RiccardoLS
Tarot of Legends
(creation notes)
A few times I’ve been asked to give an account of the creation process behind a deck. One reason I’ve never done it, it’s the language, as I’m not a native English speaker. I hope you will forgive me.
I start now on this endeavor, but I cannot give any garauntee I will find the time and energy to follow it through, until the end. However I’m hoping so.
I have also chosen to write all of this on a forum, rather than on a blog or an facebook. First, I would like to give people, if interested, to be able to write comment and ask question, like in a two-way discussion and not like in a monologue. And secondly, with all the differencies, I have a lot of gratitude to AT, Solandia and the staff… so I hope that this may help them to provide valued content to the forum.
That said… let’s start on a deck.
The deck is known by the provisionary title of Tarot of Legends.
It was originally written in 2008, was then modified a few months later, but only in 2011 an artist started working on it. The artist is Paolo Martinello (already known for the Universal Fantasy Tarot and the Mona Lisa Tarot. He had been very busy, among other things, becoming the father of two twins and making several other works. He hopes to be able to complete the deck in Summer 2011, so the deck may possible be released in 2013.
How it all begin?
Once upon a time there was a little Tarot dude (that’s me)…
The origin of the Tarot of Legends are dutifully linked into the end of the Manga Tarot.
For those not familiar with that deck, it was created with a few quirks that are worth mentioning.
- all gender attributions are switched in the cards. Usually you may find a male Magician, in the Manga you have a female Sorceress. Strength is male, the Hermit is female, and so on…
The purpose of this was twicefold. On one side I wanted to challenge the “give for granted” ideas we have on the cards. Strength is female because in the heavily male-dominated, yet chivalrous, society of the Renaissance, it would have been impossible to portray females in a position of dominance, but very possible to portray them as representation of abstract virtues, like Strength or Temperance. It could be said that males, at that time, respected women enough to place them above themselves, but not humble enough to place them at their same level as peers.
On the other side I wanted to explore the idea of playing with genders, subtly altering, without having any true control on it, what the Arcana would have been. Strength – after all, is not male or female, except in the eye of the beholder. In order to “feel” the archetype I had to look at it, at least once, from the complimentary point of view.
As usual this change was cause of more trouble than it was worth. It was one of the causes that made the deck labeled “unsuitable for beginners”, and the average comment was that “the gender switching was not as unsettling as it could have been”.
I point to this, a bit because I’m grumpy (^_^) and a lot because it is a good example of the resistance of public to what is supposed not to be “as they know”, but to be “stimulating on what they know”. And the new vs old kind of fight is something that will be long present in any consideration about deck creation.
- all cards are color coded into 4 colors, each referring to a specific suit/element.
Many decks share this twist. It comes very handy when you have to visually and emotionally clearly mark the distinction between a suit and another. Also, it reflects interestingly into a reading, because you have (and you provide the Querent as well) with a “at a glance” idea of the energies present into the reading. A lot of fire stands out as a dominance of red… and it’s quite impossible to miss.
What was sort of new in the Manga, was that the Majors were color linked as well. It meant that it was very easy to link each major Arcana to a specific suit, or – if we prefer – to a specific kind of energy.
Two cards were an exception… the monochromatic Fool (expression of a potential blank, clean slate, state) and the full color Wheel (expression of the transition, “in the making” change between energies).
- all cards were glyph coded into four seasons.
This was the part most difficult for the Manga Tarot users, and I can safely bet that most people using the deck simply ignored the glyph/season part. It was designed to be that way, as working with the glyphs was supposed to be an advanced use, one calling in not just intuitive resources (as the color were) but intellectual resources (after all, you need to think what each glyph is).
The effect I wanted to achieve was to code each Arcana with a double reference. For instance one card would be green (earth) in color and autumn in season. Even before looking at the cards, you can see how this card can be interpreted as a waning (autumn) stable (earth) energy. For those familiar with math, a card could be seen as a vector, defined by its length and direction.
As you remind, each suit share the same color, but the season flows and wanes through the numbers. So, all cups share the same color, but all fours have a different glyph changing through the suits.
Without wasting too much time on the Manga (even if most of the Manga twist had been brought to the Legends), it can be said that that Tarot dude (still being me) used the Manga to make an interesting (for him) exploration on the structure of the Minors.
The idea of the Legends was to continue this exploration within the structure of the Majors.
What Sign is River Tam…?
At some time in the past something happened here on AT (I don’t remember the precise when it entered the creative process). I was definitely more present, and I spent considerable energy onto one single thread regarding the Strength card. A thread that went bad and was later deleted. If I remember correctly, by PM, I had a very interesting discussion with a previous member of this forum (Umbrae), and another (I hope current member) that was Firemaiden.
The core part of that discussion was the reliance of Tarot on outside systems: namely (always them, the bad duo) Astrology and Cabbalah. I will try to explain.
Why does a specific card has a specific meaning? Universal truth? Nope (imho). Ancient tradition (definitely not). It is because Cabbalah and Astrology.
The core meaning of each cards (historically first the Majors and much later the minor) was connected to the system of Cabbalah and Astrology. For instance the Emperor is Aries (noticed in how many decks the throne of the Emperor has goat head on it?) and again the Emperor is connected to Deleth (one of the Hebrew letter of the Cabbalah, meaning “door” and specifically the door/transition between abstract and concrete). For the French occultists, earlier, and for the adepts of the Golden Dawn, later, this was a huge conquest. After their contribution, Tarot stopped being a collection of random meanings conjured out of thin air by some charlatan (sorry, mr. Etteilla), but was a very cleverly integrated, remarkable and serious esoteric discipline toolbox. These people were looking to make Tarot Universal (timeless, ageless, true, one).
That was the time when Umbrae asked me what Sign was River Tam.
River Tam (I was well aware) is a character from a Tv science fiction series called Firefly. I could tell it was a trick question… but I didn’t know the answer.
Finally Umbrae told me that, as River was not born on Earth, the Sign had precious little meaning for her.
This is, mostly, the point. Referencing Tarot to outside consolidated (by centuries of studies) systems had not made Tarot Universal. It made it dependant on those systems and their own limits. Even before humanity leaves Earth (like River Tam, nullifying the very concept of Astrology), we will be forced to face those limits.
I personally think that the greatest limit is that over 95% of Tarot users has no real knowledge of Cabbalah, and I would say that over 50% has just a passing knowledge of Astrology.
So we call in something we don’t know. This makes us (our understanding of Tarot) weaker. Not stronger. And again, we are submerged by decks that have been giving meaning to a card not because of a reason, but just because they were copying from other decks. How can be meaning and innovation if we act out of rote and habit? If we lost the reasons why we do something? Least we consider Tarot done, and the only thing possible, are sterile variation in style.
Sadly, it won’t be my voice to change anything. Doing this – very sadly – has created the foundation of a great loss in Tarot. It has created the basic for stagnation, and almost destroyed the ability of modern Tarot to evolve with the times, and be something of worth to be passed on to our children.
I know most readers will disagree to my melodramatic Tarot millenarism. So what… agreeing or disagreeing won’t change the outcome ^_^ let the blind optimism faces the bleak pessimism into battle, and time decide on his own how things are going to be.
Returning to the Tarot of Legends I felt the necessity to try to give a different reason to the meaning behind each card. A reason that was embedded into Tarot and not reliant to outside systems.
That was what I started into the Manga. As I wrote before each card (Minor Arcana only, obviously) meaning could have been seen by the combination of COLOR + GLYPH.
To make a better example here is the list of the associations in the Manga Tarot (will be the same in the Tarot of Legends) for the Cup/Chalices suit
****
Chalices: yellow
Ace of Chalices: all four seasons
2 of Chalices: summer
3 of Chalices: fall
4 of Chalices: winter
5 of Chalices: spring
6 of Chalices: summer
7 of Chalices: fall
8 of Chalices: winter
9 of Chalices: spring
10 of Chalices: lack of winter
Prince of Chalices: summer
Princess of Chalices: fall
King of Chalices: winter
Queen of Chalices: spring
****
What can we say following just this simple table?
Let’s imagine we don’t know anything about the cards, except what we can see there.
We can see how the Ace is a certain card that contains, at the same time, the energies of all four seasons. The Ten, on the other side, is the card that express the lack of winter (much more important than the presence of Summer, Autumns and Spring).
How can we define Chalices? Chalices is the suit whose Ten (a number suggesting fullness) is expressed by the lack of winter. A suit whose Prince is in Summer and Queen is in Spring. Even intuitively, you can see how Chalices (even if you knew nothing about it) seem to have a certain connotation.
Or You can go the other way round, and define the Queen as the card whose spring is in Chalices.
I don’t want to make a guide (after all this was begun in the Manga Tarot, and now we are going forward), but I wanted to show where I was coming from, and why, and how.
One day, maybe… but the system is quite easy once you start thinking about it, and not about what the cards should be. Interesting enough… the meaning ends up flavoring the known archetipes, making the deck definitely recognizable.
In a way, I sometimes think we can act differently when creating a Tarot deck.
If Tarot, seen as a whole, were a tree a deck creator may change the fruit of one specific branch. And it’s what is done most often.
But as tree grows, it’s necessary that, beside new branches, there are also new roots, else the tree wither and die. When Tarot authors “reseed” the concepts behind a deck, they are working on the roots.
All said and done, I was quite happy with the Manga Tarot as it moved and shacked and (at least to me) improved my understanding of the Minor Arcana.
The Majors, however, were still mostly untouched.
And that was what brought me over to create the Tarot of Legends.
*********
Majors in the Tarot of Legends
The Major Arcana are 22, and are divided in 3 groups of seven cards each, plus the Fool.
As the deck is a Fantasy deck, each Major represent a God/Godddess of this world. The Gods are seven and each is seen thrice, through his/her manifestation in the:
- material world
- intellectual world
- spiritual world
Apart from being Fantasy Gods, and representing the traditional Archetipes, I wanted these Gods to represent some quintessential quality of our human experience. They are not meant to be Gods, but rather of being expression of what we may call energies or perspectives of the world as we know.
Those qualities are:
- the different
- Magic
- Knowledge
- Reception
- Creation
- Love
- War
As you can see they may be linked in pairs:
Magic and Knowledge may also be seen as emotion and intelligence, sense and sensibility (not pride and prejudice, sorry), Id and Ego, uncertainty and certainty, logic and faith…
Reception and Creation we all know quite well. They are the Ying and the Yang, the Sun and the Moon, the taking and the giving, the male and the female.
Love and War follow a similar pattern than we may call Eros and Thanatos, nurturing and distriction, survival and self-destruction, hope and despair, fullness and emptiness…
This three dimensions, divided in two extremes each may be seen as the core concept of humanity.
And beyond them there is the different: what makes the world not symmetric, what makes every answer a prelude to another question, the source of what we call “seeking”. It is the necessary fifth, out of four elements.
Without it, we would be static, and easy. With it, we are a mistery of incredible complexity.
Once we have seven key concept, and three tiers (material, intellectual and spiritual), we may start create our 21 Arcana.
a) Difference I, X, XV
b) Magic II, XII, XVII
c) Reception III, Strength XVIII
d) Creative IV, Justice, XIX
e) Knowledge V, IX, XX
f) Love VI, XIV, XXI
g) War VII, XIII, XVI
What You will see (I hope) is how each single element of this structure brings out what we already know about Tarot. But now it’s not more about something we probably know little about (Astrology and Cabbalah) but something we may really understand INSIDE our OWN experience. Not outside… but inside.
The point I’m betting on is that we understand much better what LOVE is, than what Daleth is. And this means that the connection between an Arcana and its seed may be again perceived, used, and – most important of all – FELT.
The Fool
The Fool is the man, not any man, but the man without Gods. The Man before looking out at the Universe. It’s us, and it’s an empty sky. It’s a clean slate, and a perennial question… like a children constantly asking “why? why?”.
The Goddess of Magic
II, the High Priestess: the Goddess of Magic expressing her aspect in the material
The Keeper/Guardian of Mysteries.
III, the Hanged Man: the Goddess of Magic expressing her aspect in the intellectual
The Lady of Visions
XVII, the Star: the Goddess of Magic expressing her aspect in the spiritual
Perception of the Divine
Can You see the High Priestess, the Hanged Man and the Star you are used to?
And can you see their connection one to the other, and to a greater whole?
“Magic” is the ability of the human being to perceive the wonders of the world, to perceive and to touch something greater than himself.
In the Material world, “magic” may be written, contained and understood (hence the book of the High Priestess, and one of the reason I did not connect the HP to Knowledge).
In the Intellectual world, “magic” may be experienced.
In the Spiritual world, “magic” may be believed.
It’s a journey from the unknown to the Divine.
As I once said, I don’t want to change the Arcana.
I wish to change (to spark a change) on the way the Arcana are perceived.
Editing to add some images:
The High Priestess
http://www.loscarabeo.com/files/web/02_Papessa.jpg
The Hanged Man
http://www.loscarabeo.com/files/web/12_appeso.jpg
The Star
http://www.loscarabeo.com/files/web/17_stella.jpg
Actually both the script and the art for the cards was done much later than the conceptualization of the deck I was writing about. But it may be nice to skip some passage and see how it all actually went on the practical side.
The script for the cards said:
High Priestess: A female child. She has an open book in one hand, holding like by magic without touching it. From this book a magical glow. In the other hand, a closed book, glowing of dark and shadowy light.
The Hanged "Man": A woman hanged upside down, tied not by a rope but by a snake. Her face is blindfolded, but the eyes behind the fold seems to glow of unheartly light (they are actually the main source of light in the scene). The clothes she wears are very simple, like a virginal white tunic.
The Star: A single green tree, blossoming of a lonly single flower. Without picking it up, a women, clothed in white like a novice monk, brings the flower closer to herself like to smell it.
A single ray of light hits the flower and the hand from above. On her head she wears a crown with a star on it.
Looking at the images You can see how they need some correction.
The correction process is something I will handle with much greater detail later, but I will try to give a few elements here.
The greatest modification is in the Star cards, which seems to me quite off, not in the detail, but rather in the atmosphere. What I couldn't see it was the "perception of the Divine", that needed to be the core concept of the card.
[What will follow… images (I have to look for them and upload them somewhere), more cards, and mainly how the concept I portrayed until now made their way to the art – and how they changed and evolved into the process).
Oh… it’s a long way to go. A first step, however… is better than nothing. ^^
Any and all question, I will be happy to work a discussion. And also, any and all corrections!]
(creation notes)
A few times I’ve been asked to give an account of the creation process behind a deck. One reason I’ve never done it, it’s the language, as I’m not a native English speaker. I hope you will forgive me.
I start now on this endeavor, but I cannot give any garauntee I will find the time and energy to follow it through, until the end. However I’m hoping so.
I have also chosen to write all of this on a forum, rather than on a blog or an facebook. First, I would like to give people, if interested, to be able to write comment and ask question, like in a two-way discussion and not like in a monologue. And secondly, with all the differencies, I have a lot of gratitude to AT, Solandia and the staff… so I hope that this may help them to provide valued content to the forum.
That said… let’s start on a deck.
The deck is known by the provisionary title of Tarot of Legends.
It was originally written in 2008, was then modified a few months later, but only in 2011 an artist started working on it. The artist is Paolo Martinello (already known for the Universal Fantasy Tarot and the Mona Lisa Tarot. He had been very busy, among other things, becoming the father of two twins and making several other works. He hopes to be able to complete the deck in Summer 2011, so the deck may possible be released in 2013.
How it all begin?
Once upon a time there was a little Tarot dude (that’s me)…
The origin of the Tarot of Legends are dutifully linked into the end of the Manga Tarot.
For those not familiar with that deck, it was created with a few quirks that are worth mentioning.
- all gender attributions are switched in the cards. Usually you may find a male Magician, in the Manga you have a female Sorceress. Strength is male, the Hermit is female, and so on…
The purpose of this was twicefold. On one side I wanted to challenge the “give for granted” ideas we have on the cards. Strength is female because in the heavily male-dominated, yet chivalrous, society of the Renaissance, it would have been impossible to portray females in a position of dominance, but very possible to portray them as representation of abstract virtues, like Strength or Temperance. It could be said that males, at that time, respected women enough to place them above themselves, but not humble enough to place them at their same level as peers.
On the other side I wanted to explore the idea of playing with genders, subtly altering, without having any true control on it, what the Arcana would have been. Strength – after all, is not male or female, except in the eye of the beholder. In order to “feel” the archetype I had to look at it, at least once, from the complimentary point of view.
As usual this change was cause of more trouble than it was worth. It was one of the causes that made the deck labeled “unsuitable for beginners”, and the average comment was that “the gender switching was not as unsettling as it could have been”.
I point to this, a bit because I’m grumpy (^_^) and a lot because it is a good example of the resistance of public to what is supposed not to be “as they know”, but to be “stimulating on what they know”. And the new vs old kind of fight is something that will be long present in any consideration about deck creation.
- all cards are color coded into 4 colors, each referring to a specific suit/element.
Many decks share this twist. It comes very handy when you have to visually and emotionally clearly mark the distinction between a suit and another. Also, it reflects interestingly into a reading, because you have (and you provide the Querent as well) with a “at a glance” idea of the energies present into the reading. A lot of fire stands out as a dominance of red… and it’s quite impossible to miss.
What was sort of new in the Manga, was that the Majors were color linked as well. It meant that it was very easy to link each major Arcana to a specific suit, or – if we prefer – to a specific kind of energy.
Two cards were an exception… the monochromatic Fool (expression of a potential blank, clean slate, state) and the full color Wheel (expression of the transition, “in the making” change between energies).
- all cards were glyph coded into four seasons.
This was the part most difficult for the Manga Tarot users, and I can safely bet that most people using the deck simply ignored the glyph/season part. It was designed to be that way, as working with the glyphs was supposed to be an advanced use, one calling in not just intuitive resources (as the color were) but intellectual resources (after all, you need to think what each glyph is).
The effect I wanted to achieve was to code each Arcana with a double reference. For instance one card would be green (earth) in color and autumn in season. Even before looking at the cards, you can see how this card can be interpreted as a waning (autumn) stable (earth) energy. For those familiar with math, a card could be seen as a vector, defined by its length and direction.
As you remind, each suit share the same color, but the season flows and wanes through the numbers. So, all cups share the same color, but all fours have a different glyph changing through the suits.
Without wasting too much time on the Manga (even if most of the Manga twist had been brought to the Legends), it can be said that that Tarot dude (still being me) used the Manga to make an interesting (for him) exploration on the structure of the Minors.
The idea of the Legends was to continue this exploration within the structure of the Majors.
What Sign is River Tam…?
At some time in the past something happened here on AT (I don’t remember the precise when it entered the creative process). I was definitely more present, and I spent considerable energy onto one single thread regarding the Strength card. A thread that went bad and was later deleted. If I remember correctly, by PM, I had a very interesting discussion with a previous member of this forum (Umbrae), and another (I hope current member) that was Firemaiden.
The core part of that discussion was the reliance of Tarot on outside systems: namely (always them, the bad duo) Astrology and Cabbalah. I will try to explain.
Why does a specific card has a specific meaning? Universal truth? Nope (imho). Ancient tradition (definitely not). It is because Cabbalah and Astrology.
The core meaning of each cards (historically first the Majors and much later the minor) was connected to the system of Cabbalah and Astrology. For instance the Emperor is Aries (noticed in how many decks the throne of the Emperor has goat head on it?) and again the Emperor is connected to Deleth (one of the Hebrew letter of the Cabbalah, meaning “door” and specifically the door/transition between abstract and concrete). For the French occultists, earlier, and for the adepts of the Golden Dawn, later, this was a huge conquest. After their contribution, Tarot stopped being a collection of random meanings conjured out of thin air by some charlatan (sorry, mr. Etteilla), but was a very cleverly integrated, remarkable and serious esoteric discipline toolbox. These people were looking to make Tarot Universal (timeless, ageless, true, one).
That was the time when Umbrae asked me what Sign was River Tam.
River Tam (I was well aware) is a character from a Tv science fiction series called Firefly. I could tell it was a trick question… but I didn’t know the answer.
Finally Umbrae told me that, as River was not born on Earth, the Sign had precious little meaning for her.
This is, mostly, the point. Referencing Tarot to outside consolidated (by centuries of studies) systems had not made Tarot Universal. It made it dependant on those systems and their own limits. Even before humanity leaves Earth (like River Tam, nullifying the very concept of Astrology), we will be forced to face those limits.
I personally think that the greatest limit is that over 95% of Tarot users has no real knowledge of Cabbalah, and I would say that over 50% has just a passing knowledge of Astrology.
So we call in something we don’t know. This makes us (our understanding of Tarot) weaker. Not stronger. And again, we are submerged by decks that have been giving meaning to a card not because of a reason, but just because they were copying from other decks. How can be meaning and innovation if we act out of rote and habit? If we lost the reasons why we do something? Least we consider Tarot done, and the only thing possible, are sterile variation in style.
Sadly, it won’t be my voice to change anything. Doing this – very sadly – has created the foundation of a great loss in Tarot. It has created the basic for stagnation, and almost destroyed the ability of modern Tarot to evolve with the times, and be something of worth to be passed on to our children.
I know most readers will disagree to my melodramatic Tarot millenarism. So what… agreeing or disagreeing won’t change the outcome ^_^ let the blind optimism faces the bleak pessimism into battle, and time decide on his own how things are going to be.
Returning to the Tarot of Legends I felt the necessity to try to give a different reason to the meaning behind each card. A reason that was embedded into Tarot and not reliant to outside systems.
That was what I started into the Manga. As I wrote before each card (Minor Arcana only, obviously) meaning could have been seen by the combination of COLOR + GLYPH.
To make a better example here is the list of the associations in the Manga Tarot (will be the same in the Tarot of Legends) for the Cup/Chalices suit
****
Chalices: yellow
Ace of Chalices: all four seasons
2 of Chalices: summer
3 of Chalices: fall
4 of Chalices: winter
5 of Chalices: spring
6 of Chalices: summer
7 of Chalices: fall
8 of Chalices: winter
9 of Chalices: spring
10 of Chalices: lack of winter
Prince of Chalices: summer
Princess of Chalices: fall
King of Chalices: winter
Queen of Chalices: spring
****
What can we say following just this simple table?
Let’s imagine we don’t know anything about the cards, except what we can see there.
We can see how the Ace is a certain card that contains, at the same time, the energies of all four seasons. The Ten, on the other side, is the card that express the lack of winter (much more important than the presence of Summer, Autumns and Spring).
How can we define Chalices? Chalices is the suit whose Ten (a number suggesting fullness) is expressed by the lack of winter. A suit whose Prince is in Summer and Queen is in Spring. Even intuitively, you can see how Chalices (even if you knew nothing about it) seem to have a certain connotation.
Or You can go the other way round, and define the Queen as the card whose spring is in Chalices.
I don’t want to make a guide (after all this was begun in the Manga Tarot, and now we are going forward), but I wanted to show where I was coming from, and why, and how.
One day, maybe… but the system is quite easy once you start thinking about it, and not about what the cards should be. Interesting enough… the meaning ends up flavoring the known archetipes, making the deck definitely recognizable.
In a way, I sometimes think we can act differently when creating a Tarot deck.
If Tarot, seen as a whole, were a tree a deck creator may change the fruit of one specific branch. And it’s what is done most often.
But as tree grows, it’s necessary that, beside new branches, there are also new roots, else the tree wither and die. When Tarot authors “reseed” the concepts behind a deck, they are working on the roots.
All said and done, I was quite happy with the Manga Tarot as it moved and shacked and (at least to me) improved my understanding of the Minor Arcana.
The Majors, however, were still mostly untouched.
And that was what brought me over to create the Tarot of Legends.
*********
Majors in the Tarot of Legends
The Major Arcana are 22, and are divided in 3 groups of seven cards each, plus the Fool.
As the deck is a Fantasy deck, each Major represent a God/Godddess of this world. The Gods are seven and each is seen thrice, through his/her manifestation in the:
- material world
- intellectual world
- spiritual world
Apart from being Fantasy Gods, and representing the traditional Archetipes, I wanted these Gods to represent some quintessential quality of our human experience. They are not meant to be Gods, but rather of being expression of what we may call energies or perspectives of the world as we know.
Those qualities are:
- the different
- Magic
- Knowledge
- Reception
- Creation
- Love
- War
As you can see they may be linked in pairs:
Magic and Knowledge may also be seen as emotion and intelligence, sense and sensibility (not pride and prejudice, sorry), Id and Ego, uncertainty and certainty, logic and faith…
Reception and Creation we all know quite well. They are the Ying and the Yang, the Sun and the Moon, the taking and the giving, the male and the female.
Love and War follow a similar pattern than we may call Eros and Thanatos, nurturing and distriction, survival and self-destruction, hope and despair, fullness and emptiness…
This three dimensions, divided in two extremes each may be seen as the core concept of humanity.
And beyond them there is the different: what makes the world not symmetric, what makes every answer a prelude to another question, the source of what we call “seeking”. It is the necessary fifth, out of four elements.
Without it, we would be static, and easy. With it, we are a mistery of incredible complexity.
Once we have seven key concept, and three tiers (material, intellectual and spiritual), we may start create our 21 Arcana.
a) Difference I, X, XV
b) Magic II, XII, XVII
c) Reception III, Strength XVIII
d) Creative IV, Justice, XIX
e) Knowledge V, IX, XX
f) Love VI, XIV, XXI
g) War VII, XIII, XVI
What You will see (I hope) is how each single element of this structure brings out what we already know about Tarot. But now it’s not more about something we probably know little about (Astrology and Cabbalah) but something we may really understand INSIDE our OWN experience. Not outside… but inside.
The point I’m betting on is that we understand much better what LOVE is, than what Daleth is. And this means that the connection between an Arcana and its seed may be again perceived, used, and – most important of all – FELT.
The Fool
The Fool is the man, not any man, but the man without Gods. The Man before looking out at the Universe. It’s us, and it’s an empty sky. It’s a clean slate, and a perennial question… like a children constantly asking “why? why?”.
The Goddess of Magic
II, the High Priestess: the Goddess of Magic expressing her aspect in the material
The Keeper/Guardian of Mysteries.
III, the Hanged Man: the Goddess of Magic expressing her aspect in the intellectual
The Lady of Visions
XVII, the Star: the Goddess of Magic expressing her aspect in the spiritual
Perception of the Divine
Can You see the High Priestess, the Hanged Man and the Star you are used to?
And can you see their connection one to the other, and to a greater whole?
“Magic” is the ability of the human being to perceive the wonders of the world, to perceive and to touch something greater than himself.
In the Material world, “magic” may be written, contained and understood (hence the book of the High Priestess, and one of the reason I did not connect the HP to Knowledge).
In the Intellectual world, “magic” may be experienced.
In the Spiritual world, “magic” may be believed.
It’s a journey from the unknown to the Divine.
As I once said, I don’t want to change the Arcana.
I wish to change (to spark a change) on the way the Arcana are perceived.
Editing to add some images:
The High Priestess
http://www.loscarabeo.com/files/web/02_Papessa.jpg
The Hanged Man
http://www.loscarabeo.com/files/web/12_appeso.jpg
The Star
http://www.loscarabeo.com/files/web/17_stella.jpg
Actually both the script and the art for the cards was done much later than the conceptualization of the deck I was writing about. But it may be nice to skip some passage and see how it all actually went on the practical side.
The script for the cards said:
High Priestess: A female child. She has an open book in one hand, holding like by magic without touching it. From this book a magical glow. In the other hand, a closed book, glowing of dark and shadowy light.
The Hanged "Man": A woman hanged upside down, tied not by a rope but by a snake. Her face is blindfolded, but the eyes behind the fold seems to glow of unheartly light (they are actually the main source of light in the scene). The clothes she wears are very simple, like a virginal white tunic.
The Star: A single green tree, blossoming of a lonly single flower. Without picking it up, a women, clothed in white like a novice monk, brings the flower closer to herself like to smell it.
A single ray of light hits the flower and the hand from above. On her head she wears a crown with a star on it.
Looking at the images You can see how they need some correction.
The correction process is something I will handle with much greater detail later, but I will try to give a few elements here.
The greatest modification is in the Star cards, which seems to me quite off, not in the detail, but rather in the atmosphere. What I couldn't see it was the "perception of the Divine", that needed to be the core concept of the card.
[What will follow… images (I have to look for them and upload them somewhere), more cards, and mainly how the concept I portrayed until now made their way to the art – and how they changed and evolved into the process).
Oh… it’s a long way to go. A first step, however… is better than nothing. ^^
Any and all question, I will be happy to work a discussion. And also, any and all corrections!]
