My 1970s Tarot

[Pet Jeffery]

Before I write anything about this, I'll post this link, so that we know what I'm talking about:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.135260262038.123232.521032038&type=3&l=7578645b86

A tidy computer program has placed the cards in alphabetic order from Ace of Cups to Two of Wands. A number of the major arcana (such The Fool) are under T for "The". If one clicks on an image, it will bring up the whole card.

[Le Fanu]

I like that deck. I like the roughness of it, the handwriting, the symbols, the colours, the unusual composition. Can't put my finger on it but I think you have created a very unusual deck. Love the details like the blotch on the 2 of Swords. It looks like the kind of deck that a Golden Dawn member would have to make as part of their journey... And it's packed with fascinating iconography. Well done.

[gregory]

Nice ! Shall you publish ?

It's very - I'm not sure how to say this - the word that comes to mind is personal. In that it is different and yet the same (part of TAROT !) and clearly comes from an individual mind. Does that make any sense ?

[Pet Jeffery]

Thank you very much Le Fanu and Gregory.

I have no current intention to publish, as such, although I do have some thoughts of publishing a book with the cards reproduced in colour, together with some commentary.

The pack is very personal.

I intend, over the following weeks or months to post details of how I came to paint the cards, my procedure in studying and then painting them, etc. These may well include how there came to be a red blotch at the top of the two of swords (which is part of a larger story, so I won't go into it now). Other stories include how the image of The Devil came to be partly smudged... and other images (such as the Queen of Swords) were blurred for a different reason.

A lot of what happens in painting a tarot seems random, but may be significant. After all, the tarot relies upon drawing significance from the random fall of cards.

[Babalon Jones]

I like your cards a lot, and really look forward to reading your stories about them.

(Funny, your "red blotch" and commentary thus far reminded me that on the originals of the set of cards I painted, there is a small red blotch on the Emperor that was my partner's blood. Seems appropriate, he is very masculine and an Aries rising. But I can't remember how it got there right now. I shall have to ask him, he has a much better memory than I do. It was nothing very dramatic, but still as you say could be interesting.)

[starlightexp]

I think these are great. There is a rawness to them but yet the art has a refinement and def style to it. I for one would buy this set

[Wee_Gypsy]

I have no current intention to publish, as such, although I do have some thoughts of publishing a book with the cards reproduced in colour, together with some commentary.


.

I like it!!! Kuduos to you, Pet Jeffery! I Woulden't mind if you should published it :D--but like you were saying the deck personal to you, so in the end it is up to you :), whatever you feel most comfortable with, since the link is here, I can enjoy your tarot art online. Cool deck though!


-Wee_Gypsy

[karenquilter]

Looks good to me. I see a lot of slick decks, this one stands out.
K

[Pet Jeffery]

Thank you all.

To paint my tarot, I bought two sheets of posterboard, which is quite thick card. They were red on one side and white on the other. I cut each board into forty cards. I can't recall the process, but the straightness of the cards' edges argues that I used a long straightedge and a craft knife. As I certainly didn't own such a knife at the time (or a suitable straightedge) I must have borrowed the tools for the purpose.

I painted the aces, then the twos, and so on. When I painted these early cards, I had a single tube of grey watercolour paint. All of my other paints (not many of them) were cheap solid blocks of watercolour. (I was extremely poor, and buying paint was a real issue.) At the time I ate quite a lot of dried onion (since I dislike crying). The plastic tops from the onion pots made adequate palettes for mixing colours. Fortunately, the limited colour range rather suited these early cards. Then, to my surprise, a friend of a friend gave me a box of gouaches -- maybe two dozen tubes of paint, with a really good range of colours. My benefactor was someone I hardly knew. He worked in the design department of a local factory (it manufactured linoleum). Giving me the paints, he said that they'd been lying around at work, not being used, and he thought I could make better use of them than anyone else. As far as I know, he didn't know I was painting a tarot pack. Or maybe someone had mentioned it to him, I don't know. At the time, I didn't question the gift. I thanked him nicely, and put the gouache to work.

A glance at the cards should show that the colour range was greatly extended fairly early in the painting process.

With the gouache, I could also use different painting techniques -- notably over-painting one colour with another. The effect of this can clearly be seen in a number of cards.

All of the paint was water soluble. I was well aware that cards could be destroyed by spilt liquid. I'm no stranger to knocking over mugs of tea... in fact, I knocked one over yesterday or the day before. So, I covered the cards with watercolour varnish (which I applied with a brush). The varnishing led to the red blob at the top of the Two of Swords, and a number of other unintended details...

But it's growing late (gone twenty to one in the morning). I'll post about the varnish problems next time.

[Simone95]

Its a very intriguing deck! I love it! Thanks for sharing it. Cant wait to read more of your creation stories!

[Pet Jeffery]

Thank you, Simone.

There are three different stories about the varnish. I'll take them in order of how quickly (after varnishing) problems declared themselves. Actually, the first became all too clear during the varnishing process.

Some of the gouache colours dissolved when I applied the varnish. The most extreme example is the Queen of Swords. The main background colour melted as I brushed on the varnish. One can see the colour streaked over the figure of the queen. A less drastic example of the same thing was the Queen of Disks. Her disk was painted with quite an intricate design using a lovely shade of pink. The design simply melted like a chocolate left too close to a fire.

There was a warning marked on the gouache tubes -- whether the colour was "permanent" or not. I thought that this referred to colours fading in strong sunlight... and perhaps it meant that as well. But the least "permanent" colours were the ones that dissolved when I applied the varnish. Fortunately, my thinking that they might fade led me to make minimal use of the colours in question. When I discovered the effect of varnish on non-permanent colours, my reluctance to use them (naturally) redoubled. But, sometimes, a non-permanent colour seemed perfect, and I took the risk.

I notice that both of the cards I've cited as affected by dissolved varnish are queens. That may not be a coincidence. The non-permanent colours were rather girly shades. Well, you can see the Queen of Swords' blue, and judge for yourselves. The Queen of Disks' pink remains as no more than a memory.

It's a shame that The Queen of Disks' lovely orb was reduced to mud, but mud is earth, and disks are the earth suit, so maybe the muddy version is more apt than my pink intentions... More than that, come to think of it. The Queen of Disks represents the watery part of earth... and what is the watery part of earth but mud?

As to the Queen of Swords, she represents the watery part of air. Maybe the dissolved colour expresses that rather neatly.

[Alta]

Interesting. I have read quite a few posts in this section discussing the need for a varnish and some difficulties but clearly when you did your deck the materials available were even more difficult to use. How frustrating after having put your thoughts into the cards.

[Pet Jeffery]

Interesting. I have read quite a few posts in this section discussing the need for a varnish and some difficulties but clearly when you did your deck the materials available were even more difficult to use. How frustrating after having put your thoughts into the cards.

Yes, seeing the Queen of Disks' pink design turning into mud was frustrating. But that was at least three dozen years ago, so I can smile about it now.

I don't think that the lovely straight-from-the-tube pink can be seen anywhere in the pack. The pink that forms the main background colour for the Queen of Wands, for example, is one I made myself from red and white. A little smudge of the pink above the area I intended to paint suggests that the red and white were mixed on a palette, rather than one colour painted on top of the other.

[Pet Jeffery]

My second varnish mishap affected only one card -- XV The Devil. (It would be The Devil!)

I'd just finished varnishing the card when it slipped from my fingers, falling face-down on to a floor that had not been recently swept. I had to scrape the surface of the card (now a mass of fluff, stray hairs and grit). I thought that I'd probably have to re-paint the card -- something to which I didn't look forward (The Devil isn't my favourite card in the pack). But, amazingly little damage was done to the image. I slapped on a bit more varnish and the result was as you see.

The most noticeable effects were the smudging of the group of four figures at the bottom right, and smearing of colour into the top and bottom bands. "Ayin: Eye" at the bottom is extremely difficult to read. The palette-mixed pink of the disordered Tree of Life (with which the devil is playing) survived astonishingly well.

[Pet Jeffery]

I varnished my cards on both sides (the face and the back). It's difficult to be certain of my motivations from so long ago, but I think that I was concerned that liquid spilt on the backs would seep through the card and damage the image.

Varnishing on both sides turned out to be a very bad idea. Leave two varnished surfaces pressed together, and they glue themselves together. This is more pronounced in hot weather. The heat probably melts the varnish a little.

The easiest way to unglue the card that I discovered is to tap the edge of the pack on a table or other hard solid surface. The glued together mass will split into smaller masses. Any cards that have come free I set aside before repeating the tapping. It can take quite a while to render the entire pack usable.

And ungluing the cards has left its marks on them. The red blob on the two of swords (noted by Le Fanu) is actually a bit of the red back of another card permanently stuck to the front of this card. Similar red marks near the tops or bottoms of other cards have the same origin.

Damage to the images on the cards has (so far) been slight (touch wood). I think that only one card (The Emperor) has ever needed portions re-painting. There might be a second such card, but I've certainly touched up two areas of The Emperor.

I was (obviously) distressed by the cards' tendency to stick together, but no solution suggested itself to me until 2005. I was working for Victim Support in Southwark, where my duties included producing leaflets and our annual report. This included liaising with the printer, a local businessman with whom I built up a good working relationship. The printer produced something for us that was laminated (I forget what it was). I thought: "if he can do this with the work material, he ought to be able to do it with my tarot cards". So I asked him. He doubted whether it would be possible to laminate the cards because, during their approximately 30 years up to that time, the cards had become slightly bowed. He also thought that the pack would become far too thick. (The posterboard on which I painted the cards is thick -- the original pack is more than 90mm thick.) So I asked if he could produce colour photocopies of the cards, and laminate them. He said he'd have a go. The work cost me £50 (I still have the receipt, which is how I know it was 2005) but, at long last, I had a working pack that didn't glue itself together.

The laminated photocopies are extraordinarily good, and are the cards I scanned to form the jpeg images. The originals are more tactilely pleasing. And the scraped surface of the original Devil feels different from the other cards.

Gluing and ungluing since 2005 has rendered the originals a bit more battered than the photocopies or the scans.

My feeling is that laminating is far preferable to varnishing.

Laminating, as such, is an old process. History buffs may know that New Kingdom Egyptians used laminated bows. But the Egyptians had neither card nor clear plastic. Laminating card and clear plastic is, I think, a fairly recent process. If it was available when I painted the cards, I had certainly never heard of it.

At Victim Support Southwark, we subsequently bought our own laminator. In unskilled hands, the laminating was notably less successful than the printer's work. Air bubbles sometimes crept in. On that basis, I'd recommend professional laminating for hand-painted tarot cards. If one is going to all the work involved in the painting, it's surely worth spending money to have that work laminated to a professional standard. That's what I think, anyway.

[Pet Jeffery]

My feeling is that laminating is far preferable to varnishing.

Laminating, as such, is an old process. History buffs may know that New Kingdom Egyptians used laminated bows. But the Egyptians had neither card nor clear plastic. Laminating card and clear plastic is, I think, a fairly recent process. If it was available when I painted the cards, I had certainly never heard of it.

At Victim Support Southwark, we subsequently bought our own laminator. In unskilled hands, the laminating was notably less successful than the printer's work. Air bubbles sometimes crept in. On that basis, I'd recommend professional laminating for hand-painted tarot cards. If one is going to all the work involved in the painting, it's surely worth spending money to have that work laminated to a professional standard. That's what I think, anyway.

Looking at this the following morning, it occurs to me that -- even if lamination had been available when I painted the cards in the 1970s -- I wouldn't have been able to afford it. Unless one has money to spare, cost is sure to be an issue.

[Pet Jeffery]

Moving on, I'd like to talk about the process of creating the cards. For me, the process ran through these stages for each card:

1. Research. I read about the card, and related matters... looked also at the cards in my possession.

2. Thinking. This was an active process: thinking about what my research had brought up.

3. Internalising. This was a less active process, mulching down my thoughts into fertile earth from which the card could emerge.

4. Reflecting. The theoretical card, as it emerged from the process of internalising.

5. Returning to sources. Taking another look at the books and cards, as seemed desirable, also (at this stage) looking at images in books that might form models for drawing the card images.

6. Note taking. Making a note of likely elements to be included, colours to be used, and like matters. Occasionally such notes could be stored in my head, but at other times I needed to write them down.

7. Listing. Based on the notes, listing the elements I wished to include in the final design. For the simpler cards, this was a mental list -- for the more complex cards, a written list.

8. Rough sketching. Producing one or more rough drawings for the card. Sometimes, I did this in a notebook (especially if I was away from home). Often, the rough sketches were scribbled on scrap paper.

9. The pencil drawing. I drew on the card itself in pencil, with the option of rubbing out false lines.

10. Painting. Painting the pencil drawing.

11. Inking. Writing at the top and bottom of the card with a fountain pen, also giving the image any inked detail that seemed desirable.

12. Varnishing. Perhaps I've already written more than enough about this.

[Pet Jeffery]

Although my 2012 self is no great admirer of the late Mr Crowley, two of his books formed important sources on which I drew for my tarot.

The more obvious of the two is "The Book of Thoth". There may be little need to comment on this at the present stage, except for this... I was very much struck by his observation that the minor arcana is more complicated than the major arcana -- because, while the major arcana are a set of individuals, the minor arcana comprises a series of interactions between different forces. (I no longer own a copy of the book, and summarise the point from memory.) So, for example, the 9 of Cups is the meeting between the element of water and the number nine conceptualised as Yesod. "Yes," I thought, but how was I to paint it? The answer came from another of the late Mr Crowley's books.

The volume in question is entitled "777". I think that this was the first of his books that I ever bought, because it was going cheap in a sale. I was, perhaps, hoping for wickedness -- what I received was a set of tables of correspondences. It seemed downright dull, and I put the volume to one side... until I painted my minor arcana. It contained the key to painting the cards. I couldn't paint (in the abstract) an encounter between the suit of water and the number nine. But I could paint an encounter between an eagle (assigned to the element of water in "777") and an elephant (assigned to the number 9 in "777"). The crucial correspondences listed in "777", and seen in my minor arcana, are these:

Fire (Wands, Knights) = Lion
Water (Cups, Queens) = Eagle
Air (Swords, Princes) = Man
Earth (Disks, Princesses) = Bull

1 (Aces) = God
2 = Man
3 = Woman
4 = Unicorn
5 = Basilisk
6 = Phoenix, Child, Lion
7 = Iynx
8 = Hermaphrodite, Jackal
9 = Elephant
10 = Sphinx

All very well, and mostly paintable, but a couple of questions arose. In the first place, how does one paint God? I chose to represent this as an act of creation: the primal mound, arising from the waters of Nun/Naunet... or (as it might be) the child's head emerging from the mother's amniotic fluid.

The other question was: What the blanketty-blank was an Iynx? I found some kind of answer in Eliphas Levi's "Transcendental Magic". The book contains a picture of what appears to be an Egyptian goddess, captioned "The Pantomorphic Iynx". It was near enough to an answer to my question. I would use the goddess figure to represent the number 7 on the four sevens.

[Tibor]

Reminds me a little bit of the World Spirit Tarot which I love :)

[Babalon Jones]

Quite fascinating! I had to goodle Iynx I was so curious, so found this in various online encyclopedias:

Another musically-inclined myth involving Pan tells the story of Echo, a nymph who was a great singer and dancer. She also scorned the love of any man. This angered Pan, and he promptly instructed his followers to kill her, which they did, tearing the nymph to pieces which scattered all over the earth. The goddess of the earth, Gaia, received these pieces of Echo, whose voice remained, repeating the last words of others. In some versions, Echo and Pan conceive a daughter before Echo is destroyed: this child has been identified as either Iambe, the goddess of verse, or Inyx, a girl in the form of a bird

IYNX (Iunx), a daughter of Peitho and Pan, or of Echo. She endeavoured to charm Zeus, or make him, by magic means, fall in love with Io; in consequence of which Hera metamorphosed her into the bird called lynx (iynx torquilla). (Schol. ad Theocrit. ii. 17, ad Pind. Pyth. iv. 380, Nem. iv. 56; Tzetz. ad Lycoph. 310.) According to another story, she was a daughter of Pierus, and as she and her sisters had presumed to enter into a musical contest with the Muses, she was changed into the bird lynx. (Anton. lib. 9.) This bird, the symbol of passionate and restless love, was given by Aphrodite to Jason, who, by turning it round and pronouncing certain magic words, excited the love of Medeia. (Pind. Pyth. iv. 380, &c.; Tzetz. l. c.)

Suidas s.v. Iynx (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek lexicon C10th A.D.) :
"Iynx: The daughter of Ekho or Peitho (Persuasion), also Aphrodite, conquerer in the games: bewitching Zeus with drugs she was turned to stone for such things by Hera. And she was called kinaidion (Wryneck*) by some. There is also a little instrument which is called iynx, which enchantresses are accustomed to turn about as they cast charms on their beloveds. It is also a bird, which is believed to have the same power. Wherefore they bind [them] on wheels."

Suidas s.v. Iynx :
"Iynx: That which attracts the spirit to desire and love . . . It is a bird suited to the evils of love charms, say that it was the daughter of Ekho, some [say] of Peitho (Persuasion). ‘Kleopatra [i.e. Queen Cleopatra of Egypt] thought that by those same charms by which [she had overpowered] Caesar and Antony she would also overpower Augustus as the third.’"


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(*A wryneck is apparently a type of brown woodpecker with an odd habit of twisting its neck around)

Learn something new everyday!

Didn't find a picture, though, and wish I had Levi's "Transcendental Magic" now to see the original!

I really like your deck! But I told you that :)

[Pet Jeffery]

Thank you for your comments.

I'm not familiar with the World Spirit Tarot, Tibor -- I must check it out.

I hadn't thought, Babalon Jones, to check "Inyx" on the Internet. (And, of course, when I painted the cards in the 1970s, there was no Internet to check.) Your findings are extremely interesting.

Looking it up, I find that the scientific name for the wryneck is Jynx torquilla. I and J were once the same letter. (Hence the letters INRI on many crucifixes. The first I is for Jesus, and the second for Jews, neither of which do we spell with an I any more.) I have little doubt that Jynx and Iynx are the same word.

If Jynx is the same as Iynx, I strongly suspect that Jinx is also the same word. There are references to "charms" in your quotations, in the sense (it seems) of magical spells. The word "Jinx" fits reasonably well with that.

I've never seen a wryneck, although I live in the right country to do so. But woodpeckers are much easier to hear than to see. I've only once caught sight of the most conspicuous British woodpecker -- the green woodpecker (with green plumage and a flash of red on its head). The mottled brown wryneck would be much more difficult to see. Its elusiveness seems to fit well with your quotations.

I no longer have a copy of Levi's "Transcendental Magic". The one I had was a red-covered paperback published thus in the mid 1960s by Rider & Co. Rider & Co. are, of course, best known on this forum as the original publishers of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot.

[Pet Jeffery]

Although the images in my tarot are based upon ancient Egyptian ones, I didn't set out to create an Egyptian tarot.

The idea of an Egyptian origin for the tarot seems to me, and has always seemed to me, nonsense. Of course, it is not impossible that the turn of an archaeologist's spade might bring to light evidence of an Egyptian connection with the tarot. That is, it's not impossible in the sense that walking through mountains is impossible, let alone the sense that four sided triangles are impossible. But I would be greatly astonished if anything of the sort is ever revealed. I submit that all attempts to produce an Egyptian tarot have been failures. They have either failed to be Egyptian or failed as tarots... all three that I've seen fail on both counts, but others probably do better.

The reason I used Egyptian models is that I have an almost lifetime interest in ancient Egypt, and quite a good library of books on the subject. This meant that if I wished to paint an elephant, for example, the most likely place (in my library) to find a model for the beast was in a book about Egypt.

My phoenixes (they appear on each of the sixes) are Egyptian Benu birds, rather than the Hellenic (or later) conception of a phoenix.

The four fours include a unicorn, which was not part of the Egyptian scheme of things. My paintings of them are based upon Egyptian images of horses, with the addition of a horn (and cloven hooves).

A depiction not found in my Egyptian library (and, probably, not in anyone else's) is a rainbow. These appear on several cards. Without a model, I attempted to work out logically which colour appeared at the top, and which at the bottom. The terms infra-red and ultra-violet suggested to me that violet would be at the top, and red at the bottom. I was mistaken, and -- for that reason -- my rainbows are upside down.

Oh well, the Egyptians had a verb meaning "to be upside down".

[karenquilter]

I'm glad that you gave us such a detailed description of your tarot creation process. It's fascinating.

About rainbows: if conditions are right, you can see a second & third bow bracketing the main bow. They will have the reversed color scheme.

Thanks again for this thread, it's been a real pleasure to read.
K

[Pet Jeffery]

I'm glad that you gave us such a detailed description of your tarot creation process. It's fascinating.

About rainbows: if conditions are right, you can see a second & third bow bracketing the main bow. They will have the reversed color scheme.

Thanks again for this thread, it's been a real pleasure to read.
K

Thank you very much for that.

When I painted the cards, I was living in Lancaster -- which, of all the places I've ever lived, is the one most given to rainbows. I've always felt that maybe I should have waited for a real rainbow and taken a good look at it. Lancaster is not only given to rainbows, but to multiple rainbows. I once counted twelve rainbows in the sky at the same time (eleven of them, as you say, "bracketing the main bow"). Several of these were complete bows, others partial ones. So, had I waited for a real rainbow, perhaps I would have focused on an inner bow from such an occasion, and reversed the colours on that basis. There's some comfort in this realisation.

[Pet Jeffery]

Painting the cards from Ace to Ten (which Crowley called the "small cards") I found that, sometimes, a set of fairly straightforward things could provide all that I needed to form the picture:
The suit
The number
Attributions for these from "777"
Crowley's title (keyword?) for the card

An example is the Four of Swords. It needed to contain four swords, a man (=air) and a unicorn (=the number four). The title (keyword) is "Truce". This almost paints itself. A man and a unicorn have retired to their separate towers, from which vantage each brandishes two swords at the other.

Other pictures drew upon remarks embedded in Crowley's commentary on the cards. In the Three of Swords, for example, the flower stems from the Two have broken in half, and sprouted monstrous heads. This refers to Crowley's comment (quoted from memory, and probably not accurately): "There is a burning urge to create, but all their children are monsters".

[Pet Jeffery]

I had a few books on the tarot, when I painted my pack, other than Crowley's "Book of Thoth". I think this may be a fairly complete list:

George Beal: Discovering Playing Cards and Tarots.
Alfred Douglas and David Sheridan: The Tarot. (A Penguin Book, a new publication at the time.)
Arland Ussher: The XXII Keys of the Tarot.
Paul Foster Case: Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages.

Possibly also a paperback I've been unable to identify. If I recall correctly, it reproduced line drawings of the Aquarian Tarot. Could this be the same as the Alfred Douglas and David Sheridan book???

I don't own any of these books any more (although I now have a lot more tarot books). The list, modest as it is, is the result of wracking my brain and research using Amazon.

I consulted all of these from time to time, although I didn't find all of them very useful. The only use I found for the George Beal book was that it reproduced photographs of some tarot cards.

[Pet Jeffery]

This morning, very belatedly, I looked through my copy of the Rosetta Tarot, clarifying (as I examined the cards) some points of interest by consulting The Book of Seshet. It's the closest I've come, in many years, to examining Crowley's work (the prime influence on my 1970s tarot). Doing this (unexpectedly) helped me to gain some purchase on features of my cards which I've found totally baffling in recent years. One is the question as to why is there a seven headed lion in my Lust card. I now find that it refers to some nonsense in the Bible (a book I've never read, and with which I'm not all that familiar).

[Pet Jeffery]

Unfortunately, it doesn't explain the specific nature of the seven heads:

An ibis
A hawk
A goat
A lion
Three human (one weather beaten, one pale, the third blue)

[jema]

I so love this deck and would get a copy in a heartbeat if I could. But I guess what I really love the most about it is that I suddenly feel like making one myself!