Might as well note that you can buy a deck of blank, standard-sized Tarot cards from Amazon (or U.S. Games, or some occult shops).

I've never completed a deck (or even the Major Arcana), but creating each card can be a real learning experience.

Hey anyone know where to get the Shadow Tarot deck? I got this bug in my ass to start working with the tunnels of Set again but it seems impossible to locate the deck.. Any thoughts? Besides Google..

I know this might flippant but right now I truly wish there existed a Twin Peaks tarot deck. There's something about Lynchian Archetypes that grabs my unconscious and does a little freaky ass dance of powerful meaning. Maybe I should get the blank deck Evan posted and do some clip art...

I dunno, Lynch might be into a Lynchian tarot if he and his were consulted first obv.

Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me.

OR

Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see.
One chance out between two worlds
Fire walk with me.

Back again - sorry, life got in the way of things again!

Anyway, just wanted to update the tarot thread. I've been feeling the pull of voodoo/vodoun recently and am about to embark on a bit of a reading recon of the subject by rereading Deren, and getting into some others. So I thought that picking up the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot might be a good way of getting knowledge to sink into my head a little faster.

Has anyone had any experience with this deck?

I have a copy of the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot for very similar reasons, actually - I know Tarot, and thought it might be a way to understand things a bit better. I do like it for study, but never try using it for general readings so far.

I'm a little baffled by the Fire suit - are all Petro really "La Flambeau"? That seems strange to me...

Otherwise I do like it but find it strangely daunting to work with.

--Ember--

Grant: yeah, I know what you mean. I think it's something I'll use as a tool to learn (maybe?) and then perhaps not use so much when I have my head around the idea. (Assuming that ever happens...) I'm reading a lot and will see what happens from there.

Just a query about retiring decks: have you mob ever had to? Some of my Universal Waites are looking much the worse for wear, and though they don't feel much different (though I do sometimes go "ick" when I see certain manky cards) it prompted the thought: are decks ever retired? Or binned? Or whut? Have you ever had to replace an ole faithful with a pristine version? How did it make you feel?

I have had very similar results with the deviant moon tarot, it really speaks to me and so far is very accurate.

I just couldn't resist...
I placed an order for the Deviant Moon & the Alchemical.
So excited! :D

CaptainFez:Just a query about retiring decks: have you mob ever had to? Some of my Universal Waites are looking much the worse for wear, and though they don't feel much different (though I do sometimes go "ick" when I see certain manky cards) it prompted the thought: are decks ever retired? Or binned? Or whut? Have you ever had to replace an ole faithful with a pristine version? How did it make you feel?

Great question, I was wondering that myself.
I can't imagine retiring my Thoth deck, as they're like an old friend to me. But if pressed, I suppose my first impulse would be to 1) break in the new deck (exact match if possible) with the old deck present, like training a puppy. Then 2) offer the old deck to the elements: ie, burn them à la sacred bonfire, like a cremation, then scattered on the wind, air and earth. Or maybe I'm just over thinking it......

I gave away a deck once rather than retire it. It was kind of beaten up but still useable - mostly I just felt like it was time to move on. And it's kind of haunted me ever since. I actually forgot that I'd given it away and kept looking for it for quite a while before remembering. I now follow Ember's method of just wrapping the deck up and putting it away, at least for any deck I've really used. I would still probably give away a deck I just never connected with in the first place, but I wouldn't destroy one short of serious exigent circumstances.

I'm still trying to find a Tarot that I can really connect with; I've been using the Rider Waite, and that one's alright, but it doesn't really speak to me, y'know? I feel like I'm reading and trying to interpret a little too hard sometimes, rather than knowing, if that makes sense.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everybody: am still pondering what to do. I'm enjoying reading with it - it's a come-and-go thing with me, it seems, this feeling of impending deck retirement.

Blue Eyes: how long have you been reading? I know from my experience that it took me a long time to feel at home with the cards.

I think a lot of it is learning to trust what you're thinking or feeling when you pull cards.

I've reached the point now where I have an intrinsic vibe off most of my home deck's cards - at least to the point where if I'm confused and pull the Pollack off the shelf to clarify, I can discard the bits that I feel don't apply to the situation.

Cards keep me on my toes, but I'm feeling a little more comfortable with them. They're like an occasionally spiky flatmate.

CaptainFez:
Cards keep me on my toes, but I'm feeling a little more comfortable with them. They're like an occasionally spiky flatmate.

Hah, yes! The friend who will always tell you when your bum looks big in that, no edging around the subject!

Egypt Urnash:I made my own last year. It is not actually done quite yet - there are two extra Fools to do and a few other additions that I need to decide if I'm serious about them or not - but it speaks to me a lot more than any other deck I've ever seen. (The World Spirit is the only other one I've seen whose art even begins to connect to me.)

It tends to come off as a bit of a smart-ass sometimes, but at least it speaks my language instead of being full of a bunch of medievalist painterly fantasy art that just leaves me cold. (The smart-assery might be inherited from me, or maybe from Uncle Al - Crowley's book on the deck he and Frieda Harris did was one of my primary sources.)

Making said deck is, thus far, the only magical undertaking I've followed through with. It came about after fooling around and casting a whimsical spell for generalized 'successful artist' stuff; a few months later I found myself working on it, then ended up having my first gallery show due to it. I still haven't decided if these things have anything to do with each other or not.

WOW!

Small internet.

*glomp*

I am very interested in your finishing the 99s. I was hoping they would work for meta social level messages, with which we as internet people get every day. A few centuries ago, a volcano would go off in the Mediterranean and other than some gorgeous sunsets, us here in the colonies wouldn't know about it until a newspaper made it over on a boat. And the boat would dock in one of our largest cities - which would fit in a neighborhood of our cities now. As individuals, we are not necessarily more globally focused than oooooh Ben Franklin, but we are more forced into deciding if we want to look outward and think in masses, and our tools are much better if we do look outside a monkeysphere number of what? (50-350? What is the fission size of a yamamamo village?) Traditional decks do not necessarily have a mentally tackling huge masses of humanity symbol other than the kingship/clergy level of the higher arcana High Priestess, Empress, Emperor, Heirophant and I am looking forward to that mass level of awareness moving down out of the higher arcana the way being literate and worldly is now much more accessible.

But I digress. I have OPINIONS about archetype and empathy as coping mechanisms for daily dealing with way more people than we are biologically built to handle. Insert discussion about it not being a coincidence that Quan Yin is a product of an ancient urban society here. And if you want to gank this as a start off to drop some content into your Tarot Deck LJ - paste away!

I'm interested in the comments that have been made about the Aquarian Tarot because I had no idea it was that old... the Aquarian is my primary deck and really the only one I've done much work with. I saw an image of the Temperance card somewhere and instantly fell in love - the style combines dark, intense line work with an earthy, muted color scheme and for some reason that really clicks for me. It's the deck I would have designed if I had time to do a whole deck. Somehow even though it's not as florid and art-nouveau the line work makes me think of Aubrey Beardsley (who I love). After seeing the Temperance card but not being able to remember what the deck was called I went on a desperate search and when I finally found the deck I bought it immediately. It lives in a box on my nightstand in a gold drawstring bag inside a velvet-lined, hinged turtle shell that is exactly the right size for it.

I also have a very cute miniature Rider-Waite travel deck, and what I always thought was a Thoth deck but now realize is a third-edition Golden Dawn deck, but have not worked at all with either. They belonged to the late wife of my step-father, and came to me when my mother was clearing some of her old stuff out of the house a few years after they got married.

I'm not altogether comfortable with them, I think largely because the circumstances of their previous owner's passing kind of freak me out - she vanished without a trace on a camping trip with my step-dad and was never found - which is the sort of thing that is creepifying even though the area was the sort of place where things like that do happen (rough terrain, backpacking far off established trails, known predators like cougars and bears around). Aside from that, the Rider-Waite deck is in sad shape and sort of an awkward size for shuffling, and I find the GD deck rather intimidating - it has this "not-for-beginners" feel to it, and I still consider myself quite the novice reader. So mostly those two just sit in their little boxes.

Interestingly, the same woman who owned those two decks made the turtle-shell box that contains my Aquarian Deck, and I have no qualms about using that - of course, it was given to me by my step-dad before he married my mother.

Being a drawing-and-sketching sort, I did try to design a deck myself once, but the first and only card I actually completed was the Tower card, which probably doomed the whole enterprise. Actually, that card was included in my contribution to the Barbelith Creation's Second Wandering Notebook (aka the Blue Book). I'm rather afraid that may be part of why the book subsequently vanished.

The Carnegie-Mellon Tarot?

Oh, man. TAROT OF STEEL!!

Are there any other locally oriented tarot decks out there? I think part of the mystique, historically, is that they were Italian cards that were attributed to Egyptian sources. In other words, they gained power from being localized to Egypt. I suppose, of all things, the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot goes overboard with being tied to New Orleans mystery traditions. There's one... is it the Cosmic Tribe one? No, but one with a similar name... that breaks the suits up by continent/indigenous people, so I think wands are all African and cups are all South American or something.

Oh, but I can picture one based on city lore. So many stories....

EDIT TO ADD: Oh. The Aeclectic site has plenty of "regional" decks... definitely an idea. Heh, I wonder if this one has any Prisoner references.

Ooo, you know what we need? A LN tarot! A cross-regional deck, with photos of local places. There's a wild falling down folly near me that would make a fantastic Tower...

I just got my gift! http://www.urnash.com/tarot/ They are GORGEOUS! The display on the monitor really doesn't do any justice to the gradients I can now see in the printing. And I adore the palette. It makes my little arts & crafts movement heart go pitter pat. And one more of the Fools was recently worked up, and the timing was lucky so I even get a Fool I can really identify with. YES! I don't know how well they work, and I don't know how long it will be before I have an opinion on them worth posting but these are now my deck!
Now to go figure out how to protect it and make it travel ok...

Wow - the Tower card in that deck is very 9-11, don't you think?

I doubt I could get along with a deck that had such a modern aesthetic, but it sure is pretty to look at...

I'm just looking at this thread again, specifically the first post. I may have to pick this deck up. Very complex, reminds me a bit of a more elegant golden dawn deck.

Fascinating blog post:

The Comic Book of Thoth

I always find it hilarious when I get sent links exactly when I am studying the topic by people who have no idea what I'm up to. In this case, I'm using my winter in door time reading Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom and forced myself to go buy the RWS deck. I never had much resonance with the art but it is a completely different matter when walked through it by Pollack. I rather thought the blog post has a lovely perspective of the deck and this process.

I recently did a Kabbalah project for a local esoteric study group that involved making flashcards of the Hebrew alphabet and correspondences for all the Paths. I used RWS images as the backgrounds for the associated letters, with the correspondences listed on the reverse (over an image of the Coulthart Tree-of-Life Underground Map).

Had I never done this, I never would have recognized the extent to which the cards' images echo the actual shapes of the Hebrew letters or how many associated symbols they include. The colors correspond, the shapes - considering I didn't have much of an interest in the RWS or much knowledge of the Tree it was an amazing and intensive learning experience. There's an awful lot in those cards.

Still not my favorite art, from an aesthetic standpoint, though.

I don't, no - though I could send them if you're interested, just PM me. All the art on the cards belongs to other people so uploading them for public perusal seems like it might be a little gauche...

I'm considering a learning experiment with the tarot by hand writing the deck onto 3x5 index cards with no images. Basically making a text deck to see how the meanings interact and then tweaking the text for rev2, as it were.

From there I think I'd like to go with my own images, maybe making bigger cards that can include layered images. I do ultimately prefer the visual language of the cards for promoting in the moment associations. My goal with my current studies is too review and deepen my understanding of the tarot and I think a good application of that is to make a deck. Might just be a study aid to help me sift out my own definitions and those that resonate from more traditional readings. Process it fully by hands on thinking/doing.

I truly enjoy Rachel Pollack's relational techniques of putting the RWS major arcana cards in physical relation to each other. Doing so pops out the color coding Gypsy mentions and other thematic design elements. Pollack's analysis has profoundly deepened my appreciation of the deck. Placing the majors into the three lines of seven with the Fool over has been a fantastic way to better understand the relationship between the cards and the RWS clearly has the design elements to strengthen those associations.

I've never found a deck that completely satisfied me. My older sibling is a great reader and we've discussed our shared frustration over the years. One of the biggest complaints I have is with the psychological impact of reversals even when they can be a positive position in a reading. For me, this is often based on the visual impact of an upside bit of artwork that doesn't signify clearly the implied meanings. I find with reversals I have to think about the card's textual callbacks for the reversal rather than sourcing the images directly. Arnell Ando's Transformational Tarot has a few cards that work reversed but the overall collage style often doesn't work for me. Or perhaps, I just need to make my own.

EmberLeo:My only copy of the Thoth, my Dad took one look, cringed, and told me Crowley would never have allowed to have the colors mangled like that while he was alive. So I want to see if I can get ahold of an older copy to compare the colors, as apparently the palette has shifted at some point in the reproduction process.

Lon Milo DuQuette's book Understanding Aliester Crowley's Thoth Tarot looks at the colour schemes of the cards in more detail than I'd seen before. Because my focus is mainly on the small cards at the moment I haven't really read much of what he has to say about the trumps, but certainly the colour schemes in the small cards link up with the King, Queen, Prince and Princess colours scales from Crowley's 777. DuQuette's suggestion is that these colours have been drawn out from astral visions of the various spheres, and therefore the colours as well as the symbolism of the cards were designed specifically so to introduce the user to the mysteries of each sphere.

Actually, I think one thing that's really awesome about the Thoth deck is that they really were a teaching aid - Frieda basically insisted on not just re-drawing a deck of cards, but being taught magick by Crowley, and the Thoth tarot resulted from this lengthy work between them. DuQuette's quotes a lot of correspondence between the two of them from the period when the cards were being created which really helps to make this process obvious.