazy dancing-naked-in-the-moonlight women with 75 silver pieces of jewelry draped all over my being that practices magqyick in the lyghte of the fulle moone. So, just to assuage my own embarrassment at my new-agey witchiness, I think I'll start a mosh pit in my living room. :)
no subject
Date: 2003-06-07 12:20 pm (UTC)I feel more embarassed browsing through books on mysticism than I would browsing through porn.