Perhaps
Weird might be a bit over reaching, but the question essentially is...
what hobbies do you have that are off the beaten track?
I collect a few things as a hobby and among those are Tarot cards.
Through the early 70s, I had seen Tarot cards in various books on the occult, but did not pay much attention to them outside of thinking of them as something fortune tellers used.
It was not until my second year of high school that I had bought a deck of cards after reading Steinbeck's
The Winter of Our Discontent in English class. I bought a deck at Spencer Gifts in the mall, which was a Rider-Waite deck. Now I was used to seeing a particular deck of cards in books on the occult, thinking their was a standard deck everyone used, and was quite disappointed with this rather ugly deck which was not what I had wanted (way too much use of yellow in it).
Most of my concentration on decks early on was traditional decks. After high school, I had an interest in pathworking. When one starts with Tarot, you are usually looking for 'your deck'; one which appeals to you the most either visually or on some other level. Though a friend of mine, in which we both had varying interest in magic and mysticism, collected decks including Crowley's Thoth Tarot, Salvador Dali, and Giger (yeah, as weird as you think it is), my interest was in an older, traditional deck and I went with the Tarot of Marseille (Fournier). Still, though, not the deck I had seen in the books.
The Tarot of Marseille has many variations, though many do stick close to the Claude Burdel design, and the AG Muller Classic Tarot is the Burdel woodcuts. Other Marseille or Marseille variations I have include the Founier as mentioned, Lo Scarabeo, and the Grimaud deck which is also the oldest deck I have (mine was printed in 1963). I also have the Lombardy which takes from the Marseille, more in spirit, and is done in neo-classical artwork that reminds me of some of the art I would see in books of bible stories. The one I like most is from about 1890 (the design) and takes directly from the Lombardy, but has a much nicer and cleaner look to it; t is only called Ancient Italian Tarot by Lo Scarabeo, and I don't have another name for it.
Ah, but the mysterious deck from the books. If you have seen any Tarot cards illustrated in books on the occult from the 60s and 70s, you have likely seen the same cards used for the illustrations. This is a Marseille variant and is known as the 1JJ Swiss Tarot. Took me a while to identify the deck I had kept seeing in these books until I ran across one that named it, so I ordered one and do have that deck; that deck is no longer in print, BTW, but give it time as it is still a popular deck and will be reprinted in time.
Though my initial interest in Tarot may have had an association with the occult, I just collect the decks for the art. They are rather compact collections of art from different times, and even decks designed for today have interesting variations on the theme.
Some decks such as the Bosch and Da Vinci Tarots are what if decks. What if the artist had designed a Tarot deck; what would it look like? I have both. Bosch is an interesting deck that makes good use of the Flemish painter's style to be rather nightmarish. One reviewer of the deck commented that it is the only deck where a pip card (suit) makes the Death card look pedestrian in comparison.
I do not have a standard Rider-Waite deck (which should be called Smith-Waite properly). There is a Universal Waite deck, and pocket version, both of which I have, that recolors the cards and makes them much more pleasant. The Hanson-Roberts deck is a Smith-Waite variation that is considered a friendlier design.
The Smith-Waite deck was not the start of the Hermetic tradition in Tarot, though it did solidify the tradition and did start a tradition of illustrating the pip cards as well. The Hermetic tradition in Tarot goes back to probably the 1700s but the most noted contributors to that which kickstarted it were Oswald Wirth and Papus. Papus postulated an origin of the Tarot back to the Egyptians and preserved by the Gypsies who introduced it to the European continent. Papus and other infused Kabbalistic influences and Egyptian symbology into the Tarot. Though this was interesting, and was a good fit, his presumes origin was simply dead wrong.
Tarot simply was a card game. It was a game of trumps to which story cards were added and used as trumps (triumphs, tarots). The oldest extant Tarot deck, the Visconti-Sforza (eh 1430?) contains the 56 suit cards and 4 trumps added to each suit. Somewhere along the way, 5 more trumps were added, and an unnumbered card called The Fool, which later became the joker card. Many of theses trumps are representative of costume characters, games, events, and stories one may have encountered at a harvest festival. This is just a take on the origin and I do not presume to know the full origin of how the Tarot came to be as we know it.
The Hermetic tradition in Tarot, though, held on quite strongly and Aleister Crowley added to it with his publication of
The Book of Thoth which now made the Tarot a book of magic handed down through time only to those querants who possessed the knowledge to properly read it. In some ways, this was an extension of the writings of Eliphas Levi who also considered the Tarot to be a complete book of magic.
The deck Crowley designed, with artwork provided by Freida Harris, was certainly different than anything before. I have a Thoth deck and a more recent variation on it called Liber T.
Past all the speculation, theories, magical claims, paranoia, and accusations, the Tarot is just a deck of cards; but I like the artwork.
Well that went longer than I had intended. I was going to get into pyramids in this also, but I'll save that for later.
What hobbies do you have that are off the beaten track?
