Tarot ArkLetter - http://www.tarotarkletters.com
By Christine Payne-Towler
ArkLetter 107, January 30, 2014
A few days ago I got a little package in the mail. The note enclosed said "The Three Kings left you this at my home". Who can resist such a charming introduction? When I opened the package, I found a little handmade bundle wrapped in a scintillating tie-dye pouch in sky-blue, olive and a golden-earth color. Inside was a magical gift from the visionary sphere. The top card says, Arcanos Mayores ORACULO, sonado u dibujado por Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Impreso en Taller Lenateros, 2011.
I wish I could show you this little pack: the author sent me pictures, and I attempted to make slides from my scanner as well. Unfortunately my internet connectivity has been compromised lately, and none of my images were able to upload. Therefore you will have to contact the author to see imagery and/or acquire a pack. Search Arcanos Mayores ORACULO with her name, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, and a number of sites come up in Spanish, some with translation functions associated. I'll append her e-mail when I get her permission to do so.
Some readers have already seen my remarks about the playing-card packs that serve the Spanish-speaking world. Historically, these seem united in their style of folding Trump echoes into the Royals. The Spanish playing card packs also demonstrate more color, motion, and curvilinear design elements than packs from other parts of Europe. This is not a hard-and-fast rule by any means, but among the older packs we have remaining from Tarot's early days, the trend is pretty clear. I attribute this more lively sensibility to the multicultural literary and artistic influences that Spain has always been subject to.
With Delgado's Arcanos Mayors ORACLE, these characteristics are demonstrated in their own contemporary ways. This pack has no "minor arcana", so we are focused particularly on the sequence, titles and visual implications designed into the Trumps. Each image is drawn entirely by hand and notated in her curvy but clear script, then screen printed in shining silver on matt black card stock. One can't actually call this pack "colorful", but it is filled with motion and curves, allowing the images to spin and wiggle as you gaze at them, especially under the light of a gently flickering candle.
Delgado highlights the sense of movement in all her designes, even to the point of labeling her Trump #7 el carro en movimiento, the Chariot 'in motion'. Black and silver horses smile happily as they gallop through a rumpled landscape under the reins of their master. The charioteer's totem is a winged sun; wheels of five spokes spin under his feet. To me this suggests that the ego (5-spoked wheels) and the soul (Sol, solar essence or singular drop of Light) have come together in a 'vehicle' that the composite self (7 = the visible solar system, which form the organs of Astral Man) can master. Students of the Hebrew mysteries will recognize their own Merkaba Chariot in this image. The charioteer has yoked the opposites (dark and light horses, the Two Pillars of the Kabbalah Tree) to his cause, so now he can progress towards his goals with greater speed and power. From all these details I see that the creator has thought long and hard about her subject.
Delgado has a unique take on nearly every card, but even so, this little Trumps-only treasure has a distinguished pedigree. There are four extra explanatory cards that come along with this pack, one of which gives a list of the author's artistic and esoteric inspirations. Influences that I can recognize include the Tarot de Marseilles, the I Ching, tai chi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Vicky Noble, Osho, the Rider-Waite Tarot, followed by a number of Spanish names of people who are new to me. There are obvious visual references to the images created by Pamela Coleman Smith for A. E. Waite, which make some of the cards feel "cozy" and familiar despite their eccentric treatments. But Delgado is by no means limiting herself to this familiar ground.
It is through her free reinterpretation of the Trumps that Delgado makes her radical departure from the footprints of her esoteric ancestors. These arcanos mayores are transformed to illuminate the worldview of a practicing witch, sorcerer, healer, psychic or diviner. These words comprise the primary definitions for the term brujo/bruja (in male and female form, respectively). One could call such a person a shaman, but all of these terms have been subverted to some degree by academia, hence none of them are perfect. I am mostly inclined to leave the details of terminology up to the subconscious, since we all know it when we see it . Delgado has for the most part washed over the Trumps of our cultural memory and etched them with the acids of her own creativity. It is the fertile mind of the avid student I see here, not the fixed and rigid categories of any single lineage of Tarot. The playful spirit of The Fool wanders through the scenes set by these lively little icons, responding newly each time.
Delgado has already set a huge train of thought going by changing the name of the Empress to la bruja while showing us a beautiful and seductive heterae, draped in flowers and lounging in the crescent of her Moon boat. In the sky appears the symbol of Venus as well as the treble clef of musical notation. The tail of a mermaid dangles from the upper edge of the image, hinting at some shape-shifting secret that awaits revelation. Below the waterline a luminous shield gleams forth, bearing the "as above, so below" image of a reflected pyramid, such as one might find among the Pythagoreans. This same symbol appears on the shield of the bat-winged Empress in El Gran Tarot Esoterico. Thrillingly, this is an image I can truly benefit from visualizing as I contemplate my natal Venus in Scorpio!
The Empress isn't the sole focus for Delgado's transformative contemplations, though this Great Mother is a formidable and somewhat paradoxical force to be reckoned with. Trump #1, for example, is entitled el aprendiz de mago, the apprentice to the magus. We see him meditating with a living fire that sends smoke around the card, while other suit symbols await their turn on his table. Trump #5 is entitled el maestro, the master, showing a spiritual healer or curandero, standing outside of his sweat lodge. Every figure ultimately has a magical aspect to it, even el loco, who is the most true to the Waite/Smith pack. According to my count, there are seven male figures and six non-human images, complimented by ten female images -- los amantes, The Lovers, shows a couple clasping at a crossroads under the Tree of Life while the Serpent of Genesis peeks out from the foliage.
My favorite way to test out a set of cards is to illustrate my birthchart with it and see what new things the pack shows me. With its stark black/silver contrast, I could instantly see that this is a tool to be used for a candlelight or moonlight ceremony. But what further became evident, once I laid out the signs in a circle and began putting the planets in their proper places, is that certain design-lines that bleed off the edge of one card will often link up with lines in roughly the same place on the next card. This doesn't happen in every case, nor should it. But when this happy synchronicity appears, it really enhances the interactions of the two cards in question. I love to find this depth of thought built into a set of cards, it tells me that the maker is sympathetic with the needs of the reader. Thank you, Nicole!
To change the subject a little, I want to use this article to make a point here that I don't think is often enough addressed in the modern milieu of Tarot, but which is especially saleint with these Arcanos Mayores ORACULO cards, because of their explicitly shamanic content. The distinction I'm highlighting represents a glaring clash of methodologies which can come up whenever we are facing unfamiliar imagery, whether those images arise from earlier centuries of our own culture, or from cultures unknown to our experience. My point has to do with the non-relativity of symbols in super-condensed media like Tarot. In iconic art like the Tarot trumps, the individual symbols don't mean "whatever you want, whatever you see in them right now"! Historically a symbol has been vetted by hundreds if not thousands of years of precise usage. If we look at the glyphs of the planets, or the kind of details I mentioned regarding el carro and la bruja cards above, such things are not arbitrary or capricious. By this I mean, if the spokes on el carro's wheels had been six instead of five, that would transmit a whole different message in company with the winged sun on the canopy. If the mermaid's tail on la bruja was replaced by a different real or imaginary animal, the information transmitted by its presence would be entirely different. There is an issue of context here that contributes to meaning just as strongly as any claim made by the overt content or title.
This issue has come up across my entire life as a reader. Once I started collecting reprints of the oldest Tarots, the issue became glaring in the extreme. Take the situation of the Anonymous Parisian Tarot, which is one of our oldest surviving intact European Tarots, said to be printed in the mid-1550's. Close examination reveals that it incorporates details gathered from every nation that enjoyed and created playing cards, marking it as a very sophisticated product of the international printer's guild. However, due to the reproduction techniques employed at the time, the images are difficult to read in their fine details. The woodcut outlines are clear enough when you can can isolate them out from the bands of color. However, the broad-stroke finger-painting technique employed over the top of the woodcut outlines can obscure the lines that define the individual symbols. The experience of looking into them is murky at best, though once we acquire some insight about the times and customs being illustrated, the implications become clearer.
The Tower card of the Anonymous Parisian Tarot is a great example of the problem I'm highlighting. It easily fools the eye, since it superficially offers some of the familiar shapes we have come to expect in this Trump. The upper half of a man's body stands out at the bottom of the card, and if we follow his uplifted gaze we see the tower. But this is where the resemblance to the modern Tower concept ends. Nowhere in sight is there a lightning bolt, despite the fact that The Lightning is one of the old names for this Arcanum. The man sits in a tranquil medieval garden in the moonlight, playing his harp. At the top of the tower is a noble lady who is disrobing to give her admirer a glimpse of her natural beauty. Notice, there is no concept of punishment or fall from grace. We get no sense of violated nature that seeks to tear down the garrison disrupting the feng shui of the landscape. Instead we are looking into a scene from the annals of courtly love, where the knight or troubadour serenades his lady love in a chaste and respectful way, according to accepted rules of decorum. The couple will likely never get to be lovers, since the class difference between them is too great. But in this way the knight can show appreciation for both his Lord and Lady, and the woman can have a little bit of a private life amidst the demands and possible indignities of her arranged marriage. A society governed by the rules of courtly love is not as oppressive on its female members as one that is run according to unwavering patriarchal privilege. It was understood by all that the kingdom was strengthened by a circle of knights who were attached both to the King and the Queen of the realm. The right to earn such favors from the Queen and her Ladies is one of the things the Knights were competing for in the jousts.
Clearly, there is a potentially massive differential between one and another version of the Tower even right in Europe where the Tarots were first developed. Thus we have to understand that a contemporary Tarot, 500 years beyond the pack's inception, will need steady examination to gain surity about what we are looking at. Tarot is a condensed medium, each card generally bears a single ancient icon, packed with implications and allusions. We need to take the time to understand what the card before us inherently IS, what the creator made it to be, before we start projecting our personal assumptions over the card in hand. If a deck is shamanic, we need to be willing to learn how that might be so. If a deck is religious, we need to approach it from within the assumptions of its faith. If it is oriented towards a specific body of knowledge, then we need to take the time to find out what that knowledge contains and what it leads to. After we have done some homework, and gained some authentic experience of the world the deck is representing, then are we free to start having our way with a deck's imagery and ideas. No matter how much we might think we know about Tarot as a general phenomenon, every new pack of cards is a hologram, like a set of magical glasses, which can take us places we might not have gone by ourselves.
In this case, my little gift from the "Three Kings" has offered me a new dreamscape that easily flows into and around the cultivated hologram of my years of esoteric exposures. It offers a blend of influences that are at once tradtional and offbeat, recognizable yet utterly fresh. It is feminine without excluding the masculine, being madly magical without falling back into the mystegoguic tropes left over from the turn of last century. It's a breath of fresh air and a stimulating dose of visionary helium. Well done, Nicole Cecilia Delgado! I hope this isn't the last thing we hear from you in the realm of Tarot.
ArkLetter 107, January 2014
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