Tarot Cards (and Other Forms of Divination)

[Brown Rat]

About a decade ago, I spent a year playing around with various Tarot decks, doing readings for a limited number of people who I knew fairly well. The most successful readings were when the cards suddenly seemed to click together in my mind like the material for a story--the backstory, the motives of the characters, the central conflict, and so on. (Mind you, most of the time the cards didn't click, but it felt magical when they did.) Thinking of the cards like the component of a story, and looking at the person being read for as the central character, worked better for me than thinking of the cards as a divination tool.

Reading your thread today reminded me that certain Tarot readers are more in tune with one deck than with other decks. Maybe if I had had a deck where the illustrations on the cards were all drawn from science fiction and fantasy stories that I know well, I'd have experienced the click more often, because there'd be a direct connection from those stories to the story told by the cards. (Right now, I'd love a Firefly deck!)

Has anyone ever made their own deck?

Has anyone ever made a Tolkien deck?

[Teresa Edgerton]

I've toyed with various concepts for my own deck over the years, and at one point Ann Maglinte and I were working on one together (she was doing the artwork, of course). But none of those projects went very far.

There is, in fact, a deck called the Tolkien deck, which I have seen in bookstores, but it didn't look very appealing.

Alis Rasmussen/Kate Elliott designed a deck for her first book The Labyrinth Gate, and I believe she had someone actually draw up the pictures.

It would be interesting to come up with a deck to go with "The Rune of Unmaking" books -- much too interesting -- by far too interesting -- just the sort of tangent I could go off on soooo easily.

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

I've toyed with various concepts for my own deck over the years, and at one point Ann Maglinte and I were working on one together

I remember once wanting to create my own deck - but it would require re-creating some of the tarot deck - ie, removing some cards. Ultimately, the deck is based on key symbols, and some of them are plain repeated. To me, The Fool and the Hanged Man are simply different interpretations of the same symbols - ie, positive and negative aspects - and the need for two cards to relate to these becomes somewhat negated if you use the reverse interpretation idea of upturned/downturned cards in the Celtic Cross.

2c.

[Teresa Edgerton]

The Hanged Man and the Fool are so different for me, that wouldn't be a problem. But certainly the idea would be to come up with a set of symbols that were personally meaningful and offered a wide range of interpretations between them.

I've always wanted to get my hands on one of those early decks with the additional trump cards -- the Tarot de Mantegna or the Minchiate Tarot -- to see what I could draw out of the extra symbols. They do replicate decks from that period (I have the Visconti-Sforza deck), but they always seem to be the standard 78 card packs.