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Tarot Cards: Themes, Sets & Decks

I also want The Vampirella Tarot Deck. It's beautiful. But it takes about 6 months to ship.
 
I wish so much this was an entire Tarot deck—unfortunately for now, available only on coffee mugs and T-shirts:
https://www.teepublic.com/user/barlena/albums/16919-millennials-tarot-series
the like.jpg
 
IbisNibs said:
I wish so much this was an entire Tarot deck—unfortunately for now, available only on coffee mugs and T-shirts:
https://www.teepublic.com/user/barlena/albums/16919-millennials-tarot-series
Click to expand...

It is available as a deck - sorta ...

The Barlena design Millennials Tarot is available as a card set, but only to the extent of her re-interpretation of the Major Arcana. Here's an overview display of the cards:

https://barlena.jimdofree.com/work/tarot-series/

... And here's an online source for purchasing the deck:

https://www.printerstudio.com/sell/designs/millennials-tarot.html

Her Major Arcana consists of 22 cards displayed on the overview webpage, but the purchase webpage indicates the set contains 23 cards. I don't know whether this means there's an additional '0' (Fool) card or whatever ...

NOTE: The card designs are also available as prints / posters ...

https://barlena.jimdofree.com/shop/
 
By the way ... There's another Millennial Tarot deck available on the market:

https://www.millennialtarot.com

This one is also a hip rendering of the Major Arcana only. The set consists of these 22 cards plus 1 more (for which there's no clear description).

This set provides thumbnail messages / profiles on the back of each card.

It would be rude of me to claim this pre-packaged pseudo-interpretation delivered in as cursory a manner as accepting your fast food bag at the drive-thru window is 'stereotypically millennial', so I won't ...
 
Clearly this is the moment for someone enterprising to design some LockDown tarot cards. I'd do it myself but I can't summon up the motivation. Clearly lack of motivation would be one of the cards :) Along with mysteriously increasing in size. Talking without anyone being able to hear you. Etc.
 
IbisNibs said:
And, well, here's a 20th century cutting edge design from Salvador Dali:
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/11/salvador-dali-tarot-cards/
The Death card is the most sinister one I think I've ever seen:
View attachment 36222
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I have this deck. It came in a purple velvety box, and the whole thing is beautiful. Never read with it, maybe I should get it out this weekend and actually try a reading rather than just gazing at it...
My deck of choice for reading is the Deviant Moon deck, by Patrick Valenza. It’s brutally to the point!

https://www.tarot.com/tarot/cards/the-fool/deviant-moon
 
IbisNibs said:
Continuing tangent:

Political Correctness is not a problem with the people I'm thinking of, who are all over the map, politically speaking.
They just never use the past participle, and at times have trouble using words according to their officially defined meaning.
But yes, when you have to express yourself indirectly, your self-expression becomes a bit convoluted adn hard to follow.

And now, back to the thread:
Here's a site with fabulous and modern Tarot designs:
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/5-great-tarot-designs-by-contemporary-creatives/
"Tarot is often associated with divination and mysticism. But historically, picture card packs had a variety of uses and styles, including storytelling: the combination of these pursuits is what makes contemporary creatives keep coming back to tarot design centuries later."
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Oh heck this could get very expensive!
 
I think I’m developing a bit of a collection. Started with Aleister Crowley ones as a student and buy a pack evey 10 years or so! Which pack(s) do you particularly love?
 
JaneD said:
I think I’m developing a bit of a collection. Started with Aleister Crowley ones as a student and buy a pack evey 10 years or so! Which pack(s) do you particularly love?
Click to expand...
I love the Tarot of the Golden Wheel, which is kind of Russian folk art, and the Nicoletta Ceccoli deck is really lovely. My most recent is the Wildwood Tarot, which is very Celtic/Western European mythology- there’s also an active study group on Facebook.
Aeclectic Tarot has lots of deck images, though I don’t think it’s still being added to... worth a browse anyway!
https://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/list.shtml
 
Mrs Migs said:
I love the Tarot of the Golden Wheel, which is kind of Russian folk art, and the Nicoletta Ceccoli deck is really lovely. My most recent is the Wildwood Tarot, which is very Celtic/Western European mythology- there’s also an active study group on Facebook.
Aeclectic Tarot has lots of deck images, though I don’t think it’s still being added to... worth a browse anyway!
https://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/list.shtml
Click to expand...
Blimey
 
A wonderful article on the artist who drew the images for the Rider-Waite tarot deck:

tarot.jpg

As an exercise draw a composition of fear or sadness, or great sorrow, quite simply, do not bother about details now, but in a few lines tell your story. Then show it to any one of your friends, or family, or fellow students, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you meant to portray. You will soon get to know how to make it tell its tale.
– Pamela Colman-Smith, “Should the Art Student Think?” July, 1908
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A year after Arts and Crafts movement magazine The Craftsman published illustrator Pamela Colman-Smith’s essay excerpted above, she spent six months creating what would become the world’s most popular tarot deck. Her graphic interpretations of such cards as The Magician, The Tower, and The Hanged Man helped readers to get a handle on the story of every newly dealt spread.

Colman-Smith—known to friends as “Pixie”—was commissioned by occult scholar and author Arthur E. Waite, a fellow member of the British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to illustrate a pack of tarot cards.
Click to expand...
https://www.openculture.com/2021/03...-the-worlds-most-popular-tarot-deck-1909.html
 
IbisNibs said:
Here's a deck I just found out about:
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sola-busca

Old, mysterious, beautiful—who can resist?
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I've been looking at versions of that just now but these images are the best I've seen. Thanks! It seems to be OOP or the current in print version is heavily slagged off. I'd love a version just like these images. Wish they'd put them all up if they're public domain - these seem nicer than the published versions I've seen.

I tend to read Greenwood or Wildwood but have just got the CBD Marseilles - they totally don't speak to me but I want them for a project we're working on so whilst am at it, decided to check out some more older decks...

Have had Visconti for many years but again, it doesn't really speak to me, I just like the pretty pictures. This, though...
 
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IbisNibs said:
And, well, here's a 20th century cutting edge design from Salvador Dali:
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/11/salvador-dali-tarot-cards/
The Death card is the most sinister one I think I've ever seen:
View attachment 36222
Click to expand...
smalldeath.jpg

This is my all time favourite Death card. (Greenwood, predictably and sadly still OOP). Although I recently re-covered a little 1960s' folding coffee table with part of an old Rider Waite Smith deck and DEATH and THE DEVIL are so cool as part of the background, when I photo things on the table...
 
Recently heard the Rune Soup episode re. the Sola Busca tarot, with Peter Mark Adams talking about his book about the deck, The Game of Saturn.

https://runesoup.com/2017/04/talking-the-game-of-saturn-with-peter-mark-adams/

And Sola Busca is a deck I'd heard of but never felt any pull towards, til recently. Some cards here:

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sola-busca

The Game of Saturn appears to be an attempt to de-code the very obscure deck, looking into the history of alchemy, etc. And am curious to read it as I think it's a deck I totally wouldn't get to grips with, without some background. And a deck book won't cut it.

Adams' book is expensive because full of very good images of the deck and done by arty pagan publisher, Scarlet Imprint (hardbacks all sold out and paperback is £45). I'm wondering because of price, whether to buy the deck or the book, first? Have seen a rumour that Scarlet Imprint may be bringing out an edition of the deck to go with his book but this rumour appears to have been couple years back when the book was published.

What do my fellow Tarotists think? Book first, deck later? Or other way round?

I'd normally of course, get the deck, try and use it and make up my own mind but in this case, it looks to me like a deck I wouldn't read with and would just want to "collect", and it's history is so veiled. (And am aware this book is only one person's take on it).

Anyone here read either the book or with the deck? What do you feel about Sola Busca?
 
I think the Hoi Polloi Tarot card set from 1972 is pretty interesting, in particular that nekkid images were left on the cards even as it was sold as a mainstream game:
https://threehundredandsixtysix.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-hoi-polloi-tarot/

In 1972, The Hoi Polloi, Inc. company began publishing a tarot deck that was unlike any other up to that point. It wasn’t a deck that emulated an older art style or tried to look like it was out of the 1500s. It embraced the study in contradiction that defined the ’70s aesthetic: a balance of drab earth tones and campy colors, nature-loving hippiedom and high-tech futurism, austerity and decadence. Its contemporary harvest golds and neon pinks colored Pamela Coleman Smith’s ‘medieval’ universe, and it threw Victorian Gothic lettering into moddish title lozenges. And then, unlike any tarot producer up to that point, Hoi Polloi marketed their mishmash deck as a game instead of a divination tool and put it in department stores all over the country alongside Old Maid and Uno cards. Their deck was poised to become the classic tarot deck in the American cultural subconscious. But instead, Hoi Polloi’s deck, The Tarot, sold well through the mid 1980s in three different packaging variations, and then it entirely disappeared. Today, little is known about why the deck was created, who created it, or why it quietly exited the marketplace.
Click to expand...

There is currently a Kickstarter that is doing a slightly updated version of the Hoi Polloi called the Moon Baby Tarot:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/moonbabytarot/moon-baby-tarot-deck-2nd-edition
 

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MrRING said:
I think the Hoi Polloi Tarot card set from 1972 is pretty interesting, in particular that nekkid images were left on the cards even as it was sold as a mainstream game:
https://threehundredandsixtysix.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-hoi-polloi-tarot/



There is currently a Kickstarter that is doing a slightly updated version of the Hoi Polloi called the Moon Baby Tarot:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/moonbabytarot/moon-baby-tarot-deck-2nd-edition
Click to expand...
Funky, man! That is very reminiscent of some other 70s' decks like Palladini. (But am guessing from the article, it pre-dates Palladini and the other more psychedelic 70s' decks). It's striking how much of a very strong Smith-Rider-Waite clone, it is, too. Thanks for a fascinating link. The Kickstarter looks interesting, too. Hope he doesn't hit any litigiousness.

The nekkidness doesn't look any different to the Edwardian S-R-W, but maybe it was more shocking in the US than in Europe where such things don't bother us. Although I get your point about it being more mainstream and sold in the context of "games" rather than esoterica.
 
I recall seeing the Hoi Polloi deck back in the mid- to late-1970s, probably as a deck someone else was using. I don't recall ever seeing it in its original sales packaging.

It struck me as what it is - a more intensively-colored rip-off of the Smith-Rider-Waite deck (which is the one I mainly used). I recall wondering if the manufacturers of the classic S-R-W deck were simply re-marketing the same deck with more intense colors just to seem more "hip" for the times.
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
The nekkidness doesn't look any different to the Edwardian S-R-W, but maybe it was more shocking in the US than in Europe where such things don't bother us. Although I get your point about it being more mainstream and sold in the context of "games" rather than esoterica.
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Yeah, that is the main thing, the mass publication without any discernible outcry. If this deck were released in as mainstream a way today, the Religious Right in the USA at least would have a Fred Sanford-sized coronary!
 
MrRING said:
Yeah, that is the main thing, the mass publication without any discernible outcry. If this deck were released in as mainstream a way today, the Religious Right in the USA at least would have a Fred Sanford-sized coronary!
Click to expand...
LOL. So true. Mind you, I'd imagine the whole idea of Tarot freaks them out, to start with! If people thought Harry Potter was the devil's work, can't imagine what they think Tarot is.
 
Just reading this, at the moment. Enjoying it. Apparently, the tarot deck was just an illustrating job for which Pamela Colman Smith got paid a flat rate (she wrote letters to people complaining about how poorly it paid) and no % of sales... She was a member of The Golden Dawn but just to hang out with cool people, and didn't really study it or get into it - she just enjoyed socialising and the ceremony of it all. Later famously converted to catholicism, of course. Interesting read so far (am about halfway through). It seems she must have visited the British Library to look at Sola Busca, as well.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pamela-Col...x=pamela+colman+smith+biography,aps,55&sr=8-2
 
I have a set of the Pamela Colman cards as well as several others.

The cards go way back beyond Waite and Colman and Waite's occult meanderings.
 
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Just to add - most modern manuals on the cards use the Colman illustrations on the minor arcana to give interpretation. But the pack I had in the 70's had no illustrations for the minor arcana apart from King, Queen, Knight, Page - just symbols like a conventional card deck. I've lost them somewhere along the way - wish i could find another deck like it - I think it was French.
 
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