Well, while I am on a roll, here is the 2nd blog post on the new deck… the process and some places.

I am a whiteboard person, basically, and when I can’t have a white board, I revert to large pieces of paper, the bigger the better. I am one of those people who has to externalise my thoughts and process, so that I can see them in patterns and pictures, not just thoughts and words.

So when I started the deck, one of the first things I had to do was list what powers/places/people would be in the deck, what their relationships and connects with each other were, and how they related directly to a magician or magical person.

I realised very quickly that it would change, and that happened many times through the 2 year process – cards would argue, sulk, make friends, and some left muttering swear words as they flounced out… new ones pushed through the door unexpectedly, and some transformed themselves into something else. With each shift, the ‘family’ connections shifted so I had to look and adapt the overall pattern each time to accommodate everyone in a balanced way.

A divination deck is a holism – it is not a series of individual powers or isolated symbolism, it is a tightly connected family of beings and powers, of life dynamics and key places… and they all need to rub along well together, make sense, and plug into each other. That process creates a pattern – a magical ‘skeleton structure’ or interconnected web that power and consciousness can flow through, and that our imaginations can plug into in order to work through. That is why the mapping of a deck is far more important than simply putting a load of symbolic images together.

At one point we had stacks of the paintings in the bedroom, with some under the bed and the rest propped in various corners – most of the paintings are 20inches by 30inches (some are a bit larger) canvas on wood stretchers…. That adds up to a lot of space. It is a small bedroom, and with so many contacted paintings all crammed together, it started to get loud and very very busy. After a week of sleepless nights, we sucked up the cost and hired a local small storage room to put them all in…. finally we got some sleep.

So here are some more peeks, this time some of the ‘places’ – some are inner places and some are outer places, and some are in presentations that are not how magicians usually think of a place. One example is the Inner Library, which is most often depicted as literally a vast library.

However, when working in this place in vision, it is important to remember that the ‘books’ are not actually books that we read, rather they are the stored remnants of knowledge and memory.

And that knowledge and memory is not just of humans across time, but also of nature. Trees are wonderful at storing information and also passing it on…. In the painting for the Inner Library, the trees send their roots down into the void….

And all of the images I post in this block are just rough snapshot photos that I took when I finished each one, so some have shadow or glare, and some are cropped…. Obviously for printing, Stuart re photographed them properly…. I am not allowed to play with the ‘grown up’ camera……

I will keep adding dribbles of blog posts with preview peeks of the images while we are busy working away in the background preparing for printing, fundraising, and finishing the book. Thanks for stopping by!