Adapting your favorite book(s) to Tarot?

Mar,
I haven't read the Anita Blake series, but have read Hamilton's Merry Gentry fey books.
Now you've got me thinking about how THOSE characters would fit into a tarot deck!

Be sure to post your "final adaptation", if you get there!

I know that it's been said before but Harry Potter. Not one with the characters on it, one that the characters would have used. If you were super rich you could make two pictures for each card and then have them done linticular (not sure if that is said correctly, you know those heavy stock cards that you move from side to side and the picture looks like it's moving? anyway....) so they look like they move like the pictures do in the books. That would probably be more for a "look at/pretty deck", it would probably be too hard to shuffle. lol

I think it depends on the deck and book

I think some people have taken the Wonderland Tarot and Alice in Wonderland for fun and silliness.

In some loose matches, the William Blake Tarot and Jane Eyre have some funny matches...Jane's odd imagination might have imagined Mr. Rochester as some sort of Nebuchadnezzar when actually he had let his hair grow, some fingers amputated and was blind in one eye as a result of an accident...

http://www.masterpiece-paintings-gallery.com/blake-nebuchadnezzar.htm

That deck/book pairing maybe too different. Maybe in a more standard tarot, you could say,

He's a King of Swords and she's his Queen of Cups...

http://images.google.com/imgres?img...d+rochester+jane+eyre&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N

Hope you can see the pictures...

Regards,

Cerulean Mari

It would be interesting to see tarot decks based on:

- A Thousand and One Nights

- Aesop's Fables

Grimm's Fairy Tales could make a good darker deck.

Rusty Neon said:

It would be interesting to see tarot decks based on:

- A Thousand and One Nights

- Aesop's Fables

Grimm's Fairy Tales could make a good darker deck.

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oooooo a thousand and one nights could be absolutely fantastic!!! I can see it now.... beautiful! Good call Rusty.

laura_borealis said:

It's not a well-known book, but John Crowley's novel Little, Big would make an excellent tarot deck... in fact, there's a deck in the book, which I would love to see. But I can also see several of the characters as Majors.

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Great idea! Here's my take:

Fool – George Mouse

Magician – Ariel Hawksquill (thanks to Laura)

High Priestess – Aunt Cloud, reading Violet’s Tarot deck

Empress – Mrs. Underhill (the matriarch of the fairies)

Emperor – Russell Eigenblick a.k.a. Emperor Frederick Barbossa

Hierophant – Fred Savage, the homeless messenger who acts as a guide to Auberon

Lovers – Smokey and Daily Alice consummate their marriage at the gazebo, watched in reverence by the fairies

Chariot – Auberon

Strength – Sylvie, carrying her impossibly awkward and bulky package, the delivering of which has surprising consequences

Hermit – Auberon Drinkwater (Alice’s uncle)

Wheel of Fortune – Violet’s Tarot deck

Justice – Smokey and Alice's three daughters, Lucy, Lilie and Tacey (I think that's their names)

Hanged Man – Grandfather Trout, at the moment when he jumps into the lake to drown himself and is turned into a fish (“Suppose one were a fish…”)

Death – Smokey working on his orrery

Temperance – Old Law Farm

Devil – The false Lilac, a changeling

Tower – George Mouse’s fireworks factory at the top floor of his house explodes

Star – Sophie, dreaming

Moon – Daily Alice consults Grandfather Trout at the lake at night

Sun – Sophie’s daughter Lilac riding naked on the stork

Judgment – the empty railroad car with Violet’s Tarot cards scattered

The World – Daily Alice (thanks to Laura)

The Fool was a dilemma. Both Smokey and Auberon are the Fool at earlier stages in the book, but later on they become other things, whereas George Mouse retains a Foolish quality right through to the end.

-- Lee

Resurrecting a VERY old thread... because I just ran across it again and remembered that I'd read an interview with John Crowley which touches on some of this. The interview is here. Go to the Jodi Snyder section.

It certainly answers my question, did he map out the characters of Little, Big on the tarot deck? -- the answer is NO, lol, he did not...

To tell you the truth, I knew next to nothing about Tarot when I began the book, and know not much more now.

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But I still love the notion, and agree with many of Lee's matches. Mr. Crowley however did explicitly associate a character with The Fool, and it wasn't one of the ones that we picked.

I can’t agree with that. The Fool in my deck, is, of course, Russell Eigenblick, or, in his former incarnation or state, the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a German (the “links of sausage”) who while on crusade to the Holy land (a “scallop shell”, symbol of the Pilgrim) fell from his horse while crossing a river and drowned because of the weight of his armor. I don’t think the traditional Fool has horse, sausage, armor, or brook. (What he does, or ought to, have is the Fool’s traditional Ouroboros over his head.)

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Say what? Ouroboros? I'm trying to remember a deck that has this... ^_^

interesting to see as well that the suggestions made long time ago for decks being based on stories like Alice in Wonderland, 1001 Nights, etc were actually made afterwards...

Hmmm, the Narnia series would be interesting.