Stamps, Mathematics, and Tarot Cards
Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 20 Sep 2004, and now archived in the Forum Library.
| darwinia |
20 Sep 2004 |
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I was trying to see if Paul Calter's book "Squaring the Circle : Geometry in Art and Architecture" had been published in August like it was supposed to be. I want this book for a tie-in with my Sacred Geometry Oracle, but they've put it off until summer 2005, and this is the third time they've deferred publication on this, so I'm starting to wonder if it will ever be published.
This other book I saw was:
Stamping Through Mathematics
by Robin Wilson
Hardcover - 136 pages 1 edition (June 15, 2001)
Language: English
Springer-Verlag New York, Inc ; ISBN: 0387989498
It's $50 CDN, so costly, but it has about 400 enlarged, full-colour stamps depicting mathematical subjects with explanatory material.
I'm very fond of an online philatelic site showing the History of Opera in stamps, so this math book was appealing. The one Amazon reviewer mentioned how interesting it was to see how postage stamps can be used to illustrate concepts.
The idea of using this with tarot cards kind of lit me up. Concepts and archetypes--how slick is that?
So, you draw a Tarot card and spin randomly through pages in the stamp book to work with the card of the day. A muchly appealing exercise for a bit of a stretch, plus you get the historical angle to Math too. I thought the Shakespeare's Flowers and Birds of China playing card decks were going to be interesting to pair with tarot cards, but this Stamping Through Mathematics book sounds pretty fascinating and might bring out some unusual insights and tangents. (pun!)
I always get such great ideas from odd sites online and books.
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| MeeWah |
20 Sep 2004 |
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Darwinia: As a Tarot fan & also of postage stamps, I like the way ye think!
The odd combination of Tarot & stamp bibliomancy with a touch of the mathematical promises intriguing possibilities & that of expanding horizons.
If ye decide to do this, do please let us know the results!
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| Rusty Neon |
20 Sep 2004 |
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"Images of Mathematicians on Postage Stamps" followed by "Other Mathematics Stamps":
http://jeff560.tripod.com/
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| darwinia |
21 Sep 2004 |
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I thought I'd just mention this book since we are talking about numbers and order etc. I bought it in the summer but haven't had the time to immerse myself in more than a couple of pages.
It talks about the tendency to synchronize--from the way women working or living together often have their menstrual periods at the same time, to the way electrons in a superconductor synchronize. Stuff like patterns, networks, systems, traffic flow, fads, group behaviours, phases of the moon, neural states, brain waves, consciousness, cycles of light and dark, things moving and stopping.
Sync : How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven Strogatz
ISBN 0-7868-8721-4
Strogatz is a mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory. "New" science I suppose, with theory and some patterns to back it up, and intuition.
And of course you could randomly pair up a sentence or paragraph from the book with a tarot card and see what happens, see if they sync!
For instance, here's a line you can work with. . .
"In striving to understand the origins of spontaneous order, this infant theory of complex networks is another step on the long journey that began with Christian Huygens and his sympathetic pendulum clocks."
Oooh Huygens, he'll be in the Stamping Through Mathematics book if I ever save up the money for it. (I most recently visited Huygens in Neal Stephenson's book Quicksilver.) You could then follow this lead and do a bit of research and pair it all up with the 5 of Wands from the Thoth deck.
Yum.
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| Ravenswing |
21 Sep 2004 |
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Absolutely remarkable book for you, if you haven't seen it.
"A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art and Science"
by Michael S. Schneider.
Subtitled: 'A voyage from 1 to 10'
Lots of hands on traditional construction methods. The pencil, straight-edge and compass type.
A most excellent trip through sacred geometry...
fly well
Raven
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| darwinia |
21 Sep 2004 |
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[quote]Originally posted by Ravenswing
[absolutely remarkable book for you, if you haven't seen it.
"a beginner's guide to constructing the universe: the mathematical archetypes of nature, art and science"
by michael s. schneider.[/quote]
No, I hadn't seen this. It's available at Chapters too and would make a suitable companion to order with the math stamps book.(Cut to Frank Sinatra singing "Just in time, I found you just in time). I've printed it out to take to the book store. Schneider sounds like the sort of math teacher we all wanted but never got. Oh yeah, really neat.
I have the Thames and Hudson publication "Sacred Geometry" by Robert Lawlor which is excellent too, but I'm always looking for other books.
I bought a couple of books in the summer that were a little new agey. One was called Mystic Spiral and I thought she was going to rocket off and start talking about aliens from Atlantis giving us the code to geometry--it just read like gobbledygook. I got really put off by her nonsense, but the reproductions of artwork are fabulous.
The other one I bought was "The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrinth: Architecture, Hidden Language, Myths, and Rituals"
by Patrick Conty, which is a titch mystical but at least he talks about the history of labyrinths in different cultures and the physical aspects of drawing them.
Now, if only I could find my expensive Staedtler-Mars compass. It disappeared from its usual spot and I can't find it--it's probably in my "art room" buried under books, fabric, dollhouses, art paper, beads, and 20 tons of publisher's catalogues I use for collage.
Oh yeah, and somewhere in there are about 70 decks of cards of various kinds.
Thanks for the book title!! Much appreciated.
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| darwinia |
23 Sep 2004 |
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Another book that I bought this year is called "Reinventing the Wheel" by Jessica Helfand, and it's all about the history and design of volvelles or wheels that show data in some way. ISBN 1-56898-338-7
You know the sort of wheels where you can dial information by sticking the pointer on the name of a city for instance, and in all the coutouts in the circle information pops up about that specific city like population stats, and stuff.
So I thought this would be fun to design something with tarot or artwork or anything you fancy. The geometry is fascinating, as is the logic involved in doing the typography and design for such a thing. I prefer illustrative artwork and typography over ethereal overly-filtered images, so this really lit me up.
My problem: I lose the thread of logic quite easily and find it frustrating, but it's an idea. I have dozens of old CD-ROMS and I wanted to use them as a base for my own little volvelles and such to put in altered books or just to play with words and images. I've always loved charts and spinners that give you information--much like I love various card decks like the Knowledge Cards or the things U.S. Games publish.
Volvelles are quite similar to mandalas and would make a great personal study method for tarot and archetypes or symbols. I just have to figure out how to do them.
"Illogical, illogical, Norman coordinate. . . "
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The Stamps, Mathematics, and Tarot Cards thread was originally posted on 20 Sep 2004 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.
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