Back in 1981, Donald Beaman, a professor of theatrical design at Boston University, visited Saqqara, the burial grounds for the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis.
Inspired by what he saw and felt at the 3,000 year old site, Beaman set about creating images based on early Egyptian systems of spiritual divination and transformation.
This past year, decades after their creation, dozens of these paintings were discovered in an old Inn and are now being made into a Tarot deck – The Tarot of Saqqara.
It’s quite beautiful. And if you’re a fan of sacred geometry, I think you might especially like it.
To learn more about the cards, the artist, and how this project even came into being, take a look at the video below.
Marie Anne Lenormand was a French fortune-teller born in the late 1700s. Through the Napoleonic era she was heralded as one of the greatest cartomancers of all time.
Mlle. Lenormand was said to have read for the likes of Robespierre, Marat, the Empress Josephine, and Czar Alexander himself.
She made quite a stir during her lifetime, writing books and other texts, causing many a public controversy, and sometimes even ending up in jail.
And though she herself didn’t use the deck her name was later attached to, her cartomantic powers seem to have lived on through it.
The Lenormand deck in its various manifestations has become quite in fashion among the Tarot folk these days. Even I recently caught the bug.
At BATS I attended a seminar on the topic with Mary Greer and within hours I had myself two news decks of 36 cards each.
You read these cards a little differently than Tarot. The meanings of each are much more fixed. They’re more like words in a sentence than symbols in a dream, but I’m starting to catch on.
Beyond Worlds has a Lenormand tutorial series and Donnaleigh herself has been posting how-to videos. I’ve got a lot watching and listening to do.
And though I’m looking forward to having a new divinatory tool to play with, I’m afraid I’ll find all the new Lenormand decks hard to resist.
In honour of San Francisco, and because I want to take a day off writing while I’m on the road, here’s a picture I took last year in SF while on a TarotSpotting mission.
It’s a possible candidate for the Chariot in my very slowly progressing San Francisco Graffiti Tarot.
I wrote about this Kickstarter Project back in early June, but I guess Mercury retrograde is giving us an opportunity to revisit the story …
The Symbolist Tarot is a project by Richard Fox, an art historian and Tarot enthusiast.
He’s curated what looks to be a really nice deck of masterpieces from the Symbolism Art movement.
It includes works from artists like Franz Von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, John William Waterhouse, Edward Burne-Jones, and many more. It’s beautiful.
But it’s not yet in print, and that’s what Fox is hoping to change by giving his project a second go at Kickstarter.
Though he was unable to raise the funds he hoped for the first time around, with some changes to the Backer Rewards and some other streamlining, he’s trying again.
And I hope he succeeds.
In the video below you can see the cards. Or go to Fox’s blog, he has many of them posted there.
And of course, if you’re interested in supporting the project and getting a copy of the deck yourself, visit The Symbolist Tarot project page to donate.
Today, we’re letting you all have the first glimpse of #21, the World.
I was inspired to reveal it after watching the video below put together by Knate Myers.
It’s a beautiful series of space images from NASA and perfectly expresses why we chose an astronaut as our final card in the Major Arcana.
Seeing our world from space reminds us that everything we know is really part of the grander whole, and whether we like it or not, we’re all in it together.
