god it annoys me to no end that putting a period on the end of a blog title makes it un-embeddable by the current laws of the fucking things technology is made of. weak. cowardly. ancient paradigm for a bygone age. at least i can append an octo-fucking-thorpe.
anyway. hi. tarot.
a couple years back, i chanced upon a small Smith-Waite1 deck themed around mushrooms. it looked cute! it was cheap enough, and having a moderate interest in tarot and nothing on hand, i picked it up. looking at it here as i type, its name is Midnight Magic, accredited to one Sara Richard. it’s quite a nice one, being around hand-sized compared to many more bulky ones, dimensions fit for travel if that’s something i felt like throwing in a pocket. visual elements are maintained in the Major Arcana fairly well without breaking the natural construction (there are some cases, but not all that noticeable, and it helps them work).
it also, for whatever reason, stops making all that much sense after those Major Arcana. i have yet to find the through-line for individual suits.
now, perhaps that’s inevitable, and there’s the first example. think about mushrooms for a minute.
the only other Smith deck i possess is a copy of a Honkai: Star Rail deck done as an artist collaboration. i don’t mind it much as a collector’s item—and much like the other, the visual craftswork on in this one is lovely—but it really isn’t all that good at being a Smith deck.
which would be fine, except… it’s also not really any other type of Tarot, that i can see.
there are three issues i take with the Smith deck as it exists today.
first. there is a higher emphasis on christian symbolism still present for no real reason. well. okay. from my surface-level understanding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn2 and this iteration of whichever lineage of Tarot this actually is (something that is difficult to find because it requires doing more research into occult history and dear lord is there a lot of that. i think it is the Tarot of Marseilles before Smith’s, but i forgot where i found that written down and can’t find it again oops), it’s sort of just the cultural history of the time. i don’t really think we need that as a core component of it anymore? there are other things you can do that are not christianity.
second. nobody should be required to do a dissertation on something to enjoy it, but it would really benefit everyone involved if they actually looked at how the Smith tarot is constructed.
third, and most importantly. there are literally other things that exist??? stop calling it The Tarot Deck??? can we please get this out of the zeitgeist. i blame Persona for this. there are so many other interesting ways a Tarot deck can be built, and a lot of them might fit these fanart collaborations a lot better! or people could make their own!
i will pause here to grant that it is a good addition to the TTRPG toolkit, but even then i point my finger back at the first point and say i would like something more agnostic or less overtly christian in design. that push is going to be pretty uphill.
i also have one of the Wormsong Oracle Deck by Helvetica Blanc, which is not Tarot, and one of The Normal Tarot, Second Edition3, which makes it designed by one referred to as “the Caretaker” [sic] who i am not familiar with and illustrated by Sam Dow. i nearly picked up a copy of the DIY kit for the Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood divination deck, but we are notoriously bad at placing stickers and the window passed. i also know there’s a fair number of others out there, but the thread of ones i was loosely interested in was only in my twitter bookmarks and i refuse to go recover it. so i’ll find others eventually.
i am not particularly… what’s the word for this. religious? i believe in magic, in the action of it, the spirit of it. i suppose i’m spiritual…ous? that can’t be how that one goes. spiritious? apparently “spirituous” has to do with alcohol. that i can certainly get behind. oh wait i completely forgot about “spiritual”.
ahem.
i suppose i’m spiritual in the sense that it seems obvious the physical is not all there is, but i don’t really ascribe to the idea of the soul as it usually is treated, outside of fiction.
all this is to say, i like tarot as a ritual and as a cultural touchstone, so my interest in it is defined by its traditions and what it can do today. so when i see a deck that doesn’t really engage with the tradition outside the basics of visual appeal, it bothers me some. well, no. it bothers me when it doesn’t quite succeed at even that.
which is entirely my own problem. and if i don’t get that out of my head, i will explode. because we don’t get to actually channel energy into crystals.4
this is not why i dislike Persona as the modern series it is, but that’s that and this is this.
so, to talk about Major Arcana finally:
within the original Smith deck and others of its kind5, the Fool is the starting point of a story, and the Major Arcana are the endpoints he can travel. in the Wormsong deck, similarly, the arcana tell parts of a story of that world (which i’m not sure is publicly posted but Blanc has written about on Patreon or in a zine somewhere). and in The Normal Tarot, too, there is a story at play in the kingdom. these are ultimately guides that can be ignored or forgotten, yes, substituted for other meanings, but they were written with meanings in mind.
the HSR tarot isn’t, like terrible, by the way. the characters chosen for each card largely fit thematically, because Stories are Themes and Characters are Themes and Stories are Characters and Baba is Flag and Win!
but the visuals leave so much of that out that it doesn’t feel suited for use elsewhere.
cards i would say are my favorites:
- Stelle, as The Fool. it’s missing the precarity of the trope, perhaps there could be a highlight of her Stelleron, but it’s good.
- Silver Wolf, as The Magician. she actually has the hands going as above, so below or whatever it happens to be, and is the most overtly involved with interfacing between reality and data. possibly my most favorite. the only suggestion i would have for improvement is giving her more chibi archetypes to match up with the suits.
- March 7th, as The Lovers. i’m not sure if we knew about Evernight when this tarot was being drafted, but this card holds up rather well. big fan of these two. a rare case where removing other symbolism leaves it stronger for the character.
- Huohuo, as The Hermit. good use of existing elements.
- Fu Xuan, as The Wheel of Fortune. another really strong card. the use of the Eight Trigrams as the wheel and the framing of the card in general is done very well.
still, even with some of those highlights, the largest gripe (and yes this is ironic as a fanart compilation deck) through all of them is that there is so much emphasis on the Characters and so little on the Story or Themes in the visual language. it rather falls apart when there is less to draw on for reading, though i suppose it could open up more if you’re very into the story of HSR.
Midnight Magic does a good job of Being A Smith Deck Through Mushrooms, at least on the Major side. the iconography and compositions are recognizable if you have any familiarity with the usual ones, and they’re embellished with the occasional wisp-y flair to finish the scene. its achilles heel is just that there is only so much you can do with mushrooms and natural elements that sort of erases the iconography being presented, and there’s instead the additional layer that i don’t understand mushrooms enough to really use this in a way i’m happy with. the scientific name is a nice touch, but a couple guiding words for each would really do wonders here.
the Minor Arcana are similarly related to a stories within decks, either cycles or progressions depending on your interpretations. these are honestly the greater loss on all parts here.
within the HSR tarot, Pom-Pom resides on all the Ace cards, in an appropriately cheery state. the Swords and Wands have a few good hits, but by and large they suffer for the removed context of a figure on the other cards, and are much more suits of playing cards than they are Tarot cards here. Pom-Pom is right there, and could have shown up in other scenes, but i suppose either time or scale spoke otherwise? there is still effort put into these, but it doesn’t show in the right direction.
the face cards for the suits are good, i think. there’s a number i haven’t looked into because it requires pulling up some references for both Smith Tarot and HSR, and that’s a lot to cross-reference when one involves under-written Wikipedia articles and the other involves Fandom. but hey at least it ain’t Fextralife…
the main issue for Midnight Magic, on the other side of the aisle, is that it lacks a visual cohesion. probably because it’s all different mushrooms. i believe that this is probably the best one can do with the style and subject matter, but it fails to land in any particular way, unfortunately.
i’m still open to getting one more Smith deck in the future at some point, but i’m going to be very picky now that i’ve hit two extremes of depiction i don’t find great for use.
okay!
now i can finally talk about the stuff that’s going into this project. because it did actually start as an exploration of what one could do with the Smith cards, it just isn’t that anymore.
i actually did about… 8 Smith-style Tarot illustrations of (gestures at the headspace) us a while back, which was sort of kind of practice to see how a full deck would be. that might still be on the table in future, depending on vibes, but the thing that we ran into drafting ideas and cards is that it all felt incompatible with the…
well, off we go again.
a lot of Tarot illustrations—many that stray traditional with it, and most fanmade ones that i’ve seen—involve humans. which is fine. humans are generally chill, if a bit unlearned on things. kinda comes with the territory.
i’m very open to fucking with tradition and twisting things around to make sense again in a more modern context. i think the most important thing you can do with any tradition is keep it moving forward with you. it’s a small part of why esotericism is interesting to me; there’s all these things trying in their own way to assemble older beliefs into something new, sometimes, and sometimes they just fuck it all up and try to regress anyway. that said, i’m not particularly interested in trying to cart the source beyond its boundaries, and what i wanted to do was pretty soon determined to be Not Smith Compliant.
the other side of this infinite-sided coin is the usual predicament. i (all of us, really) have a bit of a proclivity to need things to be exceedingly-thought-through. i could just do something for fun with the stars! with the stars that exist, even! but i can’t stomach that, not with what i know. it’d be doing the stars a disservice, myself a disservice, and other things a disservice.
so, i started looking into mythology some more.
the stars are very cool. the constellations collectively drawn on them are fascinating. do you have a favorite, or is it impossible for you also to pick just one?
there’s an aspect of astronomy that feels very similar to mythology as it exists in what i’ve studied, being necessarily confined to a north american education system with all that entails, and what reaches out of it i’ve managed so far. mythology and folklore has, at a point i haven’t found a date range for yet, become supplanted in large part by… well, it’s not quite “literature” because then it sounds like i hate books and writing. and here i am writing and reading books. though i suppose those two things aren’t really at odds with one another. no, it’s like how…
so, tumblr is possibly the social platform of all time. i hear it’s going to be the next PDF, right as soon as its current owner stops hating it and all the users that matter and trying to sneak banwaves under the radar to (profit? he can’t possibly profit.) off a userbase of harrassment. that guy aside, though, tumblr has some of the best current folklore on the internet in terms of concentrated disregard for a singular canon. you can just say things, and they stick around. they enter someone’s personal vocabulary for half a decade or more, and posts will continue to circle around in the textual equivalent of oral history until the site goes under. and then further, as images.
i’ve never truly understood fanfiction. i’ve written a bit of it as one-off pieces to illustrate a point, but the divide between fanon and canon and OC media and things that a person makes that are characters but not OCs by some invisible metric and all that tangling up with artists doing commissions and character auctions under capitalism—it’s maddening. i think you can mostly entirely blame the catholic church for canon, given its etymology, but even if not there’s been plenty of work put into making sure that things are the way that makes the most sense scientifically, or empirically, or whatever.
it’s no surprise we ended up in a culture of remakes and remasters, honestly. why let people make new things with an IP? why let the IP exist in some form that isn’t constantly kept up to maximum fidelity? what happened to the grey areas that your mind is meant to dance in? what happened to the joy of building something together with other people?
i know why everything’s so locked down, of course. that’s sadly rhetorical.
where was i?
the constellations have been locked in as 88 specific ones by the IAU for about 100 years. weird timing on that, i guess. by and large, i don’t take much issue with them, either, with a few exceptions. it just seemed so particularly odd looking at ones like Microscopium that are so different than all the rest. it’s emblematic of the time, really, since we don’t tell stories any more. do we need to? should we? i’m not properly philosophical for that, but it feels strange to ignore the reason constellations exist just to enshrine a microscope. i also don’t quite understand Horologium.
with that in mind, i did some digging, looking at some very shallow-waters information on historical astronomy in other cultures, and mainly searching for stories or constellations or patterns that involved things that aren’t human. in the interests of “not drawing 88 individual arcana” and “seeing what exists outside the IAU-approved list”, we’ve cut the potential arcana here down to about 35. some of them aren’t constellations at all, but other astronomical occurrences (i’m quite happy with the quartet of solar eclipse, lunar eclipse, meteor shower, and aurora for reasons that will be more visible when they’re sketched up) that also have a lot of history behind them especially with the occult.
there are two things left to do. one is figure out how much explicit meaning to encode within any specific arcana for the purposes of using them in readings, which is complicated. i think the context of them being shared stories about animals is enough to leave associations with animals up to the person, but i also know that having a couple guiding words is good. so what we might do is pair a name for each arcana with a word or two that we think fits, and leave the details up to the reader. the other thing is more extra, and possibly more important.
memes are great. memetic communication has been a thing for a long time, and while it’s yet another study that i’m not particularly well-versed in besides living through the growth of the internet, digital memes are sort of folklore? or at least touchstones of times. there’s uncountable stories and images and bits of trivia about things out there that are impossible to collect because of how ephemeral a specific “cultural unit” is in the grand scheme of things.
do you remember what meme you saw 7th most often last year?
anyway, the other thing that i’m attempting to do with the arcana is overlay something memetic about the astronomical feature and historical storytelling onto the card. so the moon with the rabbit in/on it (present in multiple cultures, and superseding the “man” in the moon who i have never seen and do not care for) has a lot of memetic iconography to pull from that can handle communicating ideas in a broad sense. some certainly meme-based in origin, but really the main thing is something about the animal that exists in modern culture. it’ll still take a fair bit of work to get them all set, but this is the amount of extra i need to be to really have fun with a project like this.
if there’s one thing i hope people take away from this piece, it’s that there is so much space to think about stories that isn’t used. specific stars in a constellation might be overkill for a short fantasy story, but what if it’s a setting? what would constellations look like in your D&D, in Lancer? do people still make constellations on every world in a sci-fi setting, or has that fallen away now that people live on stars that were unreachable a thousand years prior? how close are the stars to the planet, how does the moon work, are there more than one, what does this mean for religion and occult-adjacent activity, how does it change if you are the one traveling through stars to hit a mission?
when was the last time you looked at the stars, anyway?
when was the last time you saw the stars?
if i were to do something else in the same vein but more focused on humans, i’d look at the constructed observatories and historical sites across the world, but… idunno. probably nothing more than a thought experiment. archaeology and cultural history already have so much bullshit to deal with from people trying to co-opt historical constructions for conspiracies, i think i’d rather not touch that.
Footnotes
-
Smith is the illustrator of the deck, and Waite is the one who commissioned her. as he did actually seem to have input on the design i consider this a joint effort enough to include his name after hers, but Rider has no place in the damned title. ↩
-
the Toaru/A Certain Magical Index series has honestly been really enjoyable for gleaning surface-level knowledge of a lot of esoteric things that i can pretend i’ll make time to look into later. i should look into them eventually because it is really rather fascinating stuff, but i can’t even keep up with light novel releases so i don’t quite have the time right now. but yes, that’s how i first really got to know of the order as more than a name. ↩
-
it was actually a really tough decision picking one of these over the others. i ended up choosing Second Edition for the high-contrast with gold highlights, as i find it easier to parse at a glance than the others. feel free to check them all out. https://publishinggoblin.com/products/divination/the-normal-tarot/ ↩
-
like, realistically, if i put my mind to it, i could probably devise a ritual for calming myself down that involved that. but it’s a lot more engaging to put it to words and place it somewhere others can see it, because then it can prompt dialog or just give someone something else to think about. or give me something to think about, if someone hits me up with a comment on it! Ethical Hating is a practiced art. you should try it. build a website, make a blog. ↩
-
it’s such a shame that “ilk” isn’t a word with at least neutral connotations. i want to say “ilk” here. it’s a good sound. ↩