We rather enjoyed this preview of an anthology of plus centuries of divinical card decks (see previously for more on the subject) surveyed in the upcoming coffee table, conversation piece book Tarot from Taschen.
Over five hundred cards are featured from Antiquity, to the Middle Ages to Post-Modern times whose iconic symbolism is enchanting on so many levels and we particularly liked these contemporary interpretations from Olivia M Healy whose Fool, classically depicted as someone standing on the edge of a precipice and usually is understood to signify a point of departure, is evocative of spiritedness associated with Carnival. The Pre-Raphaelite vision of Treviso-based graphic artist Elissabetta Trevisan’s Justice, meaning probity and prevailing of the virtuous, was also quite arresting. Learn more at Colossal at the link up top.
Sunday 9 August 2020
major arcana
catagories: ๐, ๐จ, ๐, ๐ง , myth and monsters
Sunday 19 April 2020
mister resetti
A talented cartomancer called Silkirose is creating a tarot deck (see also here, here, here, here, here and here) whose Major Arcana, greater secrets, features characters from Animal Crossing.
Admittedly while I like the idea of social simulations in video games, world-building and civic-engineering, the social platform and the idea of inhabiting that world with others is kind of a turn-off, though this title from Nintendo (see previously) with all its possibilities for mirroring the real life does seem worthwhile, worth looking into and genuinely relieving.
Wednesday 25 March 2020
8x8
paperback writer: the cinematic portfolio of Matt Stevens in old book covers, via Things magazine
live-feed: snapshots of deserted public places around the world gleaned from web cams, via Kottke
social distance: the inspiring latest torch song from Randy Rainbow, via Miss Cellania
๐ค : lone security guard of the National Cowboy Museum virtually engages his visitors
๐ท: the origins of surgical masks and respirators
they laugh and love: John Carpenter announces sequels to his 1988 sci-fi thriller
major arcana: an automated tarot reader that seems to never have gotten off the drawing board
still buffering: the lagging evolution of the video teleconference
Thursday 7 November 2019
minor arcana
For the eighteenth iteration of James Bond in the film Live and Let Die (1973), producer Albert Romolo Broccoli (not to be confused with an Alan Smithee credit, a pseudonym adopted by individuals wanting to disown the movie) commissioned from Salvador Dalรญ a deck of tarot cards to be used as a prop for a pivotal scene featuring a psychic played by Jane Seymour. Over budget, the studio went with another artist in the end but Dalรญ nonetheless completed his assignment, limning all the seventy-eight trump and numbered suites.
Saturday 26 October 2019
8x8
best in breed: national banks in Turkmenistan under presidential decree to fund efforts to enhance the pedigree of the country’s Alabay dog
call of the wild: scientist record the mating sounds of the Amazonian bellbird, which can exceed the noise-level of a chainsaw at very close-range
zodiac killer: a treasury of Persian demons
not the doral: Number One Daughter celebrates her tenth wedding anniversary at Camp David
yip yip: a couple’s admirably coordinated costumes
major arcana: Salvador Dalรญ’s tarot deck re-issued
augmented roman: a truly phonetic-spelling reform measure for the English language, bringing the alphabet up to forty-three distinct letters
roaming costs: researchers tracking migrating Russian eagles are hit with hefty data tariffs once the birds cross borders, via Slashdot
catagories: ๐ท๐บ, ๐, ๐จ, ๐ฌ, ๐บ, environment, holidays and observances, myth and monsters
Monday 21 October 2019
ten of dowels
Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are introduced to the handiwork of a creative called Hundred-Armed Sweater (that would be for the Hecatonkherires on your gift-list) through her IKEA-inspired tarot deck, recognising that the store and experience represents “a place of transition, a journey, a source of light and comfort but also strife.” The deck includes the major and four full suites of minor arcana.
catagories: ๐, ๐️, lifestyle, myth and monsters
Saturday 23 March 2019
the queen of wands
We are directed to an exhibit that divines the often unattributed illustrator responsible for the most iconic and authoritative suites of tarot cards in existence out of obscurity and back into the prominence deserving of an individual that designed a deck that’s sold millions and the subject of frequent homage (see also here, here and here).
Pamela Colman Smith (*1878 – †1951)—who also went by the nickname of Pixie—was the amanuensis and muse of scholarly mystic Arthur Edward Waite (*1857 – †1942), to whom Smith was introduced by William Butler Yeats whilst working on commissions by the poet and playwright by mutual membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society heavily into theurgy and cartomancy. Not to be pigeonholed only with the occult, Smith, aside from illustrating the works of Yeats, Bram Stoker and others also lent her talents to creating protest posters for the woman’s suffrage movement and for relief campaigns during the war for the Red Cross. In 1909, she interpreted Waite’s Key to Tarot in visual form and managed to produce eight refined pictures in the course of six months—two more cards than the standard major and minor arcana of seventy-eight with it being a mystery what those extraneous cards represented. Much more to explore at Hyperallergic at the link above.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐, libraries and museums, myth and monsters
Sunday 6 January 2019
7x7
personality, wessonality: spot the celebrities at the 1986 All Star Party for Clint Eastwood
spargelzeit: a little education can be empowering for keeping the resolution to eat healthier, fresher foods
urban density: exploring the crowded high-rises of Hong Kong
ikumen: the rise of the Japanese hot dads is changing the traditional roles of parenting for the better
rubisco: botanists tinker with photosynthesis to make the process more efficient
fishbit and half-wit: an assortment of the dumbest smart gadgets premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) technology expo
minor arcana: the Tarot deck-like miniatures of Robert Coutelas
Monday 3 December 2018
deuces
In 1975, in order to honour a Rosetta Stone level breakthrough in ethno-linguistics by epigrapher Yuiry Valentinovich Knorozov (*1922 - †1999), the state-run printworks of the USSR issued a special edition of playing cards decorated with Mayan priestesses and chieftains and hieroglyphs.
Knorozov, who as part of the vanguard advancing into Berlin at the closing stages of World War II happened to rescue a rare manuscript from a burning university library—the Dresden Codex—one of the then-known three extant codices of Mayan script and named for its permanent home (having been spirited away with other treasures from the fire-bombed city)—a discovery that would go on to inform and inspire his career as an ethnographer specialising in Mesoamerican studies, realised in 1952 that the symbols were representational and phonetic and could consult modern, spoken Maya as a guide. Learn more and see more of the deck at Atlas Obscura at the link up top.
Thursday 12 July 2018
minor arcana
Via Boing Boing, we’re treated to a suite of Tarot cards generated with a procedural, algorithmic model that is similar to the technique used in video games to create virtual universes and randomised, extended landscapes and textures. This demonstration from developer Watabou was an entrant to a symposium dedicated to exploring the craft of making software that makes things.
Thursday 30 November 2017
four of pentacles
Well prior to digital image editing, art student Bea Nettles undertook in the early 1970s the project of creating the first complete tarot card deck in photographic form. The Mountain Dream Tarot was an inspired vision and the resulting suits, not just the trump cards of the major arcana—improvised, intuitive and idiosyncratic but following the standard, established iconography—evoke a haunting feeling in keeping with the esoteric nature of cartomancy and employ models, props and backdrops from Appalachia.
The fifty six cards of the minor arcana (whose production must have been painstaking and required dedication and planning) are the wands symbolising the peasant class and the faculties of creativity and willpower, the coins or pentacles representing the merchants and material possessions and physical health, the cups or chalices of the clergy for emotion and love and finally the swords of the nobility or the executive that represent reason. Be sure to check out the link up top for more information and to see a whole gallery of the cards.
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ท, sport and games
Friday 3 November 2017
major arcana
catagories: ๐, ๐, networking and blogging
Tuesday 23 February 2016
royal-flush or en suite
After rioting and much public discontent of Fuad I of Egypt’s particular penchant for exercising his royal prerogative and dissolving parliament when it was seen encroaching on his power finally convinced the king to restore the previous constitution that brought Egypt and the Suez back under the control of British influence, reportedly he lamented that soon there will only be five royal houses in the near future, “Britain—and diamonds, aces, hearts and spades.” If not for an interesting and informative article from Mental Floss, I would never have suspected that King Fuad’s vote of no confidence might be referencing a contemporary craze in the 1930s that was promoted by an Austrian psychiatrist called Walter Marseille who thought the additional cards—comprising a deck of sixty-five—would make games—bridge specifically, more challenging and engaging. The fifth suit of the English tarot nouveau was the Crowns or the Royals (Eagles in American decks). Though Marseille’s theory of skill-building through gaming didn’t quite catch on, his other works (let’s play global thermal war) involving higher stakes had lasting influence in weapons disarmament and peace-keeping.
Sunday 1 November 2015
arcana and hour-glass
The esoteric roots of the Third Reich—which misappropriated and ruined a lot of heretofore widespread symbolism—was based in a selective but seemingly innocent cultural revival and revanche of Germanic interest after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire that began with the folk- and linguistic studies of the Brothers Grimm. Once a lexical tradition—though borrowed and forced to fit a unified agenda, a practise perpetuated to awful extremes in just a short amount of time, other aspiring mystics found niches that could be capitalised upon in similar ways.
As nationalist sentiments simmered, parlour-games like astrology and divination seemed to be too entrenched with foreign influence and a domestic, German versions of the signs of the zodiac and tarot-readings (and the I-Ching) was readily adopted. The individual responsible for this new set of symbols was an Austrian occultist named Guido von List, who became obsessed with the cult of Odin. Stricken with cataracts, von List identified himself more and more with the Norse god, who had traded one eye for wisdom and insight, when a surgery left him temporarily blind for a period of almost year. During this time, von List found the meaning of the runic alphabet revealed to him and subsequently published his pamphlet on the Armanen Runen, which while based on the established signs, widely distorted their accepted meanings. Most familiar and infamous, the swastika was an international symbol, maybe one of the Indo-European people’s most ancient and enduring symbols, that meant “gift” or good-luck, almost universally. The English term for Hakenkreuz (the hooked cross or the cross with serifs) retains the original Sanskrit meaning of good fortune, which almost makes it seem as if the symbol were defamed twice over.
The dual lightening-bolts that came to represent the Schutzstaffel (the SS) singularly represented the sun and not victory (Sieg), as von List attributed being unable to foresee the consequences. The interpretation gets even more far-fetched with the Hagal rune—แผ being the sign for hail or a snowflake enlisted, strangely, as a mark of solidarity and faith. The rune for a yew-tree which originally connoted a measure of protection was somewhat sequitur associated with the pharmaceutical arts (as was displayed on the apothecary shingle for many years) but then แ (Algiz) was expanded as the Lebensrune to indicate life and parturition and its inverted form แฆ was forwarded to mean death. The sign was the badge of those charged with administering the Lebensborn programme and became a common way on headstones to indicate date of birth and date of death, instead of the traditional * and ✝. The above snowflake rune, Hagal, was accorded with the high-status of signifying fidelity because it contained both life and death. Despite the dubious and engineered heritage, masses of people took this home-spun fortune-telling and the trappings of new iconography very seriously and as a source of national identity, and once a new regime adopted these badges of power, they already had an air of legitimacy.
Thursday 1 October 2015
the devil and the deep blue sea
If you have not yet treated yourself to the absolutely edifying oblectation of Futility Closet series of podcasts, I strongly recommend you began with their latest instalment on the forgotten story of gentleman merchant raider of World War I, Felix Graf von Luckner. This swash-buckling villain has been overshadowed by other semi-legendary figures of the time—like the Red Baron, but was turned hero for his humanity and persecuting war without causalities. Posing as a Norwegian logging vessel, Luckner’s captained his crew of privateers in a somewhat anchronistic sailing ship called the Seeadler through the supply lines of the Atlantic, confounding materiel delivery and treating his hostages as friends—a sentiment that was reciprocated, but that’s only the barest outline of the tale. It’s definitely worth working backwards as well to catch up on all the engrossing episodes.
Thursday 30 April 2015
major arcana or juju guru
Wednesday 25 February 2015
howling fantods
The inexhaustibly fascinating Dangerous Minds features a look at the major arcana of a suite of tarot cards conceived by the brilliant artist Edward Gorey, who gave us the lovable in the macabre.
The cards are not properly prognosticating ones, however, as they all represent different aspects of our internal fantods, a word more than for the nonce, that describes our worries and anxieties and irritations and bode no hope for a bright and uplifting fortune. For instance, drawing the Feather can be interpreted to forecast obstacles of a most pernicious nature—including, rather specifically, blackmail, a forged passport, intestinal discomfort, and loss of eyelashes (which is called madarosis). The horror. Be sure to check out the link for more backstory and augury, and Dangerous Minds in general for some veteran discoveries.