Austin Osman Spare

[sus]

Exposed. The armor pulled away by gravity

 

[sus]

have I told the story about how I was forcibly ejected from the CASINO in Monaco?

Share!!

 

[william_kent]

@sus

there's a school of thought that the real meaning of the tarot is that it was just a card game ( i.e., Sir Michael Dummett, Twelve Games of Tarot, only £463 on amazon at the moment, it's a real collectors item )

there were other card games popular in medieval Italy, one was called Minchiate, using a 97 card deck



this card is called Le Torre according to the little white book that came with my limited edition Il Meneghello reproduction - it also seems to be known as La Casa Del Diavolo ( the House of the Devil )

 

[william_kent]

@sus

another Italian card game, this one from approximately 1490 CE

the Sola Busca tarot was obviously an "inspiration" for the Rider Waite tarot as can be seen by the three of swords



anyway, I should really buy read Peter Mark Adams’ The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi if I want to make any sense of this deck because the little white book that comes with the "museum quality" reproduction by Lo Scarabeo is, frankly, confusing as it says this card is The Tower, I'm sure they are only making that assertion purely based on the numbering



XVI - OLIVO

edit: ^^^^ "where's the Tower?"

wikipedia and the rest of "the Internet" are equally useless ( edit: wikipedia craps out, and "the internet" just goes with that A. E. Waite faker )

my intuition tells me that card XX is really The Tower



XX - NENBROTO

 

[william_kent]

@sus

back to real tarot

one of my favourite decks is this Il Meneghello Edizioni

La Corte Dei Tarocchi di Anna Maria D'Onofrio



La Torre Di Babele

edit: note the inverted fleur de lis

 

[william_kent]

@sus

from the Margerette Petersen tarot



The Tower

I'll post more Tower cards at a later date, I feel like my photography skills, poor as they are under normal circumstances, will degrade rapidly as the evening progresses

 

[sus]

In French, fleur-de-lis means "lily flower" or "flower of the iris." It's been used for centuries to represent a vast variety of things, including royalty, French cultural heritage, Christianity, light, defense, and female virtue.

 

[sus]

What do you make of the Margerette Petersen tower? What do you see? What is her deck style/philisophy?

 

[william_kent]

What do you make of the Margerette Petersen tower? What do you see? What is her deck style/philisophy?

she's one of those that have 'reinterpreted' the tarot according to some personal iconography - the suits are 'feathers' ( air), 'flames' ( fire ), cups ( water ), and coins ( earth )

she says:

People often ask me >> What else do you do, aside from the Tatrot cards?<< I always answer, >>Nothing.<< And they always respond with disbelief and shock. >>That's all you do? Nothing else?<< And I say, >>Yes, nothing else.<<

she describes her painting style as a kind of "Zen meditation", but it could be the pitch for a latter day Marina Ambramovic performance piece:

You take a pot full of grain and pour it on the ground in front of you. Take one grain at a time and put it back into the pot. If you find yourself growing impatient, empty the pot again and start from scratch.

[ ... ] etc.,

She renames some cards - The Hermit becomes The Crone, The Hanged Man becomes Trial, Temperance is Mediatrix

she gives some text for each of the major arcana:

The Tower
The roaring of a mighty storm,
Thunder and lightning, the raging of the elements,
Deep chasms opening up -
No way to escape.
Icy cold hailstorms and flaming rocks of lava,
Horrible screams of bodiless beings -
Nothing to hold on to,
Nothing stays the way it was.
Fiery breath, the psychic stage is being emptied.
Separation from constricting patterns.
Jump into the flaring red sky.

----

She's from Berlin, she was living there and working on tarot before the wall came down, finished her deck in 2001


as for me - what do I see?

I'd rather not say, it'll make me look bad

 

[sus]

He sees a wound a gash

 

[catalog]

In French, fleur-de-lis means "lily flower" or "flower of the iris." It's been used for centuries to represent a vast variety of things, including royalty, French cultural heritage, Christianity, light, defense, and female virtue.

I've been reading some of ithell colquhoun's essays and she's got one about lily vs rose, corresponding to 5 petals vs 6, lunar vs solar, feminine vs masculine etc

 

[sus]

I've been reading some of ithell colquhoun's essays and she's got one about lily vs rose, corresponding to 5 petals vs 6, lunar vs solar, feminine vs masculine etc

post pls

 

[luka]

post pls

do you drink pet nats?

 

[sus]

That sounds expensive

 

[luka]

no not especially. i got a bottle at about £20 today but you could pay less for sure. my one was pink coloured.

 

[luka]

edmund refused to drink it with me cos he said pink drinks were 'gay' but i enjoyed it.

 

[william_kent]

@sus

Zillich Tarot ( by Christine Zillich )

Another German lady, this time with with her reinterpretation of the Thoth family of tarot

. פ‎

 

[william_kent]

@sus

proper hand made from the hands of the MASTER, insect themed 22 ARCANA




deck no. 11 / 250, 11 is thee NUMBER OV MAGICK, hand printed and hand signed by the MAESTRO - one of my prized possessions



La Torre

 

[catalog]

post pls

Not got it in front of me but I will do, in about a week's time. Doesn't look to be available online but you can find some of her other bits online.

Couple of things I forgot first time but have remembered now... She talks about lily as 5 mapping onto pentagram and rose as 6 mapping to hexagram.

But then she also says man in general is 5, as microcosm, to universe as 6, which is macrocosm.

Which reminded me a bit of "segmentary opposition" in social anthropology, Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer i think, where he talked about this idea of a man saying "me against my brother", "my brother and I against our father", "my family against next house", "our village against another" etc, how you shift alliances as the levels of opposition change.

Elsewhere, she talks about the body as a 6, as it folds out into a modular format... If you think of a cube, it's 6-sided and corresponds in shape to a standard Christian Cross which is the crucifixtion.

So I like her way of talking about these sorts of associations, how they shift and change depending on the other things going on.

It's a structuralist way of thinking I suppose.

She's a fantastic writer, very idiosyncratic and switches modes of writing, from discussing things in quite an academic way to getting quite introspective and personal, all in the same paragraph.

 

[william_kent]

@sus

I love museum shops, I may come out in debit but it is worth it

last few times I've been to Dresden we've emptied my pockets in the shop and failed to actually enter the museum because it is closing in the next few minutes

last time we were in the Dresden museum shop I spotted this deck

CHINESEN TAROCK, Joseph Estel, Wein ( aka Vienna ), 1820

and when I opened it I was confused

XVI should be the tower?



but?



or but?



there is no information in the box so I headed to the internet and drew a blank except from one unhelpful blurb:

Between the end of the 18th and the first decades of the 19th century, it became fashionable to depict sea creatures and motifs from distant lands on tarot cards. Depictions from China were particularly popular. The Middle Kingdom was far away and was considered exotic. It is hard to imagine today, but at the time they were made, these motifs were modern. Initially, images from China and sea creatures were depicted together on each card. These games were state of the art until the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Josef Estel, a card maker who was listed in Viennese address books from 1806 to 1815, mixed Chinese with allegorical-mythological scenes in this game. This creates a Biedermeier-exotic overall impression that is particularly appealing.

edit: I tell a lie, there is a paper on JSTOR but it is just as useless except it says Josef Estel borrowed from Greek and Roman myth, and there is no "Fool" card in his deck