A couple years ago, I saw this completely fantastic version of the Tarot deck which used scenes from the comic strip Peanuts to illustrate the various cards. The major arcana of this deck which they did was just so fantastic. 95% of their choices for the cards were really awesome and on point I think. It seemed like the ones which were not very good were ones where they probably didn’t understand the implications of the card which they were trying to depict.

Anyway, as with anything good, somebody had to go and ruin it. The lawyers of the creator of Peanuts, Charles Schulz, sent a cease & desist order to the person who had made and posted those images. Even though there was big statement by the tarot creator about how the works were strictly to be considered non-commercial satire. But of course things like that don’t matter to lawyers. So rather than risk a lawsuit, the person just took them down. Which was really too bad, because the deck (especially the major arcana) were so masterfully done that they really opened up some great insights into what all the different cards meant.

I snooped around online to see if anybody had saved copies of any of the images. I found a couple, but very small. Then I had a stroke of genius. I visited the Wayback Machine over at the Internet Archive. They have a handy feature where you can enter in a URL and then view various archived versions of that URL from different dates. The only problem with it is (1) you need to know the original URL, and (2) the indexing of the pages which it saves is very spotty. It seems to save only about like 65% of what was originally there. Usually, if you go through a few different archive dates, you are able to piece together about 10-15% more of the original material.

Here’s a fun example, you can go there, type in “www.timboucher.com,” and they have a version of this site roughly when it first appeared in October of 2001. If you click around, you’ll see what I mean about some of the original content having been saved and some of it lost. But anyway, that’s just a tangent…

Now, for the moment you’ve been waiting for. Here is the link which will take you to the Peanuts Tarot saved on the Internet Archive. I’m not entirely clear on what the legal status of this sort of thing is. Whether or not Schulz’s lawyers can serve a cease and desist letter to the Internet Archive for making available these files. From what I understand, that’s a pretty hazy area of internet law, which is only going to be made even hazier by services like Furl (which I just joined and which rules) where they save archived versions of web pages you visit onto their server, so that if the original is lost, you can still access it.

Oh, also, for anybody who is too lazy to go through and collect all the major arcana files from this hodge-podge Internet Archive thing, I’ve already done it. I’m now in possession of the entire large-version set of majors, except for 6 - The Lovers (I do have a small version of that though). Anybody who wants them, I’d be happy to send you a zip file. If I can figure out a good place online to post them anonymously that can’t be traced back to me or my IP, I will also do that and update this post with the URL. I’m also going to put a copy of the zip files containing all 22 majors into my shared folder, which is accessible via KaZaa or Shareaza, when I am (infrequently using them)

In conclusion, fight the power! Save things that are important! And fuck overly restrictive copyright laws!