A match made in heaven, surely.
Tarot is, if nothing else, a potent collection of archetypes, capable of being reimagined, redesigned and reinterpreted ad infinum.
Steampunk of course specializes in stamping it’s aesthetic upon anything it meets.
You’d think there’d be more of these available, but actually not so many yet. For today’s post we’re going to ignore an officially released deck (it’s awesome and every other steampunk blog covers it so you shouldn’t have any problems finding it) for a gorgeous, stylized steampunk tarot currently being designed by a Hungarian artist on Deviant Art, Judit Farkas, or ID name flamarahalvorsen.
A direct link to her Deviant Art page is http://flamarahalvorsen.deviantart.com/
Let’s start with The Hanged Man:
Now as a storyteller, i’m quite enthralled by Tarot. I’m not interested in holding a discussion about divination, what interests me is the interpretation of archetypes, their interactions and the storylines and concepts that result.
Unless you’re relating an actual event (and even then…) stories use characters and characters are archetypes, even if it’s one very specific and not covered by a tarot deck or a Jung essay. What is inventing a story? You pick an interesting character and/or situation and then flush it out. (in my case the entire storyline for The Steampunk Opera began with an image of a mad scientist standing over a chair upon which sat a dead man she wished to bring back to life. I was driving alone and had nothing else to distract me, and over the next hour the plot of the 4 Acts wrote themselves. With…. a hundred hours of detail tinkering after that.)
But you take characters and situations and allow them to interact, after which they lead to new ideas, plotlines and characters. Somewhere along the way you stop and examine them more deeply to make them more 3 dimensional. But they begin as personal archetypes, your own mentally created tarot characters, with your own personally understood meanings and symbology, which you throw together in a situation and then watch the result.
One reason why i like this artist’s cards is that they have a cartoon like directness to them. I feel like i could look at each character and come up with a background story in a minute. More to the point, that i could take a number of these “cards” at random, put them into a “spread” and the reading of the spread would be the instantaneous creation of a vibrant, fun, and engaging storyline.
Once again, for more information on the artist, Judit Farkas (flamarahalvorsen), more cards and a lot more wonderful art, visit her Deviant Art page.
