This year I had the blessing of having my 3-year creation, a hand drawn pack of cards, published by Hadean Press, Cyprian’s deck of cards. The shipping for the decks has begun, and I’ve been in conversation with several people about the same. Briefly, the deck comes in a tin case, for ease of portability, with a small little pamphlet I wrote inside, which includes an historiola.* I kept the pamphlet and descriptions for the cards minimal, because I wanted the reader to engage with the cards on their own terms, within their own context, that is the reader in their context with the cards and the world they paint. Yet. I’d like to expand a little on the cards. This piece here will serve as a complement to the cards in the deck.

As mentioned in the booklet: “The illustrated cards sit within a narrative of an imaginal landscape, which is both rural and vaguely urban.” This is to say that that the cards arise within a particular imagined terrain and together they tell a story. Namely, each suit paints a different part of this terrain, the climate, flora, fauna, peoples, the locality, and the aesthetics.

Starting from within, the suit of cups discloses and elaborates on that which is “within;” the home, the inner world within 4 walls, the hearth. Therefore it talks about matters close to the heart, blood, water, love, emotions. All the images contained in this suit occur within the home, the four cups.

In contrast, the suit of batons paints to world outside these four walls, outside our comforts, and stability. It is the outer world, the skies, the seas, the land, of phenomena that is on a grander scale to our individual human lives. It points toward matters that lie beyond our own individual human agency, of wedding plans dampened because a storm has hit the coast. Of unexpected encounters beyond the boundaries of comfort, and discovered cave treasures. There is variability in this suit. All the images in this suit display happenings in the outer world, what a person encounters outside their house.

It all starts to mesh, weave together, with the suits of coins and swords. Both these suits dance in two worlds, the world within the four walls, the home, and the world outside the comforts and security of home. As I say in the booklet, “The transactions, commitments, the gains and losses, the adventures and misadventures, risks, favors and disfavors.” These suits can be thought of as the mediators between the inner and outer, both in a material and a metaphorical sense. Here the images will be mixed, both occurring within the house and outside or around the house. We find matters of work, the daily doings, comings and goings. The illustrations are situated within both a small and a big. Objects that can be taken outside, places found outside the home, I guess one could consider these two suits as liminal.

As for scale, in keeping with the contrast of both inner and outer worlds, that which is found in the home is illustrated through smaller objects, which can be held close to the body. The fully outer dimension (batons) is beyond an individual’s grasp, it speaks of the living cosmos doing it’s living, where we find ourselves navigating different places. Comfort and security is not the focus here.

Lastly, I want to mention an obvious or perhaps not so obvious detail, numberings and keywords. It is my particular preference not to have numbers in cards, and yes that includes playing cards, that is when I’m using the deck for telling fortunes. At first instance, that is as soon as I lay down the cards, I prefer to look at shapes and patterns arising from the cards on the table when I read them to answer a question. If it happens that I need to know quantity I can always count the suits on the card/s. So I opted to keep the insets unnumbered. Same goes with keywords.

To begin tying the knot on this first part of talking about Cyprian’s deck, I will add a few more words. There are many ways of acquainting oneself with a card deck for fortunetelling, both a long and a short way. We can make our way about the cards, looking for patterns, and building from there a bigger picture, seeking to construct the greater meaning behind the deck itself.

When I look at the card meanings in the Cyprianic booklets, I find that what is cohesive, or patterned about them is that the fortuneteller constructs the meanings for each of the cards from their context out. That is, within whatever context they live in and how they engage with the tools presented in the deck, batons, spades, etc. The reader brings with them what these tools mean to their understanding of the cards. Meaning always arises out of context, so in a paradoxical way, card meanings are arbitrary. Yet they are also not arbitrary because these are the meanings that arose through engagement(relation) and this is the understanding the fortuneteller and the cards cohere around. Each fortuneteller brings their own experience, worldview, context, and landscape, the world they live in, to the table.

This is why when taken as a whole, the Cyprian booklets on cartomancy reveal a personal view of the cards meanings, ever-changing, with only a few recurring meanings through some of the suits. Since I am first a storyteller, I had a desire to conjure a deck with a cohesive inner story, one which would play out in 40 cards, the Spanish brisca. One that brings these tools into a more tangible narrative within a landscape, a place.

I will pause here for now while I think with the second part of this elaboration of Cyprian’s deck.

*A note on the historiola, this little story is important. In an intimate way, this deck is a work of time enchantment. Meaning, I sought to conjure a Cyprianic deck from the lost annals of time. To emplace a deck that maybe existed and bring it into contemporaneous hands. It was a work of creating a portal of time to conjure this deck and bring it to life anew. So the historiola is deeply linked with the deck, it’s intimate and hidden story. This deck is an act of treasure hunting and finding.

~Deck used is the prototype for Cyprian’s deck.