Austin Osman Spare

[sus]

That's the one I own

The Swiss design is lovely

 

[sus]

Difficult how?

 

[william_kent]

Difficult how?

you know who Crowley was?

would you let him in your bedroom?

let alone your head?

 

[william_kent]

ok, years later I started collecting tarot packs, but just for 'reference', my original Swiss 1JJ pack is what I use for 'real work'

so, the following are in no particular order, but one or two decks I 'may' use for divination and interior exploration



I love smoking, I've smoked hash and weed 'forever', I didn't ever smoke tobacco ( except in spliffs ) until the night I got slaughtered at Mortal Kombat when my opponent was feeding me pipes of squishy black and I realised something was missing... tobacco ... and then I realised "My name is Bill and I'm an addict"


Il Meneghello - 22 Arcana Fumatori

 

[william_kent]

flash forward, April 2024

I'm in Tokyo, I made an appointment at the Tokyo Tarot Museum

I fucked up on the timing, we wandered around the streets

I needed a piss, there was a police box with an unhygienic toilet next to it and "most wanted" posters



and then I spotted the "life size pretty girl" fake rubber head shop:




the "tarot museum" was a clever marketing ploy, there were some vintage cards in frames on the wall but there were hundreds of packs for sale

I bought this deck by Ursi that I'd hesitated about when it first came out



Tarot Eros

 

[william_kent]

the "Tokyo tarot museum" had the deck that originally accompanied the classic Walter Wegmuller album for sale

I'm still kicking myself for not buying it, even though I think the design ( on the cover of the box ) is shit, and it was really expensive


Walter Wegmueller - Die Zerstörung

if I had bought the "Neu Age Tarot" then I would have posted this:



edit: still kicking myself for not bankrupting myself by buying a copy / regrets, it is not a bad tower card in retrospect, maybe I should have bought the deck and be living on the streets as a result

edit: I'm thinking Vangelis might have stolen a "chariots" ahem "fire" melody from this tune by Walter

 

[william_kent]

jump cut to 2023

Shinjuku, the "Kinokuniya" book shop

they had a little display of tarot and I felt obliged to buy the Japanese decks

the box cover:



the tower:




the box cover:




the tower:




the box cover:



the tower:



I feel the rum may be causing me to take out of focus pictures, I will resume this at a later date

 

[sus]

you know who Crowley was?

would you let him in your bedroom?

let alone your head?

Thats a really good point

 

[william_kent]

"the magician longs to see"

a rare glimpse into my twin peaks tarot collection



maybe I should take a photo when I am sober?

 

[william_kent]

@sus

I'm going to continue to spam you with Tower cards from my collection when I can bothered

here is Ithell Colquhoun's interpretation

what do you make of this? too abstract?



The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty

 

[william_kent]

The Tower - by Leonora Carrington

 

[version]

THE SECRET VAULT HAS BEEN OPENED

 

[william_kent]

traditional tarot has been criticised for its lack of representation

the "new choice tarot de Marseille" makes up for past errors with its "LGBTQ+ party scene fashion inspiration"

Kosario has missed out I ( for intersex ) and 2S ( two souls ) but they tried to do their research and visited Berghain and the Kit Kat club to create an LGBTQ+ deck



La Maison Dieu

edit: two white guys, how does that represent?

I'll not state an opinion here, HR will

 

[william_kent]

this is an interesting one

17?

as much as I want to slag off Crowley and A. E, Waite for fucking up the order and keeping secrets, here we have a "pips" tarot messing up the itinerary



Vandenborre bacchus tarot - XVII - Le Toile

The spurious "Capitan" card has fucked up everything...

 

[sus]

@sus

I'm going to continue to spam you with Tower cards from my collection when I can bothered

here is Ithell Colquhoun's interpretation

what do you make of this? too abstract?

View attachment 18833

The Lord of the Hosts of the Mighty

Woah! I don't know what to make of this. Is this the top of the tower, are we peering down? It looks like a portal almost. It's very chaotic. Already liquid churning. What do you make of it?

 

[sus]

traditional tarot has been criticised for its lack of representation

the "new choice tarot de Marseille" makes up for past errors with its "LGBTQ+ party scene fashion inspiration"

Kosario has missed out I ( for intersex ) and 2S ( two souls ) but they tried to do their research and visited Berghain and the Kit Kat club to create an LGBTQ+ deck

View attachment 18836

La Maison Dieu

edit: two white guys, how does that represent?

I'll not state an opinion here, HR will

This is incredible. A Berghain-themed Tower. I need this so bad.

 

[sus]

Will Kent, will you bequeath your secret vault to me when you pass over? I am planning on having my archive permanently preserved by a major academic institution, and I could include these in a special box labeled "William Kent's Tarot Vault."

 

[sus]

this is an interesting one

17?

as much as I want to slag off Crowley and A. E, Waite for fucking up the order and keeping secrets, here we have a "pips" tarot messing up the itinerary

View attachment 18837

Vandenborre bacchus tarot - XVII - Le Toile

The spurious "Capitan" card has fucked up everything...

What do you make of this one? What do you mean by that last line? The Capitan card? Is the King/Capitan here responsible for the downfall of the tower? What is it he's holding, some sort of measuring or adjusting tool? Is his meddling bringing down the Tower?

 

[william_kent]

Woah! I don't know what to make of this. Is this the top of the tower, are we peering down? It looks like a portal almost. It's very chaotic. Already liquid churning.

What do you make of it?

ITHELL COLQUHOUN: After I had completed the pack I saw some slides showing nebulae outer space and the birth of stars. These recalled my designs and confirmed my conviction of their cosmographic function.

It's a funny deck, as in it is her own, totally customised to her thought, and probably unusable by anyone who does not have the name Ithell Colquhoun.

plus I could rant about the shoddy job Fulgar press did with their outsourcing... maybe another time. Anyway, the cards in this edition are too large to shuffle and work with effectively. And Fulgar stiffed me on the Three of Swords ( again not a card I would like to see in spread for me, but a 77 card deck is an expensive waste of space ).

The Colquhoun tarot is "non-figurative" - it's based on a Golden Dawn theory about colours and their correspondences. The other cards are just what you'd expect from mixing enamel paints applied "automatically in the manner of the psycho-morphological movement in Surrealism".

I'm impressed you saw a top down view, did you do well at 'technical drawing' in school? "Liquid" - It's supposed to belong to the "fire" element, so big fail for Ithell there, she hasn't communicated that well! I see this card like a zoom in / another view of the Sun that can be seen in the top left of the Leonora Carrington rendition, which still retains some elements that I would expect of a "Tower" card.

She assigns the cards to one of 4 elements, according to some GD "Kabbalistic" schema ( I'm using the western occult spelling here to distinguish it from the Judaic discipline ) and The Tower belongs to the group that she calls "The Five Lords" ( the others are The Emperor, The Wheel, The Devil, The Sun, plus the Kings of each suit, which gets confusing because the suits are assigned to elements, so King of Cups is water & fire, which means that I suppose in the crafting system for my forthcoming roguelike dungeon crawler you'd end up with "steam" ) - so the sephiroth each have four 'colour scales' according to this theory, and the King Scale is what this card is composed of...

I mentioned that I judge decks by certain cards, so here is the Ace of wands, one of my yardsticks, as depicted by
Ithell Colquhoun - another "Fire" card:




edit: she fails my "Ace of wands" test, but my name isn't Ithell so what do I know...

edit: there is an expensive hardback that I suppose should get bundled into whatever I bequeath: "TARO AS COLOUR" - it's nice coffee table book with some recondite info

 

[william_kent]

Will Kent, will you bequeath your secret vault to me when you pass over? I am planning on having my archive permanently preserved by a major academic institution, and I could include these in a special box labeled "William Kent's Tarot Vault."

someone else might have first "dibs" on the contents of the 'vault', but just in case - what are the financial affiliations of the academic institution? Do they have ties to [ codeword ] 'apartheid states', Nuclear power, err.. are they suspect in any way now or ever in the past?