The Preliminary Hermit

The first draft of the hermit...done 4 years ago. Over the past years I focused on the research and now I'm doing the design work. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to carving, starting the strength card, or wait till I've designed the rest of the deck.

Yesterday's digital collage, design work to prep for woodcut prints.

 

every time i look at the traditional hermit card my brain starts singing "this little light of mine..."

 i've always thought the lantern in the waite card looked like a cage holding a star prisoner...

 

Look at my card and the Waite side by side:

in the Waite card the hermit stands upon a baren mountain top with his caged star...

In my version the hermit holds his broken lantern/cage in corn fields admiring the feral stars in the heavens...

in the traditional card the hermit is holding his knowledge to himself, yes we do need to seek alone time to gather our thoughts and develop our higher selves but at some point we need to leave the mountain top and free the light...share our knowledge with others so that it grows and bears fruit...

Tarot Stream of Conciousness

started working on stream of consciousness studies of some tarot decks in preparation of designing the entire deck rather than one card at a time.  Well I can only design one card at a time...what I mean is I will study all the cards then design the entire deck and then start carving and printing the physical cards.  

©U.S. Games

 

I studied the Morgan-Greer Tarot deck in May.  I'll start posting my research within my personal metaphysical studies blog here:  

http://shadowork.blogspot.com/

And I'm currently studying the Universal Waite deck.  

  ©U.S. Games

I think the next one I'll work with will be the Osho Zen deck 

 and then I'll tackle the Thoth deck. 

©U.S. Games

The Thoth deck is so complex and rich in archetypes that I will need to give it more time to understand my reactions to it.   It does give a lot of people feelings of unease, and it did so for me at first.  Now when I handle the deck it just makes my forehead itch... I've worked with the traditional symbolism in the classic Coleman-Waite deck for so long I already have an understanding of my reactions to the archetypes but the Osho Zen and the Thoth decks are a whole ball game; or should I say card game...that's why I save them for last.