Major Tom
gregory said:Would you rule out such decks as the Blue Moon, then ? Or the Tarot of the Dead ? I certainly wouldn't !
I don't think I've been entirely clear. I'm not saying the Blue Moon Tarot or the Tarot of the Dead are not tarot decks, even though the Blue Moon has only 22 cards. I'm saying they would make a poor departure point for any artist creating their own tarot.
baba-prague said:The reason I react with worry to the idea of defining too closely is that next we could end up with some idea of "approved" and "not approved" tarots
I do hope my response to gregory helps with this too, but I don't think there could ever be an 'approved' list. As long as someone is willing to print a deck of cards with the word 'tarot' on the front, they will do so regardless of whether it truely is tarot or not. I may tell someone that in my opinion their deck isn't tarot but they are still welcome to call it tarot if they wish.
baba-prague said:Can we talk a bit about this idea of a tarot extended family? I think that may be a good way to go as it does allow this type of flexibility.
Thanks for this Karen. As I said before I do like the idea of an extended tarot family. We already have one in a way. There's the Visconti decks, the Minchiate, the Etteilla decks, etc. The trends with names seem to be to either use the name of the place the deck was created, the name of the family the deck was created for, or the name of the person who designed the deck. If we consider the Rider Waite Smith a type of tarot, then the publisher's, designer's and artist's names were all used. I suspect anyone bold enough to alter the structure of tarot ought to be bold enough to put their name on it and call it by their own name. Naturally, people will do as they wish.
Ravenswing said:The structure of the Gematric Tarot can be directly one-to-one related to the RWS deck. I believe it to be Tarot.
Sounds like Tarot to me. You used the RWS as a departure point so you were very likely to succeed in creating a Tarot.
Am I making any sense here? I do wish more deck creators would join the discussion. What's your opinion?