I was looking at different kinds of fortune telling decks after reading Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (in which characters tell their stories to each other using only tarot cards, and the audience hypothesizes what happened based on the meanings/imageries of each card and where it’s placed relative to other cards). I’m looking at Greek mythology again and thinking of making my own version of a fortune deck, inspired by the Fantod Pack. I’m not sure whether to turn it into a game as yet but I’m collecting card images and ideas that I like just in case it leads me somewhere. I’m still trying to find a concrete message to convey in my work.
I don’t quite understand the Lenormand deck the way I understand the traditional tarot (I have the Rider Waite deck at home). I love well-crafted card decks and anchoring my card images in mythology would save me from having to build a whole new universe of images. Greek mythology is full of grotesques (for example, all the women who were metamorphosed into monsters) so none of my previous work is wasted, exactly.
B suggested that my card deck could lead people into the grotesque, and in doing so reflect their own self-denial in a way that can be understood (drawing influence from my readings on Bakhtin and Kayser). I’m wondering if there’s a way to extrapolate meaning from Greek mythology in a way unique to me. I remember reading that Greek mythology makes up so much ground of the human psyche in Western thought – if you look at Freudian psychology, some of his theories are named after Greek myths (i.e. the Oedipus complex). I guess this is a better starting point.
