One Avatar's Path

One Avatar's Path

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Collecting Tarot

   A friend asked me to talk a little about the decks we've collected and my favorites. As I mentioned before, I'd strongly suggest either following the links I have to Amazon on this page to look over the decks that may interest you, or else go to Aeclectic Tarot for a really diverse library of decks. Of course, since I might possibly earn a few pennies, I always appreciate someone using my Amazon links!
     A further disclaimer, as such. My lady love Cat Dancing has a much more in depth Tarot blog. She is the pro, after all. I'm learning from her, but I am only the grasshopper!
    When Cat and I first met, I had already collected twenty seven tarot decks, I love the art, and I could get them rather cheaply, some at Half Price Books, some at garage sales and Goodwill. When we started talking, this is one of the things that intrigued Cat about me. I loved the cards, but really knew nothing about them metaphysically, whereas she had been a student and reader of Tarot for some time already.
    As of today, combined, we have fifty decks of tarot and divination cards. This only includes two duplicate sets that Cat and I both already had. The list follows, in no particular order.
    The list:
Tarot of the Cat People
Robin Wood Tarot
Halloween Tarot
Thoth Tarot (2 sets)
Shapeshifter Tarot
Llewellyn Tarot
Pearls of Wisdom Tarot
Shadowscapes Tarot
Gilded Tarot
Arthurian Legend Tarot
Sensual Wicca Tarot
Witchy Tarot  (miniature deck)
White Cats Tarot (miniature deck)
Ancient Tarots of Bologna
Rock Art Tarot
Barbara Walker Tarot
Gendron Tarot
Native American Tarot
Witches Tarot
Rider - Waite - Smith Tarot
Don Clemente Tradicional  (Spanish deck, minors only)
Tarot of Dreams
Legacy of the Tarot
Tarot of the Imagination
Tapestry Tarot
Medieval Scapini Tarot
Silicon Valley Tarot
Medieval Enchantment Tarot
Da Vinci Enigma Tarot
Cosmic Tribe Tarot
Merlin Tarot
Quest Tarot
Lord of the Rings Tarot
Cosmic Tarot
Flash Card Tarot
Robert M. Place Vampire Tarot
Druid Craft Tarot
Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Playing Cards
Sacred Path (Oracle type deck)
Brian Froud: Faerie Oracle
Goddess Oracle  (2 sets)
Animal Medicine  (oracle)
Mermaids and Dolphins Oracle
Caroline Myss Archetype Cards (oracle, somewhat)
Love Cards (oracle)
Buckland Domino Divination Deck (not tarot)
Russian Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards (kind of tarot, kind of not)
Box of Dreams  (dream symbol cards)

   There they are! That doesn't include several sets of standard playing cards, also sometimes used for divination.
   Now for the favorites. Cat Dancing really likes the Gilded Tarot for most of her professional reading. So much so, that she has recently ordered a replacement deck of the Gilded. She has literally worn out her previous deck. Ciro Marchetti is the artist of the Gilded Tarot, as well as the Legacy, and Dream Tarots listed above. His artwork is incredible! For some of her personal work, Cat uses the Pearls of Wisdom Tarot, and has started working some with her new Shadowscapes deck. She often pulls out the Robin Wood deck and others to use in her classes. 
    For myself, my longest running favorite has been the Sensual Wicca Tarot. I like the images, and there is an "inner" story happening in the cards that is always intriguing. 
    I find myself often referring back to the basic Rider - Waite - Smith deck. This deck has been the basis for most other decks out there since it first came out in 1909. I love the art in all the other decks, but the illustrations in the RWS deck are literally in the "one picture equals a thousand words" category. If I am puzzled on a card in another deck, I will go to the RWS deck and it straightens me out!
Another "study help" deck that both of us often find ourselves looking at is the Flash Card Tarot, by Linda Nadeau. It has simple, but evocative illustrations, and the back of each card also has a concise description of what the card represents, a mnemonic, and questions often related to the card. Most tarot decks come with some sort of book, the Flash Card Tarot is its own book! One more deck I work with occasionally is the Cosmic Tarot. The art is visually interesting, but sometimes it gets in the way of study. As interesting as it is, some of the illustrations don't, to me, really work with the more traditional meanings of the cards. If, however, I'm working with a "storytelling" spread, it works very well sometimes. See my previous posts about using the Tarot in writing!
    As I've stated in other posts, my two newest decks have occupied much of my attention lately. The Vampire Tarot by Robert M. Place, and the Druid Craft Tarot by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm. It's too early to tell if I will use them actively in classes or elsewhere, or simply enjoy the art. 
    Oftentimes in various Tarot Classes or Workshops we will take several different decks. We'll work with one principally, and lay out the corresponding cards from other decks just to compare the various artist visions. Different scenes evoke different responses from people. As it is, a class of eight students will often have eight different types of decks. It is always interesting to compare. 
   The other "basic" tarot deck is the Thoth deck. Aleister Crowley conceived the deck, the pictures were painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943.  The deck is similar, but a bit different from the RWS deck. There are the same number of cards, 78, but many have different names and a slightly different order. Many readers use the Thoth deck, I've had trouble getting used to it. The art work is wonderful, but a bit on the abstract side.
     The "non tarot" decks we have are mostly some sort of "oracle" deck. Oracle cards have the same concept of tarot, but don't usually have the same number of cards, nor are they usually divided up into suits.
    One of the more interesting of the "sort of not-tarot" decks is the Russian Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards. I haven't spent as much time as I'd like to with this intriguing deck. The 25 cards are quartered diagonally with different colorful patterns, not unlike quilt blocks. As they are laid out, they match, or don't, the cards next to them, and that shapes the reading. If you want to do your divining differently, it might be worth a try.
   I can't say enough about taking Tarot Classes. We are blessed to have several really good teachers here in Austin, Texas. Being Teacher's Pet, I go to all of Cat Dancing's classes, of course. She has a regular one on the fourth Monday of each month. Suzanne McAnna is another teacher here both Cat and I learn from. She and Cat also teach classes and workshops together quite often.
    Books are also great. As I've mentioned in the past, some of the best books on Tarot to go to are written by Rachel Pollack, Corinne Kenner, and most especially Mary K. Greer. A.E. Waite's book "Pictorial Key to the Tarot" also has a permanent place in my library. I even have a PDF version available constantly. I admit the original copy seemed a bit hard to understand when I first attempted it as a teen, but now I find it very handy. (Of course, back then I wasn't as interested in the "reading" aspects of the cards.)
    See you in class!

Druid Craft Tarot

     Just grooving on my new tarot deck. (Not an uncommon event around here, see below, but this one is special.)
     A few weeks back I had a birthday party to celebrate my 60th. It's been a really long time since I had one. Thank you, all my lovely friends who showed up, I love you all! Anyway, from my buds Amanda and Mark I received a gift certificate to Ancient Mysteries, a wonderful metaphysical store in South Austin where my love, Cat Dancing, reads tarot. ( 4315 S. 1st Street, Suite B, Austin, Texas 78745)  I finally got around to using the certificate yesterday, Cat was reading and I was hanging out. It was tough. It's always hard to spend a gift certificate. I feel like it needs to be used for something very special. If I have twenty dollars I'll spend it in ten minutes, give me a twenty dollar gift certificate and it may take me an hour.
     For some time I've been drawn to a tarot deck named "The Druid Craft Tarot Deck" by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm. The images are, of course, very Celtic, very human, with lots of nature included. You can see some of the images at  http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/druidcraft/index.shtml (Aeclectic Tarot is one of the best sites I've found to browse decks.) Amazon is always good as well, see the link below.
     So, I bought the deck and a few candles with my certificate. I couldn't wait to get it open and look at it. I've been collecting Tarot decks for quite a while. I really enjoy the art work. I was aware of divinatory uses of the cards, of course, but, until I met Cat, I really didn't pursue that avenue. It was all about the art. I had over twenty decks when we met. Now, together, we have over forty, and we add more. 
     The cards are really cool. Nice large size, lovely art. The pictures are somewhat based on the standard Waite-Smith cards. One card in particular, the Temperance card, was named "The Fferyllt", a term I wasn't familiar with, although the image is very alchemical. Today I looked it up on the computer.


feryllt
[Welsh, alchemist, magician; cf. W, fferyll, Virgil]
A name often translated as fairy, although it derives from the Welsh name for the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), often perceived as a magical figure in medieval Europe. Ceridwen consulted the books of the fferyllt in preparing her cauldron of inspiration from which Gwion drank.

     Always good to learn something new! 

Fall Equinox coming up!

Doing a bit of re-reading of Spiral Dance by Starhawk. It's been a few years since I read it. I have the 20th anniversary edition. There is probably a 30th out, I need to get it. It's fascinating to read her 10th and 20th year commentary on the book. Amazing to see how the path has grown since she wrote it in the 70's. She says herself that there was so little material to draw from in her own research into the path of the goddess. No more than a handful of people were contributing to that branch of anthropology/religious study. Since then so much has been added, much spurred by Starhawk herself, and many others.
I think a complete re-read is in order. I was just doing a bit of brushing up to implement my role as ritual co-ordinator for the next Tejas Web public ritual, the one for Autumn Equinox, or Mabon. I got a bit side-tracked by Starhawk's updates.
It's all good!
Starhawk's own path has taken her to Earth Activist Training, among other things. It's her own branch of Permaculture, but very much activist. She has a new course coming up soon. I hope to take it myself as soon as I can. It will add a lot to the Permaculture Design Course I already took here in Austin. 
By the way, that one is also coming up. Click on the links above to check them out! I'd recommend them both!

Writing Tools: Redux. And Vampires, Oh My!

  A while back I wrote here about my writing tools, including some software I use. I just found another free software program that seems promising. I haven't tried it yet, since I don't want to divert myself too much from ongoing projects. Perhaps I will start a new one on it soon and give it a try. However, if you want to check it out for yourself, it is called Storybook. As I said, it is free, open source, software, but it has a lot of great points to recommend it. Here's a quote from the site: "Storybook is a free (open source) novel-writing tool for creative writers, novelists and authors which will help you to keep an overview of multiple plot-lines while writing books, novels or other written works." Your computer needs to have a recent version of Java on it as well, but you can get it from the same site as well if you don't have it. If you try it out before I do, let me know how it works. 
   My current tools are still working pretty well. My mystery novel, code named "Bluebottle", is going pretty good, I had a slight breakthrough on the plotting today. I've done a little recently on my dotty vampire play as well. 
   Speaking of vampires. My friend Silas just gave me an early birthday present. He brought in a deck of tarot cards called "The Vampire Tarot", by Robert M. Place. The deck draws heavily from the basic Bram Stoker "Dracula" novel, but there is a touch of other things in there as well. Nosferatu makes an appearance, as does Edgar Allen Poe. It's really pretty nice. I'll keep it handy as I work on the play. (Working title: "Quiche of the Vampire".) 

The Lion, The Witch, and the rather Tatty Chifferobe in the corner.

Pay no attention to me, I really don't have anything to say today. It's okay, you can click on "Next Blog" and you won't miss anything, really! I'm in a bit of a weird mood. We thought about going in to Austin tonight for the weekly Contra Dancing, but we're going in tomorrow for other reasons, and we do our best to conserve trips. Any trip in to town consumes at least a half a day from other things, takes at least an hour each way just driving, and consumes one and a half flagons of petroleum at least, unless of course I ride the Shadow, and that's rather a one-seater, as they say.
Of course, to really conserve fuel, I could have foregone the mostly fruitless trip I took with my mother to Kerrville and back on Monday. Roughly four hours each way for nothing. Sigh.


At least one minor achievement. I got a new hard drive for this desktop from Newegg.com and installed it yesterday. We've been having some issues, and this One Tera-gigabyte drive seems to help a good bit. Tera, that's Greek, I think, for "so freaking large you may as well forget ever, ever backing this sonofagun up again!" Oh well, it works fast. We still have to get our crashed second drive over to a friend who is hopefully going to be able to retrieve the whole bunch of stuff that was on it and no longer accessible. Nothing major, I don't think, mostly music and maybe some pix, possibly also the answer to the meaning of life. No, wait, I think that turned out to be "42".
All this time I thought "42" was that domino game my grandparents liked to play with other oldsters.
All this time they were playing with the meaning of life. I should have known.


So, what's up with you?

Flutes

Back around 1998 or so, I was at the annual Powwow in Austin when my then wife bought me a kit for a Native American style flute. I'd been enjoying the music for some time. That kit remained unmade and survived several moves and our subsequent breakup. Finally, around 2005, I felt the need for a project, and I came across that kit. The process of making it was very enjoyable. I ended with a very nice, playable flute, and several ideas of how to do it perhaps better. 
Since it was Thanksgiving when I finished that first flute, I decided I would make flutes for each of my five children for the next year's Christmas. A special, handmade gift for each of them. That gave me slightly more than a year to learn more, and craft the flutes. I joined a couple of really good Yahoo Groups on making Native American style Flutes, (NAF for short.) These groups were basic_naf_making, and nativeflutewoodworking. These wonderful groups furnished a great starting place to learn the craft and see other works. The basic instructions that came with my original kit were adapted from a set published by Ben Hunt in his classic "Complete Book of  Indiancraft". This is a very simple and easy to follow set of instructions. I wanted to go a bit beyond this, though, so I finally ordered a manual from one of the Yahoo Group members, Kieta, AKA Kieth Stanford at http://www.cherrycows.com/. With Kieta's manual as a starting point, I was able to produce my flutes.

The Five Flutes

For the fetish blocks on my children's flutes, I chose figures to represent what each would consider a significant totem for themselves, including a frog, a horse, a monkey, and two different Kokopelli figures. The woods used included local juniper, walnut, and yellow cedar.


Since then, I've gone on to make and sell several other NAF style flutes. Both by order and vending at craft fairs.


Now as to my Native American style flutes. Notice I specify the "style" part. I do have some Native American blood, mostly Choctaw, but it isn't enough to legally claim myself to be a Native American craftsman. That is actually a legal point when you begin to sell crafts.
What we call the Native American flutes were made in several of the indigenous cultures in the Americas, as well as several other types of whistles and flutes. Hunt, and others, called this style of flute the "Love Flute", as one of the purposes for it was in courting. In the last several years many artists, including R. Carlos Nakai, Bill Miller, and others, have greatly popularized the music.


I greatly enjoy playing my own flutes. They are very easy to play and the act of playing can be very introspective, restful, even meditative. There have been several studies about the natural tones produced having curative powers for the human body and psyche. I won't make any claims to that, other than to say it seems to be true for me. 

Moonstone Buffalo Flute

Moonstone Buffalo

I'll post a few pictures here of some of my latest flutes. I use a variety of materials, woods, and make them in several keys. I'm always trying new tunings and methods.
Enjoy!

Pair of Dragons

Close up Dragon

Stone Turtle

Stone Goddess