Hey, how are you? Well, I hope. Looking out over the current landscape, I don’t know how, but I hope you’re okay. I’ve been meaning to get back here for some time, and given that I fully expect this administration to kill me, either directly or indirectly, I should probably do that sooner instead of later.
So when we last left our hero, he was embarking upon a new project (and therefore forgetting to schedule his last review for a partial Hubrisween, which still remains in limbo). He was enthusiastic in an almost youthful manner, and plunged ahead.
SPLAT!
Haven’t seen the results of that yet, have you? There’s a reason for that. A brick wall was hit, and it made a tremendous noise that only I heard.
I needed to learn some new stuff to keep my brain from ossifying. So I determined to finally learn the meanings of Tarot cards.
This had the advantage of playing into a lifelong fascination and riding on another longtime nebulous project, which we’ll get into in a bit.
Now, any Tarot practitioner would be able to foretell without cards the thorny path I’d set upon. First, what I was aiming to learn was what is known as the Rider-Waite deck, which to my surprise was not handed down from medieval times, but had only been created in 1909. The “Rider” in the name refers to the original publisher, the Waite to its author, Arthur E. Waite. This deck has long since entered the public domain, so screw Rider, it should be known as the Waite-Smith deck to honor the artist, Pamela Colman Smith. And even then, there’s an argument to be made for “the Smith-Waite deck”.
There’s also not just the Waite-Smith style deck, either. The older forms of the deck were more akin to a modern deck of playing cards (which, ahem, they were), with the portentous Major Arcana and fancy court cards, but most suits having mere depictions of two coins, three coins, four coins and so on, instead of the rich symbolist scenes of Pamela Smith. These are generally referred to as “Marseilles” style decks, it seems.
I covered this much better in one of the unpublished blog posts about the project, which might still see the light of day.
Ace of Swords, Waite-Smith deck
The nebulous project mentioned earlier was even more of an infrequent hobbyist pastime: I had long also been interested in the different artistic interpretations of the Waite-Smith deck imagery. That was just going to be posted to social media like Mastodon or Bluesky, each post with a random card from four different decks. The major stumbling block here for me was the prevalence of alt-text for images. Please don’t get me wrong, alt-text is a very good thing, overall; but for all the time I would spend describing the art on each card, I might as well have had the satisfaction of writing a blog post.
In the spirit of mystical adventure, I picked a card at random from the deck I’ve been carrying around for, damn, maybe 20, 30 years? It was the Ace of Swords, the beginning of a new idea! I was jazzed.
Ace of Swords, The Steampunk Tarot
Now here is where it gets complicated, as those practitioners mentioned earlier smiled. As I worked my way through the suit of Swords, I was also researching the history of Tarot and discovered more and more how it was linked – sometimes forcibly – to other mystic belief systems.
I was working with the Tarot because I had some luck in younger days using an oracle deck (another creature entirely) to guide me through some rocky times. It made me consider connections which were not obvious at first glance, and those connections helped me quite a bit. So I wanted to use the deck to once again consider possibilities I had missed, avenues not explored. A meditation aid.
What I was not expecting was an attempt to make a deck of cards a Swiss Army knife of mystical beliefs. Once I started trying to unpack the Qaballah – which I am still trying to do – things slowed down and Life with a capital L started demanding my attention.
This venture is far from over. I’ve put too much work into it to simply walk away. It will eventually see the light of day, though who knows in what form. It probably should have been a Tumblr, and it may yet be – but then I would have to learn how to make that platform do what I want, and blah blah blah. It’s likely going to have to wait until my retirement, if I live that long.
Which brings us back to that depressing opening. I had watched shockingly few movies in 2024, but towards the end of that year, a movie called Tarot crossed my path, which claims that a group of young friends “recklessly violates the sacred rule of Tarot readings”, which was something I had not run across in my research. And while watching that, I started getting the itch to return here, to my older hunting grounds, and here we are.
But this post is already long, and if it gets much longer, I will never finish it. So let’s leave that until next time. As was said in equally tendentious times, good night and good luck.
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