Composite decks

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 08 Dec 2004, and now archived in the Forum Library.

f. silvestris	08 Dec 2004
I have done a very bad thing. I will admit to it and then slink off and change my name. I bought a Haindl deck quite some time ago, thought it was lovely, but got nothing much out of it as a working deck. There was then a fair bit of discussion here about trimming the margins of the Haindl: I trimmed, the deck was hugely improved, but I still found the minors dead [i don't have any problem with non-pictorial minors as such: i use the thoth more than any deck]. In despair and curiosity I bought a cheap RWS [the 'authentic' one with grainy colours], trimmed the Smith minors [the pictures are exactly the same size] and integrated them with the Haindl majors and court cards. My poor sacreligious mutant deck has proved to be a reading deck that goes like a tiger. Has anyone else here [owners of the spiral, for instance, or majors only decks] been tempted to do anything similar, or have I hit a new low in tarot usage???

Imagemaker	08 Dec 2004
I believe in molding a tool to try out new uses. I trim decks and have often thought about mixing decks, but the relative sizes are always a problem. So I think this is a very cool idea. You've adjusted a tool so it works better for you--that's human initiative and creativity!

souljourney	08 Dec 2004
I think you made the deck more useful and meaningful to you. Would it be different from cutting pics out of magazines and placing them on index cards and calling that your deck? I don't think so. A lot of people make their own decks...you just didn't do it from scratch. You didn't cut up something rare or unique either, both these decks are readily available if you would like them in there regular state for your collection. You might even want to laminate the cards so the "new" one shuffle better so they don't have edges of pics to get caught on each other. Like Imagemaker said... You got creative and made the tool better for you! SJ

Scion	08 Dec 2004
You've created a standing wave deck! The way I see it Tarot itself is kind of a standing wave. But I should explain that first cause this may seem like gobbledegook... (eek, I think this reply is gonna be long): From some of my old physics notes: "A standing wave pattern is produced by the interference of 2 or more waves. Standing waves are produced whenever waves of identical frequency interfere with one another while traveling opposite directions along the same medium, effectively cancelling each other out. Standing wave patterns are characterized by certain fixed points along the medium which undergo no displacement. (...Think of those moments at the beach when the water flowing out and the water coming in make stationary "hills" in the shallows") These stationary points are called nodes; The nodes are always located at the same locations, giving the entire wave system an appearance of standing still (hence 'standing waves')." I have an animated GIF of this but can't figure out out to post it here. Anyways... I was reading some threads about which Tarot deck was the "original" deck and which tradition the "true" tradition, and started thinking that maybe Tarot itself is a standing wave. A series of nodes (cards, suits, symbols) that appear to be fixed but in fact are produced by constant flow/flux. The reason Tarot continues to resonate even though it's sort of a mishmash of anachronistic detail and ideas and traditions, might be that the very contradictions which are so challenging to us are what maintain the interference necessary to produce those standing waves. If you go for the standard history: a set of trumps painted for a wedding collides with a set of Mamluk hunting cards, with some Western hermeticism and pageantry, which collides with a whole bunch of occult traditions and cultural upheaval as Europe reinvents itself, and then collides with several hundred thousand human hands over a couple centuries, and certain things reveal themselves as eternal, as standing waves in the system. I'm not saying that Tarot is random, because each of the flows involved (whether a event, tradition, or person) is itself a product of uncountable colllisions producing THOSE standing waves. The collisions create the appearance of a stationary, eternal thing we call Tarot that appears fixed and immutable BECAUSE it never stops moving. Blah blah. My point is, and the reason I'm mentioning it here, is that your beautiful Frankendeck is a LITERAL representation of that idea. The friction/intereference between the two decks prduces a kind of virtual third deck that is more resonant for you. The way that a sitar's strings, when played, force the second string beneath to vibrate without being touched. The reciprocal waves are what produce the "hum" of the sitar. So your new deck is an almost perfect expression of a "standing wave" created FROM two standing waves. Which sorta reminds me that we're actually all standing waves, because matter is actualy just energy expressed in patterns. BUt enough, I think. Yowza! That was a freakshow post. In any event, your standing wave deck seems like an excellent idea. Congratulations on finding your own nodes within the flow of Tarot. Scion

souljourney	08 Dec 2004
Forgive me if I overstep boundries here... I think what Scion is trying to say was: Cool...you made a new deck that works for you. That's good not bad. LOL...You kill me Scion. It was way too early in the morning for that post. Brought back horrorish memories of Physics. AHHHH!

rachelcat	08 Dec 2004
You hear alot about chemistry (well, o.k., alchemy) in relation to tarot, but the only physics connection I've ever heard is "uncertainty principle" and "butterfly effect." Congratulations, Scion, on bringing in another science "node" to tarot! Your essay made good sense to me. (Of course, I'm probably just kidding myself that I could actually understand it . . .) It's way cool! And I'm all for mixing decks, although personally, I think the difference in art styles would be too jarring and distracting for me to read with. But to each his own. I agree with souljourney, it's like minimalist collage deck!

Flavio	08 Dec 2004
Quote: My poor sacreligious mutant deck has proved to be a reading deck that goes like a tiger. Has anyone else here [owners of the spiral, for instance, or majors only decks] been tempted to do anything similar, or have I hit a new low in tarot usage??? If your mutant deck works for you, keep using it! it has an extra touch of personalizaton :) about sacrilege... don't worry about that Lutero's work was considered sacrilege yet his thoughts inspired a new religion. :) In my very early days in Tarot thought mixing some of my favorite cards from a couple of decks in order to create my "one" deck but the different size made it impossible to work comfortably, for example mixing a RWS deck with a Hanson Roberts (2 3/8" x 4") and World Spirit (3 1/4" x 4 3/4" ) cards, sometimes instead of dealing cards I fan them and pick cards up so there was chance I "cheated on myself" selecting an specific card because I knew which cards from what deck were included in the mixed deck. Scion wrote: Blah blah. My point is, and the reason I'm mentioning it here, is that your beautiful Frankendeck is a LITERAL representation of that idea. The friction/intereference between the two decks prduces a kind of virtual third deck that is more resonant for you. Thank you Scion for that explanation I'm always interested in scientific facts that explain how the Tarot works and viceversa. Really interesting.

Scion	08 Dec 2004
souljourney wrote: Forgive me if I overstep boundries here... I think what Scion is trying to say was: Cool...you made a new deck that works for you. That's good not bad. LOL...You kill me Scion. It was way too early in the morning for that post. Brought back horrorish memories of Physics. AHHHH! Sorry bout that... LOL Didn't even realize what time it was. I've been up all night writing on deadline. My head was hot from working and all that kinda splurted out.

f. silvestris	08 Dec 2004
Well, I really appreciated your post, Scion - and everybody else's, of course - particularly the point about the friction between the 2 decks producing a virtual third deck [dialectics ... takes felis back to his marxist past ...]

f. silvestris	08 Dec 2004
Sorry, had to break off to collect my offspring. If I made 'one' deck of the kind Flavio mentions, it would certainly have the Thoth court cards in it, but that really would feel like sacrilege. Also, they would most certainly have a disproportionate weight in any reading in which they occurred: there is surely an index of intensity which one could apply to different decks, which would count as much for reading purposes, or any individual's reaction to a given deck, as the visual style.

WolfSpirit	08 Dec 2004
I have tried mixing decks, but I could never work with them because they did not match properly for me. I tried mixing the Glastonbury and the Greenwood: they are already the same size which makes it easier, and I saw more similarities between them. I love the Glastonbury but some of the cards I find quite badly drawn, so I wanted to replace those with cards from the Greenwood. It did not work at all for me, maybe also because the Greenwood is a very untraditional tarot. I find a mixture of Haindl and RWS very surprising - they seem so different in artwork ! But I am glad it works for you, and that the whole deck trimming experiment worked out so well too :D

Cerulean	08 Dec 2004
I have a small size Lo Scarabeo Romantici (majors only) and similar size early 1995 Renaissance by the same artist--Giorgio Trevisan. I mix the majors and minors together. I like this, but I use the Renaissance meanings that came in the 2001/2000 edition of this deck. I also have decorated pips-only decks and made mutant sticker-decorated minors with similar size majors...the coloring and subject may have been similar. However I find these work best for personal readings or storyboarding. The Trevisan mutant worked well for practice on an aeclectic.net reading, as there were meanings in a LWB of a slightly larger edition of the Trevisan Renaissance...but I also checked another RWS equivalent for my layout to augment the reading. Nice and fun to try all the different variations! Cerulean

augursWell	09 Dec 2004
Some of the LoScarabeo decks have different artists commisioned to do the Majors and the Minors so mixing of styles is something others have tried. My problem would be the card backs, I would know by seeing the backs if there was a major or minor in the spread before turning the cards over. Some would say that any set of objects can be used for divination as long as they have meaning to the reader so I say go with it and see if you learn something from it.

The Composite decks thread was originally posted on 08 Dec 2004 in the Tarot Decks board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Tarot Decks, or read more archived threads.