excavating a concept basis for an expanded tarot

that's a hard question to answer. I've been thinking and writing about it since you asked me. I think I'm still excavating my concepts.

I've landed on 16 because, in addition to the 4 conventional suits, you can have a hybrid of each pair. so bells are a combination of cups and swords for the meal, the idea of ideas ringing around. bells are kind of an idealized version of swords. they remind me of a friend I love very much who is gone now. they make me think of church bells, monastaries. for most of my childhood I knew I would be a monk. hourglass are cups and coins. the sand grains, that's the coins passing through. the time dimension of coins/pentacles ideas of materiality. one thing about materials is that they occur and become and are destroyed over time. lanterns are cups and wands. very specifically those red lanterns you see at festivals or better yet floating through the sky by their own heat. 🏮

cups, bells, hourglasses and lanterns, the way I stylize them, have variations on The same three dimensional silhouette, a cylander perhaps two and a half times as high as it's diameter, whether open at the top for a cup or bottom for a bell or tapered in for the glass. they occupy the same visual space as cups so that lets me do variations on familiar layouts for the corresponding suit.

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!photo essay tarot suits

so wands are joined by quills, horns, and lanterns

swords are expanded with sickles, anchors, and keys

coins get orbs, wheels, and shells

and cups get bells, hourglasses, and fans

.

“Oh this is definitely a landscape”

“What are your concept basis? Why these symbols?”

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it's been kind of an electric process.

originally I was grouping them partly by shape. like lots of decks substitute anything circular or even spherical for the coins/pentacles, long cylinders for Wands, etc.

so I was playing with shape, with form, taking ideas from other decks. the surrealist tarot was a big influence, also the fiction of China Mieville (especially the Dowager of Bees), grouping things based on silhouette, on outline. as such, the way i stylized most of them share a sense of form

that gave me the bell, which is like an upside-down cup, the hourglass, which is like a cup which tappers in the middle, and the lantern (think like this emoji 🏮), which is like an enclosed container. they each also contain space, cups and hourglasses have this fluid/flowing function, etc.

similarly, quills and horns (think especially like a unicorn horn) are long and narrow like wands, and coins, orbs, wheels and shells (more 🐌 than 🐚) have the circulatory of pentacles.

I never really resonated with pentacles until I learned they were often classified as coins, they just kind of looked like goofy frisbees lol, but I loved it when I learned originally playing card suits derrived from Chinese decks which used all coins. since learning that I've drawn my coins with square holes which I like both visually and metaphorically.

I think the original inspiration for this project might have been me wanting a tarot deck with coins as well as orbs (orbs seemed more magical ✨ than frisbees when I first started studying tarot as a kid) and that blossomed into giving each deck two and later three corresponding decks.

swords have been maybe the hardest set to figure out long term. I knew right away that I wanted sickles cause like many of the other items they're used in ceremonial magic. I like the stylization of an anchor and the way it can symbolize depth as this kind of inversion of the classic swords as air suit in the tarot, flashing through the air, instead sinking to the foundations. and keys are a recent switch, I'd been using stars as the fourth suit for a while but (as with wheels) felt weird using a major arcana for a minor arcana suit

at a point in the project parallel to the visual motifes this has kind of been a meditation on the four original suits, at least since settling on the number of 16 suits. namely, each additional suit was meant to correspond to a combination of two original suits (in theory, I've been working on this for like 6 months or more but it's very much still a work in progress)

viz.

wheels are a combination of coins (shape) and wands (spokes), corresponding to movement, rapidness, etc.

hourglasses are a coombination of cups (the container) and coins (the sand)

bells are likewise the swords of cups, horns are the swords of wands, sickles are the coins of swords, etc.

as I've moved things around however these correspondences have become less symmetrical and neat and I'm not sure how committed I am to it as a framework.

again in parallel, I was thinking about different groups of people each suit could represent. it's my understanding that wands, cups, swords, and coins originally represented peasants, clergy, aristocracy, and merchants, and I had the idea of making each suit the guild symbol of a kind of craftsmanship, probably cause I was reading a lot about the Florentine guild system at the time, which was roughly cotemporal with the production of the firsttarot decks, the Visconti deck. cups would represent alchemists and healers, for example, quills were scribes and bird keepers, orbs were stone massons and also fortune tellers, anchors were sailors, bells were singers and metal workers, swords were soldiers, sickles were gardeners, etc.

one suit I recently jettisoned was the suit of masks, they corresponded to actors.

I've also gone back and forth on suits of flowers, suits of mirrors.

I guess I'm still in the process of excavating my concept basis. in terms of what they all share in common, they're all motifes I like to draw, they all feel contemporary to a vaguely premodern technological era which lends them a certain sense of cohesion. most feel to some degree magical or like they could be tools in a ceremony.

correspondences

wands

quills

horns

cups

bells

hourglasses

fans

coins - value passing through the gateway between the obverse and reverse

wheels

orbs

shells

swords - conf

lict, logic

anchors - stability,

sickles - harvest

keys - unlocking