Cloistered for most of 2020 and flush with time and unemployment money, I managed to create a tarot deck called Singularity Tarot. I’ve taken these cards to street fairs and tarot reading events. Many people who have some familiarity with tarot have been puzzled by the differences between my deck and more famous tarot cards on the market. Singularity Tarot draws its inspiration and ideas from futurism and theoretical science as well as the occult. The majority of the cards break completely with traditional imagery and divinatory interpretation. Singularity Tarot is in many ways an experimental product so it’s worth clarifying a couple of its premises. How and why does Singularity Tarot deviate from the traditional meanings for many cards? And what expertise, inspiration or hubris licenses me to pass off my deck as a legitimate contribution to the tradition?
First, let me present a note about tarot structure. Tarot decks are composed of two classes of cards: Major and Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana, or trump cards, though fewer in number, are by far the most famous images. With titles like The Emperor, Death, Judgment, or The Tower, these cards contain potent symbols that rise to the level of psychological archetypes. They have always been fully articulated, and their compositions have changed from deck to deck only slowly across centuries. The Minor Arcana, however, are in form almost exactly like a deck of playing cards, containing four suits with ten numbered cards and four court cards each. Until the famous Rider Tarot deck’s publication a hundred years ago, the illustration of these cards was limited to just the suit and the number. The Rider Tarot’s illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith, was the first to introduce a rich world of allegorical imagery for these cards. Before Smith’s work, interpretation of the minor arcana was based on the association of each suit with one of the four classical elements: earth,air, fire, and water. Each sequential card was also layered with numerological meaning; thus, the same number of every suit traditionally all shared a similar character.
For Singularity Tarot, I adhered almost completely to the traditional compositions and meanings of the Major Arcana. These images have the longest visual tradition and are most deeply rooted in syncretic religious and mythological ideas. Where I deviated, I tended to do so only in a layering of additional concepts on top of accepted convention. I also kept the name of all the suits of the Minor Arcana the same: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. Using the elemental association of each suit - Fire/Will, Water/Emotion, Air/Mind, and Earth/Body - I chose a corresponding field of futuristic human evolution. Fire was associated with neo-primitivism; water with spiritual transcendence; air with cybernetics; earth with biotechnology. These correspondences formed the thematic foundation of all the imagery I created. As for the meaning of numbers, I made no effort to align my cards with any specific numerological tradition. Though I have warmed up to numerology through the process of making this deck, my attitude about its power is that it either exists or it does not. If quantities really have qualitative attributes, any artistic composition containing that quantity will reflect its quality. I saw no reason to impose numerological significance that was not naturally there.
Singularity Tarot’s biggest departure from tradition is therefore in the Minor Arcana. The imagery and interpretation of these cards bears only surface similarity with other decks. Since the Minor Arcana number fifty-six cards out of a deck’s total seventy-eight, my deck may for many seasoned tarot users feel like stepping into an alien world. This may be disorienting for people who turn to tarot especially in times of uncertainty or even personal crisis. But the goal of Singularity Tarot is to engage with cultural and theoretical ideas about the future, and the future looks to be an unsettling place. Dealing with the anxiety the future instills requires looking at it head on. Black holes, cyborgs, genetic engineering, civilizational collapse, fusion energy, planetary colonization: these futuristic ideas are proliferating on the collective landscape of the human psyche. Singularity Tarot tries to draw them into the present to help users process what future they may be working toward.
I am not a scholar of the occult, and I don’t claim any particular expertise about the tarot. I began this project in ignorance of many important metaphysical facets of tarot tradition, and toward some I held overt skepticism. I was just an artist following my inspiration and my belief in the power of symbols. If I had required rigorous expertise and certainty of myself, I would have never started to compose my first card (which was The Fool, by the way). Making this deck was my method of learning what little I know about tarot.
My philosophy of the tarot is the same as my philosophy of reality; both function as they do because of the consensus of conscious beings. Both magic and art are aimed at changing the character and content of consciousness. Tradition and structure are important in the tarot but so is change. When Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the Rider Tarot, she did so under the “instruction” of occultist and Golden Dawn member Alfred Waite. However, for the Minor Arcana, the imagery was left largely to her own discretion. In other words, she followed her artistic inspiration. In other words, she made it up. I do not claim to be making a contribution to tarot on equal footing with the venerable Ms Smith, I’m just trying to follow in her footsteps.