Beyond Borderectomies…

People who walk through my door will often ask why I have so many decks… That amuses me as I’m sure as deck collectors go, my collection is probably on the more minimalist end of the spectrum… I refuse to count my decks as then I can truthfully answer Mr S with ‘I don’t know…’ on the odd occasion he inquires and then swing the focus around to how many guitars he’s lost over years… but I digress… I often do…

The reason I have so many (or so few depending upon your stance…) is that very few decks delight me to the fullest extent of what I crave… so many that are almost but not quite there or ok for this, but not so good for that… Within those boxes are less than a handful that make my brain light up…

But recently, I’ve added another… I’ve been looking for a Majors only deck for longer than I remember. It’s been a pursuit  that has left me broke in all the wrong ways, deckless and cashless, as promised and paid for decks failed to materialise…

I vowed I’d never buy another one… then one catches my eye…  Tarot of The Secret Dawn  and it arrives and it is so secret that the box has no name and the cards have no numbers and are untitled… Then I inadvertently torture myself by picking up the cards and partly out of habit, partly the hangover of too many years as a croupier and partly out of absent mindedness… I swirl, chemmy, riffle, strip, riffle, shuffle… ooooooopps!! Now I have not the faintest idea of the order or in some cases which is the top or the bottom… The LWB??? No…. that is still due to arrive via pdf…. 

Though to be honest… I’m glad not to have the LWB as that means I have time on my hands to play and discover what these cards will mean to me…

I like them… I like them a lot… They smell of ancient knowledge and Renaissance men who scribbled in margins and chronicled the mysteries of where Science and Magick met…

I want to twirl them and unfurl them… and I gasp with delight as the sun strikes through a card held aloft and the back becomes visible combined with the face… I want to build them like legos… Construct my very own house of cards…

I laugh with childish glee as I see shapes move between cards and the diamond under wings becomes a bird’s eye view of the flaming pyramid… It bursts into life in the way that my Thoth likes to move…

Flat images swell through axis and now the winged circle no longer hovers but flies through the z plane…

I’m geeking out on a grand scale! I’m squeeing in the key of glee!!

And close proximity to a printers’, a little too much love of laminating… a day in half-term holidays, held captive by stair rods of rain… and several hours later my aching hands have fashioned these… I’ve gone beyond borderectomies and I’ve dissected my deck down to the skeleton… and I overlap and fashion new hybrids… It makes the old geneticist in me laugh as I arrange my F1 and F2 pictures and chat away to myself…see and all those folks who said you’d wasted your science degree… 😀

But then just when I think I can’t get any more excited, I hit bliss overload as I take what I now call my ‘Derek deck’ and I overlay it onto those few other decks I own that hit my yummy button…

And again I laugh as I realise that it was never that the Art that fully pleased me… It was the Alchemy of The Geometry that had me all along… 😉