amarynth Posted October 4, 2015 Share Posted October 4, 2015 gigi, equanimity, knowledgeable folks ... I'm fixing to do a walking path with tarot (major arcana) painted on flat stone or on tiles, a path for thinking with a wooden bench to sit on at the various stations. What do you think about this? What should I use as Tarot Deck? I am only familiar with the Rider-Waite. I figure to have the numbers on there is very important to ponder on ... colors? how important are these? [redacted] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
equanimity Posted October 5, 2015 Share Posted October 5, 2015 Great idea amaranth! But now you have to focus a bit more to think about which level of Tarot you want to represent. You can go online and google Marseilles Tarots, and you will see many editions of what are essentially the same (or very similar) woodcuts from the 1500's, 1600's, 1700's and 1800's. The variations are most often found among the hand-painted packs that were made for royalty (the Visconti family of packs, or the Sola Busca), and the later gorgeous copperplate-printed decks that appear as the 1700's progress (many from the publisher Gumppenberg, for example.) The high-end private-issue packs didn't affect the sturdy peasant tradition of rough woodblock prints that were sometimes done in multicolored inks, and sometimes overpainted after being printed (in b&w) with loose smears of fingerprint. The line art doesn't vary much but there's a lot of interpretation that gets hung on the color choices by the partisans of different traditional decks. One pack that benefits from a HUGE amount of retrospective examination is the Camoin Marseilles Tarot. This is the edition that Alexander Jodorowski (sp?) teaches from. I ignore this writer but the pack is fascinating. Two brothers from the Camoin family inherited a set of pear-wood printing plates from their great-grandfather, who was the last one to use them. They were pretty dinged up from centuries of use as well as cracking from the dryness of extreme age. These brothers went all over Europe and found copies of the original decks that had been printed from these plates. Over time they were able to restore the missing features, the tiny chips that had fallen off, and to fill the cracks. They took scans of all the cards from these historical decks and superimposed them via their computers to make sure they were not missing any details. Then they colored the resulting images in the manner of the oldest packs from these plates, as close as they could get to the originals. Turns out, there was a "reform" in the printing industry in the later 1700's (I think it had to do with social disruption as the revolutionary fervor swept through Europe and the Masons). Due to the difficulty of procuring some of the traditional colored inks, it was decided to make Tarot cards with only 4 colors of ink instead of the traditional 5 colors. As I said before, a lot of attention goes into the meaning and implication of those colors, what they might be expressing. So I appreciate the care the Camoin brothers took to not only restore the lines, but also to restore the colors. If you want to check out this pack, here's the website: https://en.camoin.com/tarot/-Home-en-.html If you enjoy the site, take your time, but again I would say they are not the ultimate arbiters of everything about the Marseilles tradition. They didn't know a thing about Tarot, and neither did Jodorowski, when they first inherited the plates. I know this first-hand because I attended the first Tarot conference they ever went to in 1999, and they glommed onto me intensely because I was the only one talking about the European Tarot traditions. One of the brothers bought my book and stayed up all Friday night reading it! Now I notice they are teaching "Tarot of Mary Magdalene" with their pack. Interesting -- that was the most controversial chapter of my first book.... The cards are all smoothed out, they don't have that rough, woodcut look anymore in the modern edition, because they are actually collages of every printing from these pear-wood plates, superimposed, with all the rough spots smoothed out and sharpened. This would not be possible by just reprinting from the carved blocks themselves, as they are too beat up. What is interesting about this deck is the restoration of the colors; red, blue, gold, green and that blended peachy flesh tone, as well as the black of the lines. You will see sometimes a color will be thinned out to a pastel, but these are the 5 colors of ink they were working with. Once you do a little research to figure out what those colors tend to represent in esoteric terms, (where they fall in the rainbow, for example, or along the Chakra spectrum), then you are in position to make your decision whether to follow this historical tradition, whether you like a different Marseille pack's coloration better, or whether to venture out into the modern approach. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
equanimity Posted October 6, 2015 Share Posted October 6, 2015 Here's an article written by a westerner of Chinese descent who is into the history of cards: http://ludustriumphorum.blogspot.com/2009/01/turfan-card.html That one points to a super-detailed site about all the old card decks and games. You will likely find confirmation of what you are saying, andromeda, as well as surprises. I have't seen a more in-depth site on the subject anywhere else. http://a_pollett.tripod.com/cardpgal.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
equanimity Posted October 7, 2015 Share Posted October 7, 2015 I agree [redacted]. Tarot as a card deck is specific to Europe after 1400. It's the ideas that are old. Some believe that in China the symbols shown upon things like that ludustriumphorum card (link above) were originally engraved on tally sticks. I think they have traveled in different forms; in books and scrolls, embroidery, bead carving, signet seals, rings, talismans, weavings. They are 'tropes', or maybe nowadays called memes. The same body of information can be used in different formats across a range of applications. For example, there is a set a Tarot-like engravings associated with Paracelsus that have been traveling with the geomantic sigils for almost as long as Tarot has existed. And those sigils are connected very directly with the Ladder of Lights within the Zodiac. So they can be carried over into the Tarot if wanted, through the direct astrological correspondences they share in common. There was also a set of manuscript illustrations in five ranks of 10 that is clearly intertwined with the ideas that shaped Tarot, about which I have written at my website. There is more than one way to format these ideas which intersect tangentially with Tarot without disturbing it. Remember the Tarot cards have all the same cast of characters you find in the Chess game. And dice patterns appear on the pips pack. What does this mean? These things are all plucked from the common body of symbol-sets the folks in the Renaissance were swimming in. You find the Tarot characters engraved in the great Cathedrals of Europe, and in the medieval artists' workbooks as standard tropes that were repeated regularly across the continent. Boetheius wrote his philosophical treatise (which showcases nearly all the Trump ideas) in the 9th century, never thinking about cards at all. The concepts themselves refer back to astrology one way or the other, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Unregistered Posted October 26, 2016 Share Posted October 26, 2016 Oh, look, you have become half-past-dysfunctional! Big deal. There are no saviors in technology, just quick fixes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Unregistered Posted October 31, 2016 Share Posted October 31, 2016 We’re All Living in a Video Game, Elon Musk and the Metaphysics of Reality https://thearcmag.com/were-all-living-in-a-video-game-64fca860d688#.f0mdztyqj (thearcmag.com, 10-29-16) If you want to project the impact of a hurricane, you can build a model that replicates everything necessary for understanding its potential impact. Yet the hurricane in the model wouldn’t need to be really wet. And the houses it devastates wouldn’t need to be real. Here’s the crucial aspect for our purposes: we are stipulating that the model furnishes us with the same exact information that we’d receive from running a “real life” version. If we wanted to, we could build a model that includes real people and real houses being demolished. But then what would that say about us? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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