The Bohemian Gothic Tarot

[Briar Rose]

Karen, I love The Bohemian Gothic Tarot. I am looking forward to it!

I hope you are going to have a bag with it, like you wrote awhile back in this thread. Which card will the picture be from? Wait, lets make it a surprise. But can it fringe and beads?

I love the silver on the cards. Would you consider using the silver around the outside edges of the cards? I think it would look amazing.

 

[baba-prague]

Karen, I love The Bohemian Gothic Tarot. I am looking forward to it!

I hope you are going to have a bag with it, like you wrote awhile back in this thread. Which card will the picture be from? Wait, lets make it a surprise. But can it fringe and beads?

I love the silver on the cards. Would you consider using the silver around the outside edges of the cards? I think it would look amazing.

The bag that comes with the kit will not have a picture - it was just impossible to get someone to do 500 bags with a picture without adding some ridiculous cost - there is no way we could produce 500 of one thing in time ourselves without devoting everything to that and nothing else for ages. But it WILL be special in a different way (I hope, I still haven't seen the sample and we have a plan up our sleeve which may or may not work). In any case, I had doubts that everyone would be happy to get the same picture - still not sure how that would have gone down.

Separately we will of course do a small range of pictorial bags - I hope about eight as I think there will be more cards than that which would make great bags (I have already decided on the Queen of Swords for myself). I want to try to see if we can use antique black brocade (which I have been stashing - though still not sure if it will be too stiff) and we will certainly do fringing - hopefully of various sorts. We have already booked ALL the blood-red glass beads that our supplier has!

 

[Vesper]

queen of wands

"There she was, dressed out. You never sid the like in they days. Satin and silk, and scarlet and green, and gold and pint lace; by Jen! 'twas a sight! A big powdered wig, half as high as herself, was a-top o' her head...and such long nails, all cut into points,"

That's one scary queen!

 

[baba-prague]

You have picked out the exact quote that I am using in the book! I don't mean that our card is exactly an illustration of this story - we have tried to keep the cards more generic so that they are not each tied to a particular story (Gothic has such strong themes that certain imagery can apply to many stories) but certainly Madam Crowl was one of the characters that went into the making of this card. As I say, the Masque of the Red Death is also somewhere in there - hence the blood-red dress.

The cat? He just wandered in (actually, if you know The Black Cat by Poe you will know that there is a horrible link between this and the Le Fanu story - they are both about "walling in" a victim).

 

[Vesper]

Oooh, I hope Poe is going to show up in the deck! Laudanum and rum, and absynth, oh my!

 

[baba-prague]

Oooh, I hope Poe is going to show up in the deck! Laudanum and rum, and absynth, oh my!

Even our little corner shop stocks absinthe - "The Green Fairy", her home is in Prague. There will be lots of oblique references to Poe stories, but, as I say, we don't plan any one-to-one correspondences with particular Gothic tales. For instance, the Queen of Swords could well be Carmilla (not a Poe of course, but still...) - but she doesn't have to be read in that way.

 

[HearthCricket]

Even our little corner shop stocks absinthe - "The Green Fairy", her home is in Prague. There will be lots of oblique references to Poe stories, but, as I say, we don't plan any one-to-one correspondences with particular Gothic tales. For instance, the Queen of Swords could well be Camilla (not a Poe of course, but still...) - but she doesn't have to be read in that way.

She is growing on me, as is the other one. All you have to do is watch a movie around that time period, be it Amadeus, Marie Antoinette, Valmont, etc. There is a fine line between who is who and what! The wigs, the enourmous dresses and finery, the painted faces (ever see that lady in Northanger Abbey, the Marchioness or something?) the various face spots, etc. Women look like men, men look like women, genders are mixed, truth is hidden and only revealed behind closed doors, faces are hid behind fans and all is a masque. It took me a while, but I am getting it!

 

[Umbrae]

So far – I’d not change a thing with this deck.

It’s not supposed to be a pretty fru-fru deck, that’s been done. It’s supposed to be disturbing (IMO), it’s supposed to create – feelings…

If a card makes you uncomfortable – perhaps that should be explored!

Take that Queen of Wands. Lift up the petticoats, perhaps what you expect to see isn’t there.

Do you know or do you think you know?

The King of Swords a knight? Bah! He’s not on a horse – lift up the visor and what stares back at you, or do you even dare to lift the visor…

The Gothic Literature genre, isn’t like today’s in your face, stuff…rarely is blood seen – but there’s always an erotic undertone.

Look again at that 7 of Cups. Will she? Won't she? All she has to do is drink the potion...will she or won't she?

Test question: Where'd she get the potion?

So far, I’ve seen nothing I’d change.

 

[baba-prague]

Look again at that 7 of Cups. Will she? Won't she? All she has to do is drink the potion...will she or won't she?

Yes - and with whom? Just who did she meet on the roof? She's excited - no elated - flushed with success and thrilled with herself. What just happened? Whoever it was who she saw on the roof, we can be sure it was NOT the boy next door (who is probably still next door looking at a picture of her in a nice neat high-buttoned dress and assuming that she was long ago safely tucked up for the night).

I like the point about the eroticism Umbrae, that does, I hope, run through many cards of this deck, and often in a disturbingly transgressive way. Personally this particular card reminds me of that line from Kubla Khan, "Woman wailing for her demon lover." If you look at the dress of the women in this deck, you'll see that most are blue or red - with, I hope, all that might be implied by that. Good girl, bad girl, it's one of the themes that Gothic still plays with.

Lay out these cards and see what stories you see - it might be surprising.

 

[HearthCricket]

If you look at the dress of the women in this deck, you'll see that most are blue or red - with, I hope, all that might be implied by that. Good girl, bad girl, it's one of the themes that Gothic still plays with.

I read the book about the making of Bram Stoker's Dracula (movie) and there was a lot about the choices they made with colour. Mina and Lucy wearing greens and blues and white, for innocence, purity and mortality. Then Lucy wears orange the night she goes out to Dracula. And Mina only wears red the night she meets Dracula and is dancing with him. Now, none of this happens in the novel, but, they made the point clear about the symbolism of the clothes (hey gotta love Dracula in the Klimt outfit, right?)!!