LittleBuddha said:
I like all three representations, incidently. In my memory, the Cats are most like the Prague. Was it an intention to move towards a different way of looking at things as you continued to design further decks [in terms of twisting Waite's original imagery and applying it to your own work], or did they just naturally work that way by theme and the finding of images?
LB
Well, hard to answer really. Interesting question and one that I hadn't really thought about consciously. Certainly as Tarot of Prague was our first deck we decided to stick pretty closely to RWS. With Baroque Bohemian Cats too, though for different reasons (we knew some would find the deck outrageous so we wanted it to have a good solid foundation so that it would be very easy and clear to read with - as it's proved to be).
With Fairytale we had to move much further from RWS as we needed to be faithful to the stories themselves. In many ways this means that the deck can be used as an oracle as well as a tarot. It's possible to read it from the stories alone (not that this is how I use it personally) and ignore the tarot meanings if you want to.
FM? Well, as I say, that's a whole different deck - very much in the spirit of Grandville complete with irony, social observation, dry humour and lots of unexpected twists. In many ways it may be the darkest - though also the funniest - of our decks.
With Victorian Romantic and now Bohemian Gothic we are being looser with the RWS meanings - they are still there (I'd say all our decks are firmly RWS at heart - though the Fairytale the least so) but they are used in a more improvisational way.
What I'm currently tussling with is how "dark" cards fit with RWS. As someone asked me on that thread, how DO you do a card like The Sun in a dark way without changing the meaning? (of course we already have a good few ideas about this). It will be very interesting to see how far the Bohemian Gothic has to stray from traditional RWS.
