"Double deck"

Happy thread resurrection.

As an newbie still working his way into Tarot I got into questions on the math of playing cards and found this thread. Maybe someone who needs a doubled deck basically wants to get around the zero probability that the same card appears a second time in a spread. Maybe this issue is born in reflections on life and the conviction that very similar inner or outer forces may appear from different directions in a situation in life or in respect to a definite question. Why not two emperors in your situation?

A technical and absolutely unromantic solution to avoid the too-huge-to-shuffle deck would be to use one deck as a chance generator and others for laying out the spread. Or the reader picks an identical card from a second and ordered deck and replaces the picked card by it's twin and they get shuffled anew.

But I think the question digs a little deeper into the principles of tarot. It seems to me that each meaning of a card is represented by some others too, so that each card represents a different combination of meanings from a common pool. (The sceptic in me asks further if such a combination of possible meanings is in each case so ambiguous that a picked card will always fit the question in some way. The human and psychologist in me asks: so what ..)

So the apparent loss of future possibilities by the picking of one card (I don't know the correct English notions from statistics) would be compensated by the overlapping meanings of other cards. The ones like me asking for double decks (apart from the vice versa effect which by the way could turn the spread into a two-dimensional projection of a multidimensional shape - the corresponding cards being ends of wormholes) - those like me asking seem to be looking for an aesthetic and semiotic effect by the communication between cards of different designs. Next step would be to mix three or more decks and at the end to design your own.

I hope discerning these two effects of doubling the deck was a reasonable contribution and worth resurrecting the thread.

*Haven't read through the whole thread.
And I don't have a "double deck" per se.

I have 2 mixed decks, which are both "the best of" 2 decks - made into 1.
I don't use the cards that weren't selected as "best of" presently... curious... perhaps I'll try it now...

1) The best of: Dark Fairytale Tarot and Dark Angel Tarot (these go quite well together as the artwork and backs are similar).

2) The best of: The Witches Tarot (Dugan) and Fradella Adventure Tarot (these do not go well together as the artwork for each is quite different - but I ignore that bit because I like so much my favourite cards from each).

I've not done readings for anyone else with them yet.
Just my own use.



@rockclimber - I sort-of follow you (just about - she says wiping brow)
And firmly agree with the "so what?" bit (the picked card will always fit the question in some way).
It usually all works out in the end.

Tanga said:

*
@rockclimber - I sort-of follow you (just about - she says wiping brow)
And firmly agree with the "so what?" bit (the picked card will always fit the question in some way).
It usually all works out in the end.

Click to expand...

I hope I didn't upset you in some way. As you might have discerned from my language mistakes I'm not a native speaker. So I am sorry for not being able to decipher the remark between the brackets. But the smiley appeases me.

Well, as I am a trained scientist there's scepticism deeply rooted in my mental procedures. And I don't want to forget about it only because of being fascinated by the cards. You will well understand that there are moments in a lifetime when someone decides to stop lying to oneself, even if it was by excluding knowledge for the sake of relative coherence. I have to deal with the tension. BUT the cards and even some other divination techniques have this strong advantage of telling stories, the cards even more of showing mysterious pictures. Come on, isn't it a common place that this, along with Bosch and Gruenewald, is historically the main predecessor of surrealism in art? (For example look not only at the works of Dali and Ernst, but of austrian painter Rudolf Hausner too. And remember that, if I am right, Walter Wegmueller belongs to the circle of late H.R. Giger. Do you know about the medieaval series of paintings called the Dance Of Death e.g. in Basel and other places?) So the sceptic Holy Office in me is again appeased for a while. In case of doubt the cards are pictural and performance art and share all the powers with them. But the trick in this kind of performance to work on the subconscious level in it's full capacity might be that the divine has to be invoked by features of the ritual. (Do you know the book "Angels Fear" by cybernetist Gregory Bateson and and his daughter Mary Catherine? There are remarks about severe shortcomings in the protestant mass compared to the roman catholic one - hard to accept for me as a lutherian but very acutely observed.)