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Tarot Tuesday? Sure, why not.
Contrary to my original statement, not everything actually arrived in the mail on October 27; I'd received an email the day before with the tracking number for another deck, Uusi's Materia Prima: An Expression of Matter, that I'd kickstarted waaay back in 2019 and that was repeatedly delayed thanks to the pandemic.
The creators were really good about posting status updates throughout, even sharing several videos of the trek from their UP studio to the post office in a snowstorm to mail the decks out.
Oh no, I thought. They're going to all this effort when the postal service is clearly not going to touch the things until well after the election.
And yup, because there the decks sat, two-day priority shipping be damned, for the next three weeks until USPS got around to delivering them, after which they arrived in a matter of days.
It was worth the wait. Materia Prima is not a traditional tarot deck; rather than the traditional 78-card deck based on astrological/Kabbalistic/numerical correspondences, it's 84 cards based on the periodic table of elements. It's a novel idea, and one I'm surprised no one seems to have thought of earlier. After all, if the whole idea of tarot is that, through its correspondences, it contains the entirety of existence, why not make a tarot based on the building blocks of existence?
The accompanying art book goes into detail on the concepts behind the cards and their elementally derived meanings, but not planning to read with this deck, I didn't buy it. But even without it, the deck is gorgeous. Like, when I read Piranesi, the Statues looked like these cards. There's something about this sort of imagery that just lights up my brain: Oh, yes, more of this, please.
I mean, look at this. Fish, salt, seawater, kelp...
I love this one, for Sulfur. The Medusa-esque hair just really looks like the plumes of smoke coiling off of the sulfur hotsprings I've seen in Japan.
Scandium reminds me a bit of the Magician from the traditional Smith-Waite deck.
I really dig the variation between all 84 cards--the art was not phoned in. Here, I love the childlike hesitation in the figure's posture, and the contrast between the orb it's holding and the larger ones in the background.
The card for Manganese is one of my favorites. The gold sphere and the flares on the figure's hair and coat really get at the idea that this is an element that comes out of supernovas.
My photographs are not doing justice to how striking the gold foil looks on the physical cards.
This card really evokes the Smith-Waite Hermit for me.
And Cobalt has echoes of the Smith-Waite Star, and Temperance, and of course, Botticelli.
And here you get the playful visual nods to chromium hood ornaments, and all the other decorative, reflective stuff that people make with the element.
This is the seat I'd go for on an elemental carousel.
...The image for the Element of Lead is a figure of a Faun, a creature half-man and half-goat, with a head of exuberant curls. He smiles slightly and presses his finger to his lips...
Such a great card. Like I said above, my brain just loves imagery like this, for reasons I can't put into words.
これで以上です。
Contrary to my original statement, not everything actually arrived in the mail on October 27; I'd received an email the day before with the tracking number for another deck, Uusi's Materia Prima: An Expression of Matter, that I'd kickstarted waaay back in 2019 and that was repeatedly delayed thanks to the pandemic.
The creators were really good about posting status updates throughout, even sharing several videos of the trek from their UP studio to the post office in a snowstorm to mail the decks out.
Oh no, I thought. They're going to all this effort when the postal service is clearly not going to touch the things until well after the election.
And yup, because there the decks sat, two-day priority shipping be damned, for the next three weeks until USPS got around to delivering them, after which they arrived in a matter of days.
It was worth the wait. Materia Prima is not a traditional tarot deck; rather than the traditional 78-card deck based on astrological/Kabbalistic/numerical correspondences, it's 84 cards based on the periodic table of elements. It's a novel idea, and one I'm surprised no one seems to have thought of earlier. After all, if the whole idea of tarot is that, through its correspondences, it contains the entirety of existence, why not make a tarot based on the building blocks of existence?
The accompanying art book goes into detail on the concepts behind the cards and their elementally derived meanings, but not planning to read with this deck, I didn't buy it. But even without it, the deck is gorgeous. Like, when I read Piranesi, the Statues looked like these cards. There's something about this sort of imagery that just lights up my brain: Oh, yes, more of this, please.
I mean, look at this. Fish, salt, seawater, kelp...
I love this one, for Sulfur. The Medusa-esque hair just really looks like the plumes of smoke coiling off of the sulfur hotsprings I've seen in Japan.
Scandium reminds me a bit of the Magician from the traditional Smith-Waite deck.
I really dig the variation between all 84 cards--the art was not phoned in. Here, I love the childlike hesitation in the figure's posture, and the contrast between the orb it's holding and the larger ones in the background.
The card for Manganese is one of my favorites. The gold sphere and the flares on the figure's hair and coat really get at the idea that this is an element that comes out of supernovas.
My photographs are not doing justice to how striking the gold foil looks on the physical cards.
This card really evokes the Smith-Waite Hermit for me.
And Cobalt has echoes of the Smith-Waite Star, and Temperance, and of course, Botticelli.
And here you get the playful visual nods to chromium hood ornaments, and all the other decorative, reflective stuff that people make with the element.
This is the seat I'd go for on an elemental carousel.
...The image for the Element of Lead is a figure of a Faun, a creature half-man and half-goat, with a head of exuberant curls. He smiles slightly and presses his finger to his lips...
Such a great card. Like I said above, my brain just loves imagery like this, for reasons I can't put into words.
これで以上です。
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Gorgeous!! 😳😍
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