Taro by Ithell Colquhoun

Debra

Looks like somebody beat Margarete Petersen into making 78 cards with blurs of color and calling it tarot.

The majors, aces, and some few others in the Margarete Peterson are recognizable representations of tarot imagery, though.

I don't see anything recognizable in the Colquhoun cards.
 

gregory

Nor do I. It is the first deck I have had (not counting silly ones like Power Animals and that Taiwanese LoTR) where I cannot see tarot in it at all. I look forward to people showing me I am wrong - because the art is lovely.
 

Patrick Booker

Phosphene Prototypes

Phosphenes are 'subjectively perceived light patterns arising after non-specific stimulation affecting the optical processing areas of the brain' (Charles Muses, 'Destiny and Control in Human Systems'). They are basic images that are claimed to appear in ancient art.

Here is a useful link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene

I see a zig-zag flashing pattern that is clearly one of them when I have the occasional aura migraine. I also see patterns that remind me of this deck when I close my eyes after looking at a light source.

No idea if this is any help to anyone who has the deck, but I thought it was interesting.

Patrick
 

gregory

It may be of help to me, as I get migraines and shall now look at it with GREAT CAUTION... :(
 

Patrick Booker

It hadn't occurred to me that they might induce migraines. Maybe if they were flashed, trying different frequencies? I believe the Golden Dawn used 'flash cards' of various colour combinations. No doubt Ithell Colquhoun would know all about this, given her background. Still not going to spend £100 though.

Patrick
 

Debra

Uh huh. Following wiki, found something more directly relevant I think--it's short. Get thyself down to the speculation on divination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constants

I'm afraid this explains why I once dreamt what I later recognized as a gigantic merkaba or kabalah tree that I found astoundingly profound and never forgot :(
 

Patrick Booker

The image I see during aura migraines is a set of flashing, zig-zag lines, and is one of the classic phosphene images. When I first had powerful archetypal dreams in my teens, I used to see a mandala pattern on waking, consisting of concentric circles, with lots of secondary circles placed along their circumferences. I think that these were capable of expanding out individually. I still occasionally see hypnopompic images on waking, usually natural rather than abstract. I would guess that there is a spectrum between abstract and natural images perceived in this way, and that we sometimes tap into different parts of it.

Patrick
 

Patrick Booker

I am not a good meditator, but there is an exercise given by Adam McLean in the Hermetic Journal, in which one enters what he calls an Inner Egg (a confined and transparent inner space), and allows various forms to transform between the abstract and the concrete. I think that he suggests a triangle, which becomes a wooden structure, but this is supposed to happen naturally and without willing things too much. It occurs to me that there might be scope here for working with these Tarot images. Just a thought.

Patrick
 

Alta

With the colours, as I understand it, she was drawing on a series of correspondences and showing how they relate and interact. For a given card she would take a colour representing the suit (elemental correspondence), a planetary influence, for the court level (if it was one), the position on the Tree of Life including the 'level' or 'world' and then they are shown as 'nesting', 'penetrating', 'lightly influencing' and so on by means of the amount, whether one colour is inside the other, or just a dot.

Tarot cards really are just ink and paper. We can draw from them because of correspondences (inferences, drawing from the collective unconscious, whatever). She made this wholly abstract but it is still genuine tarot. She drew on one aspect of the correspondences, colour, and used that to represent many levels of correspondence.

No doubt I am explaining this badly, but if you do anything more than recite meanings that you have memorized, then you use correspondences when you read.