Tarot for Techies | Hacker News Reader

Tarot for Techies

witchcraft.computer

74 pointsbenzguo32 comments

Speaking as an ex-teenage witch [1] and a student of Crowley's Book of Thoth, this is... underwhelming? At the very least, if you are going to re-interpret the Tarot for the modern era, you should make an effort to design your own deck, rather than repurpose an old deck, even keeping the cards' names.

For the uninitialised, that is how Crowley did his Tarot of Thoth, essentially an update of the old Tarot for the modern era (welll... Crowley's era!):

https://www.tarot.com/tarot/decks/crowley

For instance, the first thing I'd do would be to redesign Lust to more closely match the Internet (a red woman riding a beast of many heads):

https://www.tarot.com/tarot/cards/strength/crowley

And The Tower:

https://www.tarot.com/tarot/cards/the-tower/crowley

An obvious metaphor for the post-9/11 world, no doubt.

_____________

[1] ex-both, to be clear.

After playing Inscryption recently, I've been thinking what it would look like to have something akin to a card game (or even Tarot) but based on modern tech.

Even bought a copy of Tabletop Simulator to try it out. This might be inspiration enough to give it a shot.

+1 for Inscryption, what wonderful and beautiful piece of art that game is.

Agreed. I think that TFA's major arcana reinterpretations are pretty good, if not fleshed out. But Tarot when you really get into it is an entire framework for thinking about all aspects of existence, so you have to be pretty crafty to make a whole deck.

A few years ago I tried, and this is as far as I got (just threw it on github now):

https://github.com/zwkrt/programmer_tarot/blob/main/major_ar...

Intersting :) I'd have personally put the man in a VR helmet as the Hanged Man.

Have you considered giving these descriptions to a neural net art generator? Could be fun...

I was expecting "Hexen 2.0" by Suzanne Treister (https://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/TAROT_COL/HEXEN_2_TAR...). It's a Tarot deck with "mysticism of the 20th century" theme - CIA, computing, quantum, counterculture, etc.

After looking through the cards, I'm vaguely sure that if I just read up for a while on each of them, I'll have background for a sizable chunk of Hunter Thompson's and ‘The Illuminatus’ 60s universe. Surprised that Crowley himself is not there.

The card images are from this deck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider–Waite_tarot_deck

I've long ago bought me a copy of that deck purely for how good it looks. Everything else is either old and crooked, or crayon drawings by some psycho nerd (ahem Crowley/Harris cough), or straight up Boris Vallejo style. Plus some are influenced by Rider-Waite. Meanwhile Rider-Waite is pretty much Marseilles-but-good.

I don't even do anything tarot, and owe the knowledge of its existence primarily to ‘The Ogre Battle’ and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Should probably learn to do some kind of dealing for when I need a decision, in lieu of coin and dice.

(Mildly curiously, the cards I bought had original English titles—unusual because they accompanied a book in Russian, and the target audience is IMO unlikely to casually know English.)

About "when I need a decision" - you might like this: http://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html (disclaimer: I am the author).

Wow, I actually much prefer the Crowley Harris deck, just for the sheer amount of detail.

The Rider-Waite just looks kinda boring to me, to be honest.

Eh, I pretty much apply modernist thinking to my mystic symbolism: I like the symbols clear and concise. Excessive decoration just takes away from the message of the symbols, and suggests either that the author might be unsure that they can impart the symbols well enough, or that there are additional meanings in these details—which is probably untrue.

Plus, in this post-psychedelic age, the detailed drawings look like self-parody, in the spirit of ‘horror vacui’. Compare e.g. art by Rammellzee and James Koehnline for various outfits of Bill Laswell:

https://www.discogs.com/release/57834-Altered-Beats-Assassin...

https://www.discogs.com/release/2166602-Various-Axiom-Dub-My...

https://www.discogs.com/release/196685-Transmutation-Mutatis...

https://www.discogs.com/release/1228556-Profanation-Preparat...

I feel that this is what Crowley would've done if he had Photoshop in his day. The dude had plenty of troll attitude, IMO.

(Also I discovered this paragraph in the Wikipedia entry on ‘horror vacui’, which sounds sorta funny in this context (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui): There is an inverse relationship between horror vacui and value perception. Commercial designers favor visual clarity in shop window displays and advertising to appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers, on the premise that understatement and restraint appeals to more affluent and educated audiences. In one study, 100 clothing stores were surveyed to find patterns and relationship between how efficiently the store's real estate was used and the store's brand prestige. Bulk sales shops and chain stores were found to fill their window displays to maximum capacity; while high-end boutiques often used their space sparsely, with no price tags.)

Hah, Mr. Crowley was a total troll. But he was an artist's and interlectuarl's mystic, so his tarot was specifically designed to look like it belong to an upper-middle class practitioner, rather than a commoner, with traditional but incomplete understadning of the Art. He basically wanted to elevate Tarot reading from the palmistry tent at fairs to the salons of the nouveau rich, so he chose art and interpretations that would appeal to that kind of person.

A troll and a real marketing genius, I think.

Ooh, this does remind me that I need to figure out mass-culture and highbrow design values before modernism, since I indeed might apply modern thinking where it doesn't belong, sometimes. I vaguely know that it was ‘more stuff = rich’ in the middle ages, leading to the ridiculous outfits of the aristocracy, but not sure when it switched to pure modernist ‘lots of empty space = rich’ (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/87/56/678756c714c2bd405964...).

My favorite (for the artwork) to date (scroll down to see all the cards): https://robertmplacetarot.com/the-alchemical-tarot-renewed-4...

Rider-Waite, Marseille, and Crowley-Harris are the trinity for me, personally speaking.

Code, Keyboard, Pixels and Docs appear to be the suits.

Some of the Major Arcana were funny to me: The Tower (usually meaning I believe a very bad turn of events) has become "The Reorg".

Years ago I was drawn to the "Alchemical Tarot" deck by Robert Place for his amazing artwork.

It's gone in and out of print, being tweaked when re-issued. Looks like the 6th edition (and examples of his amazing art) can be found here:

https://robertmplacetarot.com/the-alchemical-tarot-renewed-4...

is this supposed to do anything? I click "Go", I see a card. Hovering over the card gives me a pointer-cursor as though i should click it, but clicking it does nothing. The only part of the page that does anything is the link to biddytarot.com to explain the current card.

Am I missing something?

Although the card itself has an unclickable cursor for some reason, there is a relevant clickable piece of text under it.

Nice, though it seems like cards come out only upright (I only drew a few cards).

One can still additionally flip a coin heads=upright/tails=reversed to manually correct the issue.

This is not how tarot works. Shuffle a tarot deck. Half of the cards are not upside down....

Edit: spelling

I'm not a "Divination Expert", but I'm pretty sure you're supposed to do a pile shuffle so that some actually are upside down.

Do you mean riffle shuffle? A pile shuffle should be able to keep all cards in the same orientation (technically a riffle shuffle could as well, if you're careful with the orientation)

V2 cards! Thanks for the feedback everyone :) https://witchcraft.computer/major-arcana

Being delusional for people who should be smart enough to know better.

> The sun: the frontend

> The Sun Tarot card radiates with optimism and positivity. A large, bright sun shines in the sky, representing the source of all life on Earth.

Yeah sure bud.

I guess going for sun/moon comparison (frontend/backend). Also sun being the known and moon being the unknown?

We are all but slaves to the database.

>is it safe?

>i met a witch in mendocino and told her i was building a tarot website. she told me to build with good intentions, and that is what i have done. use at your own risk.

Don't know if this is satirical or not, but it was a good chuckle regardless :p

It seems in line with typical attitudes towards tarot decks, which might or might not be tongue-in-cheek. For example, the recent tabletop RPG Wickedness, which uses a tarot deck to simulate a coven of witches, recommends reassuring the deck that you are going to make it play a fun game.

Good work on the foil effect, site author.

wow, this is really cool

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