Also mentioned on Fantastic Planet in regard to the celebrity/pop culture tarot ideas is an interest in developing the minor arcana. If you’re not “in the know” these are the cards of the tarot deck which eventually became the regular playing cards we use today. They are the numbered cards, plus the aces and the court cards. Aeclectic.net has some good information on meanings of these cards, but the way I understand it is each suit represents a particular element, force or way of being, and then you follow the progression from point to point along that path.

Personally, I’m really interested in continuing to do this celebrity-based “major arcana” cards, but I do like the idea of exploring other options. There’s always the option to play off the traditional minor arcana, but I had some other ideas as well. One of them I started to realize while I was writing my article on Conspiracy Theory and the Monomyth. It struck me how the tarot could be read as being sort of a prototype or a pre-cursor to what Campbell labelled the Hero’s Journey. People in tarot circles sometimes talk about the “Fool’s Journey” which is the development series that is depicted in the major arcana. I’m not really sure if this term was around before Joseph Campbell, but who knows.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that we could try to represent various systems of development described by different groups and people, and maybe have those be each their own individual suits. They wouldn’t necessarily be symmetrical to each other. One might have more, one less. But I like the idea of having the whole deck be sort of amorphous, chaotic and constantly growing through multiple hands, authors and idea/story filters. I also really want to get into things like exegetical literature, where we go in and elucidate each other’s cards, and also do “readings” based on various combinations of cards. It would also be really awesome to go and look at things like fan fiction, news events, tv shows and movies, and use our cards as sort of guides to decoding and recoding them.

Another idea for a suit might be to portray the 8-circuit model of consciousness. More ideas on this as they arise though…