Creating the Vamp

I have been working on creating my own tarot deck for over a year now using an obsolete Victorian photographic method called ‘wet plate collodion’. This is a labour of love; it is a slow and expensive process so will probably not be completed until some time in 2021.

In the meantime, I started work on another tarot deck as a side project. This has now been completed and the result is a deck called ‘VAMP: the Theda Bara Tarot’ Theda Bara was a huge star of the silent film era. She was the first screen Vamp and is sadly not well known today as most of her films were destroyed in a huge fire at Fox Studios in 1937. The VAMP tarot deck comprises of images of Theda Bara merged with my calligraphy of tarot prose. This prose comes from PD Ouspensky’s ‘The Symbolism of the Tarot’ published in 1913 for the major arcana and the tarot poetry of 15^th century Italian Count Matteo Boiardo for the minor arcana.

The deck is currently on kickstarter to hopefully raised funds to finance a small print run. At the time of writing, it is uncertain whether or not it will succeed – I would say 40:60 chance. In a couple of weeks I will write a blog about ‘how to successfully crowdfund a tarot deck’, or ‘lessons learned from a failed kickstarter’. Hopefully the former.

As I really can’t predict the outcome, I decided to do a reading to get some indication or advice from the cards themselves. I have a test deck of VAMP produced by my printer and wanted to use this to question itself about the outcome. Nothing unusual so far, and probably something most tarot deck creators would do.

The interesting thing for me is that the VAMP minors are based on the Boiardo proposal of 4 suits based on the ‘Four Passions’ of Fear, Jealousy, Hope and Love. And this was the first time I had ever attempted a reading using these suits. As far as I am aware, no complete copies of Boiardo’s tarot survive. So potentially I could be the first person in a couple of hundred years to do a reading based on his writings.

The VAMP deck uses majors based on the 22 traditional and familiar characters, it is only the minors that are different. So, I decided to do a reading using just the minors to ensure every card was something new to me. It is possible to read the Boiardo minors by equating them to the relevant traditional minor card. For example, treat and read the Ace of Love as if it was the Ace of Cups. However, I decided to read the cards in their original format.

And you can read that reading here next week… together with other articles by Steve Jook. Meantime, to find out more about how to support his Kickstarter project, take a peek at his site: http://jooktarot.com/

And it’s worth visiting just to take a peek at his work – it’s like poking around in an amazing art gallery with free entrance.

So, again, here it is: http://jooktarot.com/wet-plate-process

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Jook

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