Saturday Essay Are Tarot cards a visual art, a hoax, or “prophecy cards for middle-aged aunts who made their own permanent”?

Patti Smith, that ingenious musician and writer tends to pick up a card from his Tarot deck regularly. He has been told to repeatedly emerge as the Queen of Swords, no matter how he shuffles a deck of 78 cards. The tenacious queen would seem to have some message just for her.

Huuhaata? Definitely by many. On the other hand, there is clearly something special about tarots, as they have gently crossed centuries and geographical boundaries and are constantly being reborn.

Now the user base has rejuvenated and is on the move Harry Potter read generation. This has been noticed, for example, in the Unio Mystica store, which imports and distributes cards, and in the Academic Bookstore, which sells books in the field and combinations of books and compulsions. Academic sales have also increased clearly since the downturn of the 2010s.

For many artists tarot is a source of inspiration. Marita Liulia made his own version of the tarot already In the early 2000s, and says he still uses his cards. “Where would the wisdom of the world go,” Liulia announced, saying she was planning the next edition with both a book and cards. Susanna Salo created the popular Kalevala Ukon frost in 2018. The tarot has also inspired a rap artist, for example Yeboyahia and theater makers. Cécile Orblin read interpretations of the tarot to one viewer at a time in the performance Hamlet Private.

Supervisor Leea Klemola has, in turn, described the tarot as “the prophecy cards of middle-aged aunts who made it permanent”. Let’s get back to this.

Dior’s fashion house a creative (and very straight-haired) leader Maria Grazia Chiurin The Tarot collection has attracted a lot of attention. Le Château du Tarot In the collection (spring / summer 2021), the archetypal characters in the deck of cards lived as fantastic fashion creations.

The collection is partly an outstretched hand Christian Diorille (1905–1957), who is known to have relied heavily on the saying of the cards. For Chiur, the tarot symbolizes according to the interview the unifying effect of East and West and the coexistence of different cultures, and are the way to explore one’s own internal reality. Inspiration came to the collection Italo Calvinon From the Tarot novel ll Castello dei destini incrociati (Castle of Praised Fates, 1973).

Surrealists used tarot, and one of the greatest names in the art trend Salvador Dali (1904–1989) also designed their own Tarot cards, originally commissioned. They had to come to the Bond movie Live and let others die (1973), but Dalí priced his work as valuable as the entire film budget, so the cards were made by another artist.

An original Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929) there are also Tarot men. And the biggest Tarot women definitely include a French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle (1930–2002), who built his own Tarot Park in Tuscany, Italy. There, the plump and colorful sculptures inspired by the figures of the great arkanah celebrate there, one of which the artist also lived in for some time.

Tarot card deck is divided into 22 so-called large arcana cards, or trump cards, and 56 small arcana cards, small secret cards. The motifs have remained essentially the same since the Renaissance: the myths feature human and animal figures, mythological themes, celestial bodies, and classical virtues. The trump cards depict, for example, Fool, Magician, High Priestess, Chariots, Power, Justice, Hanged, Moon, Sun, World.

The cards in the little arcana have four lands reminiscent of playing cards: sticks, bowls, swords, and hoops, and each contains ten number cards from one to ace to ten, as well as four court cards: the ambassador, the knight, the queen, and the king.

Familiarizing yourself with the cards is certainly not a one-night stand.

Tarot cards could be considered as some kind of bypass to the subconscious, writes Tero Goldenhillfrom which appeared a couple of weeks ago over 460 pages Tarot, one of the most extensive presentations on the subject in Finnish. The book tells a wide range of cultural history, differences in coercion, and interpretations of cards. Goldenhill also discusses the ethics of interpretations and the downsides of the cards. Tarot has become an industry, and there are both counterfeiters and vague telephone predictors on the move, motivated not by anyone’s mental development but by growing their own bank account.

Their current imagery and 78-card-sized tarot was given in 15th-century northern Italy when 22 pictorial trump cards were invented to be added to playing cards. Wealthy families, such as the Visconts and Sforzat in Milan, funded the art, and Tarot cards played their own role not only as playing cards but also as status symbols. The tarot known as the Visconti-Sforza pack was like jewelry with its gilding and stunning originals. The cards of the Renaissance reflect the human relationship of that time to the world and the universe. The beautiful Sola Busca cards are also inherited from the same era. The original packages are the treasures of well-known museums. For example At the Metropolitan Museum in New York has a number of tarotos in its collections.

The Tarot tradition still lives on in Milan. Near Porta Ticinee you can find a small shop full of artisanal cakes made with pâté. Founded in 1974 by Il Meneghello Osvaldo Menegazzi, 92, sat in the back of the store back in November, bowing over his drawing work. A couple of weeks later, he was reportedly dead.

A close relative of Menegazz, an art historian Cristina Dorsini continue Tarot research and movement. For example, he has studied a fascinating 50-card deck of Mantegna from the 15th century.

Via Marseille, France the cards spread to the people for fun as printing became more common. The esoteric meaning of divination on cards did not stick to France until the end of the 18th century. It was strengthened in the British Isles since then, during the golden age of occultism in the second half of the 19th century.

The most famous Tarot pack is from an English writer and mystic Arthur Edward Waiten created by Rider-Waite, with images by the artist Pamela “Pixie” Colman Smith. He redesigned the package by also adding expressive images to the number cards. This pack is also one of the best-selling in Finland, the second British Aleister Crowley Along the Thoth tarot road. They were illustrated by Frieda or Lady Harris (from Marguerite Frieda Bloxam).

Tarot not not stuck in the past. A couple of years ago, I came across a special Tarot pack at the Moderna Museum in Stockholm Mud muses exhibition. British artist Suzanne Treisterin (b. 1958) a multi-art work Hexen 2.0 discusses possible futures by mixing the history of cybernetics and the concept of Tarot cards. Adventurous cards made with watercolor technology, full of small details and text, are so adventurous Einstein than Elon Musk. Mathematician Ada Lovelace was honored to be the queen of lures, Aldous Huxley in turn, a fool.

But so, tarot and Leea Klemola.

Me, craftsman has unfortunately not been seen. When the corona pandemic moved the show, Klemola vented his frustration at the Q-Theater on the blog asking the cards for answers. To this style: “What is lost and where should it be sought? How the rest of creation threatens Elina Knihtilää? What is the purpose of our work and what should be understood from it? So what could we do? Want to hear the answers ?! The answers were a weaver of a leash, a princess of cups, a recluse and a princess of swords like a princess, I guess it was. ”

Klemola ended up selling his entire card arsenal.

I think I keep the old pack I dug from the wigs of my closet at hand for now.

The man began to draw to the walls of the caves as soon as he rose to two feet. It has since continued to be used to take and view images, ending in the current era of images.

At its worst, social media platforms show a rather plastic representative of our species. And even if you know the tricks of image processing, the flow of manipulated images will still be affected. There will come a time when the photoshoppered characters with their perfect representational lives will begin to evoke a vague and illogical sense of inferiority.

At that very moment, it may be time to switch to a slightly older, tactile medium.

The tarot is promised to yield a lot when the gaze turns inward. Is there something there?

(And if not, fortunately there is Patti Smith, also in Insta.)

Sources include: Jessica Hundley (ed.): Tarot. Taschen, 2020; Laetitia Barbier: Tarot and Divination Cards, A Visual Archive. Cernunnos / Abrams, 2021; Christina Dorsini: Mantegna Tarot. Il Meneghello Edizioni, 2017; Tero Goldenhill: Tarot. Like, 2022.