G6
I traded this one away pretty quickly. It felt souless and flat. I didn't connect with it.
Thanks for posting that. I am on my cell so I can't see the details very well. I am surprised that there are at least some unique seals in the background cards... Interesting! I am pretty sure it won't work for me as a reading deck but I might pick it up sometime. The male/female imbalance is irritating though, especially when I compare to the Mutational Alchemy Tarot, another somewhat dark-appearing esoteric deck. It doesn't have to be this way!
The more I look at it, the more I like it. I'm really digging the repeating elements, like the cage that appears on several cards (the High Priestess, the Empress, the Hanged Man, the Queen and King of Swords). Sometimes there's a heart in the cage; sometimes there's not. The heart also appears without the cage. There are a lot of narcissus flowers. There's a leather club chair that stands in for a throne in many cards, which is a nice way to update the throne as a symbol.
Several of the characters repeat, too. The woman on Strength is on several of the Wands cards (or someone like her). The Lovers could be the Emperor and Empress's younger selves. The men on the Two of Swords appear on the Three of Swords also. Those are just a few examples.
The textures and colors are really satisfying, too. The color coding of the suits just grabs me. Yeah, I'm going to pick this one up eventually. I have to see how it looks in person.
Just going by numbers, it seems fairly balanced to me. There may be a few more men than women. Some figures are ambiguous to me, like some of the Pages, but that's pretty common in court cards.
I get what Le Fanu was saying about how the depiction of women seems less credible than the male figures. A lot of the women have that stereotypical fantasy art figure with large breasts. With the Empress it kind of works because of the fecund aspect of that archetype. I could live without the large breasts on the Star, though.
Yes it is more the tone of the depictions of women than any numerical imbalance that irritates me. I will have to look at more cards, it could be that one or two gave me that impression but it isn't as bad as I thought.
The repetitions could be great. I read for a long time with the Tarot Draconis where there is pretty much one male and one female character that repeated throughout the deck with a lot of other visual repetitions and references between cards. It works out well because it forms links between the cards in a reading. It would bother me more in the case of something like a Solomonic seal or sigil that has a particular meaning being used as a decoration on cards where the particular meaning doesn't fit well.
If I could find a site with good pictures of this deck online I might be content with that and look for a Golden Dawn deck to buy instead since I seem to be craving something more symbolic.
For fans of the deck a little bird told me that Fabio will have some exciting news, very soon.
For fans of the deck a little bird told me that Fabio will have some exciting news, very soon.