The Writer’s Tarot
First: many thanks to the crackerjack staff on the technical upgrade of the Saavd Blog and the main website.
Second: it’s amazing how long it’s been since I posted to the blog. Daily life seems to take up a lot of effort and energy; and naturally I have books to read and games to play for both relaxation and inspiration.
Third: what in the world have I been working on? I’ve been working on several projects in addition to my Saavd work. I have been trying to flesh out ideas and symbolism for a Tarot deck specifically aspected toward Saavd needs.
I’ve always been drawn to the Tarot deck and own several different variations including the Waite-Rider, Thoth and Celtic decks. I’m by no means a Tarot scholar or expert, I use the Tarot as suits my purposes and have found it to help me in many ways. I’ve enjoyed working with my decks and I even have one Tarot deck created for the White Wolf World of Darkness RPGs, mostly based around Mage: the Ascension (all copyrights are theirs, I just bought the deck…). I decided that I wanted my own specialized Tarot deck that not only reflected various facets of Saavd, but that would also be used within the stories themselves. For multiple reasons I did not want to use existing Tarot decks within the Saavd milieu. Similarly, I did not want to use a traditional spread. So I set about creating my own spread. I’m not quite ambitious enough to design multiple spreads, so I built one that was moderately complex and then created a variation or two, including an abbreviated layout of the base spread. That left the cards themselves, the symbolism of the cards and the ties to the magic system of Saavd.
I elected to leave the Minor Arcana unchanged in terms of numbering but with different “suits”. Extremes are an important part of the fabric of Saavd and my designs for the Tarot reflected this by choosing multiple names for the Minor Arcana suits, depending upon the background, ethical and moral viewpoint of a Saavd Tarot practitioner. In order to stay reasonably close to a “real” Tarot deck, I elected to keep the same number of Major Arcana cards with much the same meanings, and simply renamed them to align more with Saavd mythology. This gave me enough of a start that I felt I could include Tarot readings in my Saavd stories, but it left an important piece undetermined: the actual look and symbols on the cards, particularly the Major Arcana.
Determining the actual look of the cards is going to take quite a bit more work and will probably begin with the cards I need to describe within the first story where I use them. Since the “normal” Tarot symbolism is rooted within historic religious and mystic traditions, the symbolism for the Saavd deck should reflect the history and religious beliefs of Saavd. Since I’m still working out a full timeline for Saavd, it may be quite a while before I can get to my ultimate goal: an actual, as in physical cards in my (and others) hands, Saavd Tarot deck, complete with unique artwork.
There are some intermediate steps that we’ll be exploring of course and some possibilities afforded by available technology. Once we’ve finalized the titles and meaning for the full Saavd Tarot deck then we can look into creating a utility on the website to generate random and not so random spreads. Tarot cards also provide a unique outlet for artistic collaboration since symbolism and meaning combine within the cards to create something greater than the sum of the parts.