Steampunk Tarot

I love the Steampunk Tarot.  The lens of steampunk is one of wistfulness and hopefulness and this blend of technology and possibility.  With its fanciful worldview where machinery and magic intersect, it is a perfect social lens through which to conceptualize the Tarot.  As a social subculture, I find steampunk’s focus on design and aesthetic to be very appealing.  I’ve featured four cards from the deck below because I think they are characteristic of the whole….

I am The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man has traditionally been understood as associated with introspection or absorption within one’s internal world to the exclusion of the external world.  It is about being caught up in intensive, total self-examination.  It is about subjectivity and being the center of the universe for a moment of consideration.  Seeing the world through only your own eyes.

This blog represents that journey of sorts for me.  I plan to use this opportunity for writing as a vehicle to focus my own thoughts, and as a site for the creation of self-knowledge through the lens of the tarot in its infinite forms.  Tarot for me is about capturing and conceptualizing a set of universal truths.  These truths are captured in the medium of the cards, and then are able to describe the ways that those concepts are captured in an infinite number of variations, and in an infinite number of lives and lived experiences.

There are so many tarot decks, and each deck becomes a dual lens.  The first lens is the author or artist who creates the expressive images and captures a truth.  The cards and their images are captured in light and color and shadow.  Each represents a rich complexity of expression and beauty.  The second lens is the card reader who receives a message through the layering and sequencing of tarot images.  And between the artist and the reader sits this collective energy of life that plays a vital role in shaping the communication.

I’m placing myself at the center in this work.  I’m using these decks as a place where I can begin to understand myself better, and define the space of my life and existence.  I do this reflective work, and welcome you to conversation about your understandings of my journey.  I’m hopeful that this conversation will be positive and productive and mutually beneficial.  But most of all and admittedly selfishly, I hope that this conversation will leave me a better person, a more enlightened soul, and more prepared to invoke The World as I return to it.