Why?

[Wendywu]

So - why do you love the deck you think of as "your" deck, or your favourite deck? What is it about that deck?

Please no "what she said" replies if you happen to love the same deck as a previous poster - expand and tell me your version of "what she said". In gruesome detail. Your feelings about the same deck will be different in small ways.

Me - and as I have said before (ad nauseam) I love Ironwing. I love the enigmatic surface that seethes with meaning when you scratch it just a little. I love the way it shouts if it thinks I'm having a particularly dim day (rather frequent, I'm afraid). I love the jokes, the sadness, the compassion. And I absolutely adore the intricacy of the artwork that can lead me down so many paths of meaning. The cards have such a distinct voice. I never much cared for black and white decks but these cards showed me that when I can't be distracted by "oooh, pretty" colours and/or bling, I can focus so much more intently on what I see. In a way that applies more to the minors than the majors, because the minors are greyscale and much more muted than the full-on very densely black/red earth/white majors.

I found I resented it when others saw the cards very negatively or didn't see the intensity and beauty that I perceive in them, or interpreted them in ways that clashed directly with my limited understanding of them. That resentement was wrong of me. There are decks I look at that others rave about - and I see nothing, or just the merest glimmer or I don't perceive their beauty. That is a lack in me, not in the cards. Also, I now know that what others see in Ironwing is also true for them, just as what I see is true for me - even if it is in total opposition to my understanding of a card. So I don't resent that someone doesn't see her as I do anymore - instead I try and learn something from their vision of the deck.

So - teach me what you see in your deck? What lies beneath the obvious for you? How have you overcome obstacles with your deck?

 

[Kissa]

The Crone: an eye- and a heart-opener!

The last time i was pretty much in love with one deck was some time ago with the Tarot of the Crone. http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/crone/index.shtml

I loved this deck because it is NOT just another RWS clone. I dislike RWS heavy esoteric symbolism (cannot stand the Sphynx on the Chariot, same guy on the Wheel of Fortune, that bloody Tree of Life on 10 of Pents etc.). As zan_chan noticed it once, the Crone is one of the rare decks in this world where you don't find the pierced bleeding heart as 3 of Swords. http://www.croneways.com/sword3.html

I love the simple artwork, it is what works best for me: naive, simple, some might say "childlike" artwork. Colors with a meaning. Strong colors

What made me love this deck most though is that it went way behind tarot. The messages I received during readings (it is hard to explain!) seemed to come from far far away (both in time and in place). They also resonated in my life in a very powerful way because the messages fit so well and made so much sense with my way of seeing the world. The Crone transmitted stronger spiritual messages than any other deck. The cards both shook me and nurtured me because I felt acceptance for who I am. I cried so often when I was reading the cards. It was ok to be dark, weak, bad.

I felt connected with a very ancient feminine wisdom. Not one with fancy Claudia Schiffer lookalike goddesses all over the place though. One that feels genuine and very real to me.

Ellen Lorenzi-Prince seems to be a wonderful woman, warm and open-hearted, generous and humble, grounded and with a good sense of humour. I read she fought/fights depression and I have often wondered how much depression influenced her work, how much she worked her way through depression using art. I also suffer from depression and some cards just throw that monster at my face, forcing me to deal with it.

The pictures that bring me happiness in the deck (this one for example: http://www.croneways.com/disk3.html as I see my daughters and myself) have such a strong meaning that the happiness stays with me for a long time, it doesn't wear off. As I said, the deck resonates deeper than any other.

In addition to all this, the Crone was the first deck in my collection to come up with a Hierophant card that I like http://www.croneways.com/major5.html. The idea of Tradition, knowledge and wisdom being carried from generation to generation, is much more inspiring than a picture of any guru, pope, holy master whatsoever.

Eck, I feel so moved now that I wonder why I haven't read with my Crone for months. Was probably trying to avoid the miror...
Writing all this is like enabling myself to my beloved Crone, thank you Wendy

 

[ilweran]

Greenwood - it's just magical, really taps into something 'other' and calls me to it. Don't know what else to say really, it's just right.

Llewellyn - I'm Welsh, I always wanted a Welsh decks and was so pleased when this was perfect for me. I know many people don't like the minors, but I love them almost more than the majors. They look misty and flowing - and damp, and Wales is certainly quite damp!

 

[gregory]

WOW. Good one. I hope Lillie comes here; she recently got the Ironwing and said it could be for her what she had hoped the Greenwood would be, but wasn't (I hope she won't mind my saying this, but it fascinated me; I simply don't GET the Ironwing, beautiful though it is !)

I don't know that any ONE deck is MINE - but - well, the Baroque Bohemian Cats always speak to me. I don't know if they just do because I absolutely LOVE cats and until recently have never been without one for more than the weeks between one death and a new arrival. But I don't need to know why.

Part of it, I think, is the facial expressions. Those cats do seem to speak to me, literally. OK - they have clothes on. I can rise above that - though I know others can't. But it does bother me when others say it's yuk, and frivolous, because it isn't.

And also - they seem so involved in what is going on in the card. The ones falling from the Tower - you can almost hear what they are saying about that. But they will turn around and add a comment to me as they fall, if you see what I mean. I have the feeling that the action carries on in private when they are in the box, so the next time they come out, they have new information to share.

And there's the detail. I think I see something in every card every time I pull it that I simply never saw before.

I don't mind people not liking it, I don't even mind them saying cats in clothes are silly. But dismissing it out of hand and saying it is trivial is not on. I am reminded of my own recanting about the Mystic Faeries, which I discounted very loudly until I read with it. I think this deck could be a bit like that, for its detractors. There is so much more to it than first hits you in the face.

This sounds a mite frivolous. Oh well. It's a damn fine reading deck, anyway ! It has never let me down.

 

[nisaba]

<grin> I suppose you've seen my desert island post.

I love Ironwing.

<astonished> NO! I NEVER picked up on that! You-what?

I love the way it shouts if it thinks I'm having a particularly dim day (rather frequent, I'm afraid). I love the jokes, the sadness, the compassion. And I absolutely adore the intricacy of the artwork that can lead me down so many paths of meaning.

All wonderful things to love. Oh, and I never saw it as a b&w deck - because of the red, I see it as a limited-palette colour deck. It's a part of its charm.

I found I resented it when others saw the cards very negatively or didn't see the intensity and beauty that I perceive in them, or interpreted them in ways that clashed directly with my limited understanding of them. That resentement was wrong of me.

I feel the same way about Granny: in particular, I was wounded to the core by an honest and polite comment from a Tarot retailer whom I thought Really Ought To Have Known Better. But, like you, with time I came to see that was *my* intolerance of diversity, not her lapse of taste.

There are decks I look at that others rave about - and I see nothing, or just the merest glimmer or I don't perceive their beauty. That is a lack in me, not in the cards.

Let me heal that lack in you, regarding the Granny Jones Australian Tarot.

I love the naive artistic style, concealing great depth below great simplicity. I like the way she has used her pastels in a childlike, crayonlike way. I love the emergence of her gentleness and kindness; her optimism; her great love of her family, her community (Richmond, Tasmania - the bridge and church recognisably appear together in two cards), and her animals; her discovery of spirituality and spiritual lessons in simple acts like hanging up laundry to dry, brushing a cat, and pouring a cup of tea.

I love the fact that the threatening presence in the Devil, a giant spider, seems to be as terrified as his victim. It's one of the images that make me chuckle warmly when I see it, despite its wholly serious message, and without taking away from that message.

I love how Granny Jones travels seemingly randomly through around fifty cards of both the Major and Minor Arcana, in important and less important roles, and I love how some crucially important figures are obviously portraits of good friends instead of self-portraits (The Empress, the Queen Cups, the Queen Buttons), family members (the Emperor and the male in the Lovers, the Queen Wands and the Queen Swords, and sundry babies and small children scattered through the deck), whilst other figures are clearly imagined people rather than actual living people she knew.

I love her "shorthand": winged light globes and banknotes for incoming money and ideas, the Three Flying Birds for the blessings of the Triple Goddess, three snow-capped mountains in the background for distant hardships, bicycles for movement and so on. I love her renaming "Pentacles" as Buttons: not all Earth-based people are rich enough to own great discs of solid gold, but all of us, rich and poor, have buttons in constant use.

And I love the two mistakes in the deck: in the Five Cups and the Four Cups, she forgot to erase her pencil guide-lines in places before the printing process (she obviously drew the outlines of the deck in pencil first to get them right before applying the delicate thin black ink-line).

I love Judgement, though I think she was totally lost in space when she designed Justice. And I love-love-love-love-love Temperance! Temperance is the card in which she most directly emerges from the card and meets us on our own territory, making real eye-contact, and really listening to us when we need it the most. Oh, and despite the fact that my mother is alive, Temperance in this deck is the only real Motherly figure I've had in my life in many, many years if ever, and I love her for that.

What I don't love: Justice. And the fact that Granny was not a writer, and the accompanying book is an anagram of carp. I would have loved her to explain things like the symbolism of the three flying birds so that other people than me would notice them (no one ever does until I mention it, sadly). I would also have adored it if she had explained who the Empress, the Queen Cups and the Queen Wands actually were in her life - I'm certain that the Queen Wands is either a daughter or a daughter-in-law, but I'd love to have heard her say that. The other two I just named were Granny's own generation, and I'd have loved to know how long she'd known them, if they were still in her life or only memories, if they were related or not ... all that sort of thing.

I love that when ever I read Tarot and quite often when I'm on AT, she is quietly with me, and fairly frequently chuckles at me in her unique kindly way. I only wish I could have met her in the flesh.

Oh, have I ever mentioned she turned me from a lifelong coffee-drinker to a frequent-daily tea-drinker and only occasional social coffee drinker?

Took someone special to do that.

 

[Wendywu]

Nisaba - had you ever thought that the book is crap because the deck is waiting for you to write the book that is good?

 

[Essjay]

Great thread!

Mine is the Bohemian Gothic. I fell in love with it from the scans back when the first edition came out. I ordered it and loved the simple palette with the occasional splash of colour. I spent a while flipping through the cards taking in all of the magical underworld creatures. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy so am very at home with vampires and the such. What I mean is that I don't let them get in the way of a good story if that makes sense.

It didn't surprise me when I found that, although meant to be a shadow deck, the BG read well all the time. It gives me good advice on the way I handled something at work or if I'm losing focus on a project or whether I should really have said what I did. I find it straightforward but softer than you'd imagine. Also, it's one of those decks when I find myself thinking of one of its cards when I use another deck or thinking, "What would the BG say?"

It has some wonderful little details and also the faces speak. The expressions, probably owing to the photographs that many of the cards originate from, mean different things at different times. I can look at the High Priestess one day and think, "I know what that look means," or on other days think, "What are you thinking about?"

It's just, to me, a beautiful deck which reads deeply and can be used just as easily on a summers day as it can on Halloween. Although I'm not saying it hasn't got the potential to be creepy, it's that too

 

[gregory]

It has some wonderful little details and also the faces speak. The expressions, probably owing to the photographs that many of the cards originate from, mean different things at different times.

Like the BBC. Maybe this is a strength that comes from Alex's designs ?

 

[nisaba]

Nisaba - had you ever thought that the book is crap because the deck is waiting for you to write the book that is good?

Sadly, it seems as if the owner of copyright is untraceable, which means no such thing is possible.

 

[Alta]

I has been a while since I loved one deck, but a deck that I still love and use is the Robin Wood. Yup, Barbie women, primary colours, colouring book like outlines and I still love it.

I love the intensity of the (to me) jewel-like colouring, I love her book which I didn't just read, I studied, I adore the little 'hints' which she drops into every card to help guide the reading and yet not enforce an outcome. That deck speaks to me in a way that only a few others have because I can feel the artist's heart pouring into it. I think she must be a remarkable person.

To me the art has hard edges, which I prefer, and speaking faces, without being recognizable people, and landscapes that hover between fantasy and reality. Where they should be. Too far into fantasy, I don't like it, too 'real', meaning faces of movie stars or even people who seem to too tied to a time and place, I also don't like it. To me this has a perfect balance. And yet, as with the Ironwing and Granny Jones, a deck that is often derided. Go figure.