by Marcus Katz
Or, you might go with the 5 staves; the deck could be called the “Deck of Five Staves” and the theme would be jousting – or a medieval town; again, a deck themed on a Joust would be entirely new, as far as we know.
In this way, you can allow your destiny to shape your deck, and hence, your keys to freedom. If you do not feel so strongly about your theme, go through your notes of the entire Tarot Life process, and consider if another theme emerged; were you actually concerned about something else throughout most of the process? This is where journaling, or a good memory, becomes useful; you may now see in review that you were often worried about time, for example, in completing a stage, or in other areas of your life. In which case, time could be the theme of your deck; the Tarot of Time, the Timeless Tarot, the Tarot of Clocks, even the “Deck of Rushing Hours” etc.
If you truly have no idea on a theme, play a game we use on some of our courses, and take a book at random, and find the first verb (action/doing word) in it, and then another book, and take the first noun (object, thing) you find. Put them together to create a title for your deck, which should also indicate a theme. As a couple of examples chosen just now:
1. The Walking Soul deck. [We get the idea this would involve a symbol for the soul, for example, a spiritual figure, depicted on a journey in every card. It would follow the deck would be quite abstract and ethereal in style].
2. The Helpful Angel Tarot Deck. [This one would be pretty straightforward, it could have an Angel depicted in the top half of every card, trying to “help” an everyday person depicted in a situation in the bottom half of the card. It could be quite an amusing deck, as the figure(s) in the bottom half of the deck would be blissfully unaware of the Angel above. Sometimes we guess the Angel would have a very exasperated expression or posture].
Finally, for the theme – again, do not be concerned about your own artistic or creative ability; work through this process as if you had no limits on your imagination, and a team of thousands of creative people waiting to turn your notes into reality.
Step 2: Reversals and Shadows in Your Deck
In Month 2, we learnt that every day is a reading, and every event an image. We were teaching you back then to start to see life and tarot (tarot life) as one and the same; you will now see how this teaching was developed across the gates that followed, culminating in the previous gate.
We then saw that each card could depict a block, and categorized these blocks to particular mechanisms of behavior as given by Gurdjieff as “buffers”.
The main mechanism you experienced should now be used as the manner in which you will treat REVERSALS in your new personal deck. That is to say, if your main mechanism to block your experience was “Suppression”, each of the cards in your deck should be designed to show some element of suppression, so it can be read as such if it appears reversed in a reading.
You can do this most simply by having one item in each card as “upside-down” so it appears right-way-up when the card is reversed. Or you can place something in a mirror – or even have half of the card in reverse, or able to be read so in a reading; like Zach Wong’s brilliant “Revelations” Tarot.
As we keep saying – DO NOT HOLD BACK in your design because of any perceived limitations in your own artistic ability. This is presently a deck in draft, a sketch of a deck, a dream deck, and an imaginary deck. You can do with it everything and anything you want.
If you wish, you can simply consider how you would read each card as manifesting that mechanism should it appear reversed in a reading – start to make notes for your own LWB (Little White Book) to accompany your new deck.
You will now see too how those “blocks” in Tarot Life 2 give ways of considering the cards when they are reversed.
Step 3: Court Cards & Suits
In Month 3, we saw how each Court Card could be used to indicate decision-making; the absolute measure of activity and motivation in the world. When you now look back at those Court Card descriptions, start to get a sense of how they would be best depicted within the theme of your deck.
If we were going with the Joust example, we could perhaps see the Court Cards as a panel of judges in the Joust itself, arbiters of good conduct, like a court. In fact, as we picture that in our heads, we might see them all as if in an Arthurian mythic film, or book illustration, all lined up in a row with a medieval canopy overhead. It is a sunny day, there is the smell of life and roast hog, and a lute playing somewhere as the clash of swords and wooden batons float from the practice field. Don’t limit your imagination to one sense when designing your deck!
So, we could put the Court Cards as one entire scene, and then “cut” each personage out to make an individual card. When those 16 cards are arranged in Suit and Rank order in a long line, they would form the entire tableau as one seamless image. How cool would that be? Again, a first for a deck – now imagine something equally interested for your Court Cards within your overall theme!
If any stage of this process does not immediately fit for you, leave it and return to it later, when you have completed a few of the other stages. There is no single right way of doing a deck!
You might also want to consider the description of the four suits given in Book 2 and throughout the Tarot Life series, and start to consider how these four aspects of existence can be divided within your chosen theme for the deck.
Stage 4: Activity on the Cards
Take a look now at the way in which the Minor Cards also suggest decisions in Book 3. Your own cards can be designed to show activity which suggests these decisions.
If you had a “numerology” theme, for example, and were working on the 6 of Swords, in Book 3 we see the decision-making aspect of that card is to “stick to your guns”. We could then show the 6 Swords as being bayonets, fastened to guns, glued or bound together – a literal symbolic representation of “stick to your guns”. As our theme in this case is numerology, we could show the guns forming the figure 6 in some way, or being carried by 6 people each with a number on their back, etc.
In the jousting example, the activity would be perhaps a person carrying 6 Swords to the jousting field, ignoring all the buskers, stalls and entertainment either side of him in the faire. That would show him focused on the task – being in the right place at the right time (we should perhaps then decide to show a Knight waiting patiently for him at the end of the aisle of stalls) – and so on.
Stage 5: The Aces and the Structure of the Minors
In Book 4, we considered the Kabbalistic structure of the Tarot, and you may choose to use this in your own deck design. Consider how the sets of Twos, Threes, Fours, etc., in each of the suits shows a progression. How might you show this in your own deck?
If we give another new example, suppose our Destiny card had been the 4 of Pentacles, and we had decided that as that card showed our destiny as tending towards ‘conservation’, as a better way of putting grasping or hoarding! We had then decided that our deck indeed should be conservation-themed, in our personal case, for the habitat of the rain-forest, as that is something in which we had an interest.
So, we would want to show the progressive stages of the rain-forest in each of the numbers of the Minors. We might decide that the Pentacles were going to be trees, and the Cups, rivers; the wands would be animals and the swords would be mankind. In each suit, we would then sketch out concepts from the Ace - the first appearance of a seedling in the Pentacles, as a tree) to the Ten – a full Forest, brimming with life, but perhaps overly so, with some trees (ten in total) being logged and piled in the front of the image. That would start the whole cycle again, and also we could put on the Ten of Swords an image of ten axes or chainsaws, packed away at the end of a day, with the ten logs in the background …
By playing with ideas across all four suits and along ten stages of creation, we can soon build within our theme a powerful deck of Minors, which symbolically will resonate with any question asked of them – for everything is a creative process that can be mod
eled in this manner.
Stage 6: Connecting the Cards Together (Flow)
In Book 4, we also consider the “flow” of the cards, and this is now the experience you can draw upon to decide how your own cards in your own deck will flow together. First, connect again to the Aces – how do they appear in your minds’ eye when you read the description in Book 4, re-connect to your experience, and then consider your theme? What music do you hear, what sounds, what feeling? How would that appear in your deck?
Then consider how these Aces pour into and through the rest of the Minors all the way into the Ten, and how that energy then kickstarts itself or returns to the source of the Ace in an eternal creation. Is that how it feels? Or does it feel like a plummet, or a swirling chaos of noise feeding back on itself?
This feeling of flow will dictate how your cards work together, so take time to connect to it and then review your previous notes for your deck and add any comments as to how you would want them pictured to capture this flow.
Stage 7: Refining the Court Cards
In Book 5, we returned to the Court Cards so you can refine your images at this stage. Take another look at the keywords for the Court card suits and ranks:
Ranks
Pages: Crystallizing, Absorbing, Counterbalancing
Knights: Active, Manifesting
Queens: Receptive, Fermenting, Transmitting, Enduring
Kings: Swift, Violent, Transient, Rushing
Suits
Pentacles/Earth: Practical Sense
Swords/Air: Mentality (Thinking)
Cups/Water: Flexibility (Emotions)
Wands/Fire: Dynamic Energy (Imagination)
You can now integrate these energies into your personal deck by picturing these forces as backgrounds, or within the scene of your Court Cards in some other manner.
As an example, back to our Jousting Deck, we could give every Court Card a dress, tunic, robe or other item of clothing that embodied these energies. So the Queen of Cups would be pictured having something embodying “fermenting flexibility”! Hmmm … perhaps rather than dress or clothing, how about jewelry? I would give her a pendant or brooch that had a snake with an egg in the middle of it; that would capture that slightly brooding and even oracular nature of the Queen of Cups. It is also a very alchemical symbol, now I think of it.
We would then repeat this for the other court cards, refining their personality, dress and activity – even their facial expression or body language – as we go along. So the Page of Wands, “dynamic crystallizing” I would have wearing a ring that somehow captured sunlight. Don’t forget - as we will keep saying - keep your imagination limitless, this is your dream deck!
Also now re-consider your secret missions in that Gate; how does this now inform the activity of your various Court Card images? We have been training you for this design task for almost a year now – you should find it easier than you ever imagined!
A final thought at this stage is to lay out the opposites of the Court Cards, as given in Month 5; refine them further in these complementary pairs. If I had the Page of Wands wearing a ring absorbing sunlight, the King of Cups (see table in Book 5) may need an open chalice in which sunlight is being reflected, or which seems to glow of its own accord. It is neat when you lay out a deck’s Court Cards in a zodiacal circle, and see the patterns that a designer and/or artist have woven into them according to that layout.
Stage 8: Individual Cards
There are several cards that require individual thought – in fact, all of them, but we will mention several specifics. As we saw in Tarot Life book 6, the Hermit card represents our “Way”. So when designing your deck, consider how you see someone who embodies your ideal spiritual path; what would they be doing, how would they look? They can be male or female, young or old – there are many ways of being a Hermit. The concept of service should also be present in this image; how did you show service in your experience of gate 6 – in what way would you picture this idea?
As with all these considerations and exercises, we are gently reprogramming your brain to appreciate tarot totally differently. When you now look at any Hermit figure – or any other card from any deck – we trust you will be appreciating the image in a new way. You may have more empathy with the designer and artist of the deck, as you will have experienced what they experience in creating these images. This in turn will make you a far more flexible and powerful tarot card reader.
Now consider in turn the following cards – how will you have them designed in your deck?
Death – What do you consider about Death as a result of your experiences in Tarot Life? How would you picture this?
Fool – What is Freedom to you? What exists outside of every experience? What is beyond?
Blasted Tower – What did you experience when you were surprised or shocked by something in Tarot Life? What image came to mind?
Hierophant – When you experienced breakthroughs of understanding, how will you now create an image of this?
And so on …
Stage 9: The Cards Ask Questions
In Gate 6, we also presented questions applying to each card. Go back now and refine your cards to ensure they carry a sense of these questions. This stage may take a little more time, as the questions can be worked into the design in quite subtle ways. Also consider how other decks use images to provoke a question, even one as simple as “what is happening in this picture?”
Can you make some of the images in your deck provoke questions? In our own Tarot of Everlasting Day, our Hanged Man (Union Deck) provokes many questions – why is it not a hanged man, why is the angel going up to the ark, what is the angel turning to look upon, why is the angel carrying his own wings, what is falling from the sky … this ambiguity makes the card far more evocative and engaging, and opens it up to many interpretations for study and within a tarot card reading.
Stage 10: Giving Your Cards a Voice
We now consider what we learnt in Tarot Life book 7, and you will see that we gave each court card a voice, to ask two questions. Can you now go back through your own conception of the Court Cards and hear them asking the relevant two questions from book 7? If they don’t seem to fit, either ignore them, if you are happy with your Court Card anyway, or tweak the Court Card figure in some way to sit better with someone who would ask those questions.
To hear the right tonality, speed, pitch, volume of the voice of your Court Cards is a powerful method of “hearing” their message. When you look at your Court cards, in your own or any deck, you should hear them speaking as they would – communicating their message in the reading.
You may also wish to apply your experience of regrets and recognitions to the Court Cards. Do they now seem like the sort of characters who would indeed have such regrets and recognitions? Do not apply this stage until you have fleshed out your Court Cards enough so that you can at least imagine what the card images would look like.
Stage 11: Checking the Minors
This stage should be done towards the end of your creative process, and derives from book 8. In that book you will now see that we ensured you experienced all of the Minors in full, so that when you got to this stage, you would have a full set.
Go back now through your Minor card designs and refine them further with your experiences from “dying to yourself” against each card. Do the designs you have decided upon map to the real-world experiences you encountered in that month or so?
If not, tweak and refine again, and keep smoothing the whole set of images until they map to your experience, and keep to the design structure of the earlier gates (i.e. Ace to Ten, Suits, etc.)
Stage 12: Checking the Correspondences
Again, you can safely skip any or all stages of this book and simply go and design your own deck from scratch, based on your experience. If that is your calling, go for it! Otherwise, we provide these stages as optional suggestions – our worst fear is that we produce “cookie-cutter” decks all of the same structure and pattern. Alth
ough of course, we do have a reasonable model in place; 78 cards, 4 suits, etc.
Some people have re-jigged that model; adding a fifth element of spirit, playing with the number of Court Cards, changing “Hierophant” to “Faith”, or any number of changes and innovations. We do encourage you to use your experience and create your own innovations, within this process.
So now go through the 12 Major Arcana that correspond to the zodiacal sequence we have given throughout this experience (and as given in the table in Book 9) and see if they fit this zodiacal sequence, and are a good picture together of your experiences throughout all twelve stages (including this one and the next, when you get to it).
You can also now go back through your almost complete deck and check that the cards work with regard to the Solar/Lunar pairings you may have experienced in Book 10. When you lay out your draft cards in zodiacal pairs that you experienced during the “Riding the Currents” optional exercise, do they fit what happened or can you tweak them even more?
Stage 13: Unifying Your Deck
At this stage, which should be done towards the end of your creation process, consider your Unity card and message, which you discovered in Book 9. The Unity card should carry that message clearly, and your own experience and response to that message. It should be considered your “signature” card and most personal card in the deck – many creators do actually feel as if one card is particularly significant to them in their own deck.
If, for example, your Unity card was the 9 of Pentacles; “Your path of unity is to escape the need for security via money and to engage in a simpler way of living”, then you should concentrate on designing the image (given what you have already done) to embody your concept of ‘a simpler way of living’. When you discovered your Unity card, recall how you responded to it, whether it made sense or otherwise, and embody all of that in the design of the image.