My first job was ‘employment for the otherwise unemployable’ – as a punched card tabulator programmer for a company that was a memebr of the De La Rue Group. One year, we all received a Christmas present of an unusual pack of De La Rue playing cards. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the French artist responsible for the design, but it sowed the seed of an interest that I’ve just taken up again. That pack was a standard deck of 52 cards plus two Jokers, but my current interest is the tarot cards.
With four court cards per ordinary suit plus another 22 illustrated cards forming the trumps and the Excuse or Fool card, you can see why artists have been drawn to them as a theme for a series of illustrations. To add to the attraction, there are several sets of tarot suit names based on efforts to adapt the original eastern names to objects familiar to Europeans. And, of course there are the cartomancers’ own mystic themes and even ones created by the artists themselves.
If you are curious about tarot – the art, the history, the card games and, of course, the mysticism – go over to tarotstuff.com , where I’ll be exploring all aspects of this fascinating deck.
