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Tarot cards

Bethany said:
Do you actually like Kaja Foglio's illustrations? I've only ever seen her Magic cards, but I always thought they were pretty ugly.
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Not as much as Phil's. It's well agreed his illustrations are far superior than hers, but also quite a few people agree she's better with color (I also seem to remember him saying something to that effect in an interview).
 
RSLancastr said:
Both standard Italian decks and standard Spanish decks use Cups for one of the suits.

The deck which most of the Enlish-speaking world is familiar (hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades) is the French suit system.

There are other standard suit-systems, such as:

Latin (Spanish): swords, cudgels, cups and coins

Latin (Italian): swords, sticks, cups and coins

German: acorns, leaves, heart and bells

Swiss: acornd, flowers, shields and bells
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My in-laws are Italian, and we play several card games with the Italian cards. May I just point out that 'cudgels' and 'sticks' are synonyms, and are also synonymous with 'clubs'? Also, we call the fourth suit 'suns' instead of 'coins'.

Regarding tarot art, I am a member at Bright Weavings, the official website for the author Guy Gavriel Kay. A fan there illustrated her own tarot deck using characters from Kay's Fionavar Trilogy. Fionavar Tarot.
 
Gr8wight said:
May I just point out that 'cudgels' and 'sticks' are synonyms, and are also synonymous with 'clubs'?
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They may be synonymous, but the Spanish cudgles (bastos) look like the kind of clubs your comicbook cavemen carry. The Italian sticks/rods (bastoni) are very thin.

As far as the "clubs" in a French-suited deck, I am not even certain why they are called clubs. In French, they are called clovers (trefle').


Also, we call the fourth suit 'suns' instead of 'coins'.
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In Italy, they call them money (denari).

In Spanish-speaking countries, they call them golds (oros).
 
Well I have to say it is interesting when doing a reading for a relative stranger, often cards come up that apply to them, but then again, you could say any card would apply to you if you looked hard enough. I own a set of rune stones, those are really interesting, I bought them in goldstone, pretty pretty :)
 
I have the Gay Tarot.

I am a straight female. I just had to have it. It's a gay tarot.

Surprisingly deep symbolism, more about what it means to be a man, than actually about being gay.

Still, gay tarot. Dude.
 
I have a "Cat People" Tarot deck. Even though I once knew how to do readings with the Rider-Waite deck, I never did figure out how to do a "Cat People" reading. The cards are pretty, I guess. They were a gift, and since the initial presentation I haven't taken them out of the box.
 
Someone beat me to it. The only Tarot deck I was ever interested in finding was Dave McKean's kickass Vertigo deck. Beautiful stuff.
 
I colored the major arcana of the bota.org tarot deck - (similar to the Rider deck) about 30 years ago and started to study the Qabalah with their correspondence course.
 
Just a new member browsing some old threads....

I've got quite a modest collection, maybe 50 packs so far. While a lot of the modern packs look rather ugly to my eye, there are still many that are great fun, if not beautiful.

karmicserenade asked if any uses them...the answer is yes and whenever I can - I'm quite good at it.

Tarot is the best family of card games I have ever played - seriously, forget Poker, forget Bridge. Tarot is the one to try. It seems so sad to me that the games are not better known and just how many falsehoods are floating around out there in print and on the net - even the Encyclopedia entry on this site is riddled with errors.

Tarot cards were created for games and were not used for anything else for 350 years. I'm glad to say that around 25 games that I know of are still played in about a dozen countries in Europe. Most of the games are now played with a French suited Tarot pack, these are very popular in France with a huge variety of novel designs - from Asterix, Droopy, XIII, to regional costumes, and stamps. The old Italian designs are still used in Italy, Sicily, and Switzerland. (and by those of us who prefer them)

I believe the best way to fight the myths is with a combination of education and demonstration. Right now, all folk recognise tarot for is the occult, it's time we gave English speakers a new association.

For anyone interested, look for books by Michael Dummett on the history of the games and the occult traditions. And yes, that's Michael Dummett the philosopher.

As for the games themselves, I think the forum requires that I make some more posts before I can include links and such but it shouldn't take you long on Google to find some rules.

The best games to start with are:

Scarto
the old four handed Tarocchi
and the French Jeu de Tarot (best version of this is the 5 player)

Some of my favourites are:

Point Tarock - just brilliant!
Straw Man Tarock - a good 2 hander
Ottocento - the KING of all card games

There are also a few good web-stores for you to buy cards from (ottocento requires a special pack, the Tarocchino, also called the Tarocco Bolognese).
 
When I was just out of high school, I was still a bit wooish (though coming out of it rather quickly) and bought an Arthurian tarot set. I would read folks' fortunes at a Shari's restaurant (24-hour diner if you don't know the name) for funsies. I found I was quite good at cold reading (didn't know the term, though) and amazing the credulous. Fortunately, I didn't decide at that point to dedicate the rest of my life to doing so, though I'll admit that in retrospect the money probably would have been pretty good - one late-night diner actually offered me money to read her cards, which I declined. If only I didn't have a sense of self-respect...

Slightly more on point, I quite liked the art of my Arthurian deck, and enjoyed the links between the tarot imagery and the legends of the round table. This allowed much richer readings, which probably helped sell my line of BS.
 
It seems to me from a couple of the tarot forums that readers tend to have a large collection so as to have a pack that will appeal to every customer or customer's question. The range is huge now, with publishers getting as many as ten new packs onto the market each year!

For myself, I tend to prefer packs using the traditional Italian designs with un-illustrated pips. It isn't just because that's better for game play, I really do find them very attractive. Something I didn't see mentioned in the earlier talk of battons and clubs was that in the earliest playing cards we have, that came to us via the Islamic world, battons were in fact polo sticks.
 
ChristineR said:
Yeah, I have that. They aren't Tarot cards but actually just Poker cards with more romantic drawings (cups for hearts for example). She made a prediction which was both vague and incorrect and people started flocking to her. She predicted that a household would get money; what actually happened is that the woman's daughter died and the ex-husband gave the mother money to pay expenses. But it was enough to get her a reputation as a seer.
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I remember that story. The writer was told by the local women that she needed to charge more and people would think she was really good.
 
I have two as well. One in Art Nouveau style, and the other is Crowley's deck.

karmicserenade said:
Okay, now how many of you actually use them??
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I used to for about 15 years ago, I think, when I was in my early 20s. I bought the Crowley deck I mentioned above because of the art work and became curious about how to use it as well. Learning their meaning and starting to use them and observing my own reactions as well as the reactions of people I read them to was a great way for me to come to an understanding of that it's total BS :) I learned what cold reading is, though I had no idea the term existed back then. It was a game to me but I stopped cold when I realized that it wasn't a game to some of the people I read for.

This was a common process for me when I was younger (in my teens and early 20s). I bought something simply because I found it beautiful - heard there were some ideas around it - found out what the ideas were/how it was supposed to work - realized it was BS - Put pretty thing on shelf - bought another :)

Unfortunately I am like a crow when it comes to shiny pwetty things :o but it's just objects and any supernatural traits they possess is purely in the eyes of the woo - not real.
 
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The Crowley pack was one of my first packs, mainly because, at the time, it was one of the few packs with pip cards that was easy to obtain. It is one of the most beautiful though and was one of the caused of my getting bitten by the collector's bug.

The trouble is now that I've discovered shopping from French ebayers is not so hard, there are sooooo many novel French suited packs available. One of my favourites was created to celebrate the bicentenary of the revolution - but it is such a mainstream game there that you get as many designs on French tarot as you find in Poker packs. Even Rugby, if that's your thing! Another great pack to look for was commisioned by the perfumery company, Lanvin - its not too hard to get and a bit chic for the right occasion.

Another source of great tarot cards is now asia - tarot is very popular now in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many of the packs are rather manga-ish, a lot are produced as promotional fodder for video games. However, there are some very nice cards out there if you look - I'm happy to say that they are usually un-illustrated pip cards lacking much occultist influence and so great for game play.
 
philebus said:
The Crowley pack was one of my first packs, mainly because, at the time, it was one of the few packs with pip cards that was easy to obtain. It is one of the most beautiful though and was one of the caused of my getting bitten by the collector's bug.
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Yes, I still like the artwork very much. The Death card is my favorite.

 
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philebus said:
It seems to me from a couple of the tarot forums that readers tend to have a large collection so as to have a pack that will appeal to every customer or customer's question. The range is huge now, with publishers getting as many as ten new packs onto the market each year!
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That's odd, because when I was into the woo, I was told that each person was supposed to choose a particular deck and stick to it because that increases the woo you have invested in the deck. Higher woo score means better results. You also were never supposed to buy a deck for yourself. You had to have someone give it to you.

Since this is the woo-rules, I suppose that the rational people ignore them. I suppose that's where the market is.

My deck, left over from those days, is the Norse Tarot, which anyone who knows me will understand. It's got beautiful illustrations which are deeply symbolic. I also have a miniature Rider-Waite deck that I don't use very often.
 
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I hadn't heard about sticking to a particular pack but I had heard about not buying one for yourself - it would be interesting to know where this notion came from, I'm not aware of it being a part of the teachings from any of the major occult schools. Not buying a pack for yourself is no longer adhered to by the occult tarotists - I think that the tarot industry has probably had something to do with that. It really is an industry now! If you take a look at the largest tarot forum (I can't link yet but a quick google will get you there) you'll find that many of the readers have massive collections, sometimes in the thousands! There is one tarot reader there who has different reading table settings for each pack - table cloths, crystals, lighting, ornaments, etc to fit with the designs.

Of course, I will try to match a pack to someone I'm trying to teach the games to - if I find a design I know they will enjoy, then they are more likely to give them a go.
 
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