Numbers and Assignments
I don’t hold onto many tarot decks these days. I’ve found having too many can confuse me. I have one deck that I prefer, and I have several versions, including a rare Swiss printing, blue box, from some distant past. I shopped, mostly at the rock shop in Austin, and on Amazon, trying to find a pocket-sized vision I could add to my travel gear to replace a tiny, now collectible, Knapp-Hall deck I’ve got. More performative than useful, but as such, I still think I should carry such items with me.
The Numbers and Assignments are from the one-off Dali Deck with its gold edges, a deck I can’t bring myself to sell, as it’s unique, weird, and like its creator, surrealistic.
For Halloween, Feb. 14, I was looking for the regular depiction of the Three of Swords, which, for the last hundred years or so, has been heart with three swords through it. Some versions drip blood, and I figured the Dali version would be suitably weird. Sort of worked. But flipping through the cards, what I found was different attributions for the cards. I haven’t dug into the history too far, not of this deck, just enjoy it for what it is, an expensive set of cards with weird imagery.
The Three of Swords was close, but then, the Chariot was Sagittarius, The Wheel of Fortune Capricorn, and El Sol, Gemini? The Fool as Scorpio?
The Numbers and Assignments when I’m reading one of my decks, the Chariot is Cancer, Wheel of Fortune is Jupiter, and the Sun is Sagittarius, with — depends — the Fool being Mercurial or Uranian, due to his unpredictable behaviors.
Numbers and Assignments
I drag out my Dali Tarot cards when I’m looking at a certain image, looking for a specified message. The deck, to me, is too nice to use in an everyday setting. Gold-edged cards?
The Numbers and Assignments kind of threw me, when I was just looking for a single image, and it’s one of those universal images, the Three of Swords, three swords stuck through a heart. I think of it as an almost archetypal image, these days.
But the rest? A master at play with numbers, meanings and like me, I try to make everyone’s day a little more surreal.
Numbers and Assignments
