More Sunday Notes (11.20.22)
Return of the crazy quilt . . .
Welcome to new subscribers! If you haven’t yet, please browse around the EP archives, and/or take one of the guided tours:
A Quick Tour of the Exploration Project (A thematic view of EP content)
Tarot in Literature, Media, and the Visual Arts (EP stories focused on creativity)
2021: A Retrospective (My favorite EP posts last year)
You might also have a look at these previous “crazy quilt” posts:
For today’s assortment of topics, I offer news of a Pamela Colman Smith museum exhibition, a fascinating look at origins of the Hoi Polloi Tarot, and some surprising survey results about Gen Z and the practice of divination.
Pixie at the Whitney
“The Whitney” is certainly one of the most prestigious museums in America—famous for its Biennial, which showcases (in alternating years) the most adventurous, cutting-edge trends in the art world. Between those events, it offers exhibitions that range across many aspects of American art.
This year, a sprawling exhibition titled:
It “showcases art produced between 1900 and 1930 by well-known American modernists and their now largely forgotten, but equally groundbreaking peers.” And in the latter category (forgotten but groundbreaking) they have included Tarot icon Pamela Colman Smith.
Of course Smith—nicknamed “Pixie” for her impishly eccentric personal style—is now well known to anyone with an interest in Tarot history. But that wasn’t always the case. Until fairly recently, the deck she created was referred to as the “Rider-Waite,” named for its publisher (The Rider Company) and its presumed theorist, the occultist Arthur Edward Waite.
For more about Waite, and this period in Tarot history, you can visit one of my revised chapters from The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore. However, the key here is that Smith is now recognized not only for her evocative illustrations, but also for major contributions to the conceptual content of the world’s best-known Tarot deck.
And despite the fact that she produced a great many other works, it’s Tarot that landed Pixie at the Whitney. Leading to this story at the Religion News Service (RNS):
For the record, RNS is a smart and very wide-ranging resource, so give it a browse.
If you’d like to know more about Smith, there are summaries at Hyperallergic and Artnet. And for the long version, Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story—a lavish volume helmed by Stuart Kaplan.
PS: Although I try not to belabor numerical synchronies . . . can’t help pointing out that there are 22 artists represented in the Whitney exhibition.
Deck Detective
Long story about why the Hoi Polloi Tarot popped into my head, but I’ll save it til another time. For now—I’ll turn the spotlight on this account by blogger “Melissa Zupan.”
That was her assumed craft name at the time of writing this post, which offers just the kind of deep dive I like to come across . . .
The article begins like this:
In 1972, The Hoi Polloi, Inc. company began publishing a tarot deck that was unlike any other up to that point. It wasn’t a deck that emulated an older art style or tried to look like it was out of the 1500s. It embraced the study in contradiction that defined the ’70s aesthetic: a balance of drab earth tones and campy colors, nature-loving hippiedom and high-tech futurism, austerity and decadence. Its contemporary harvest golds and neon pinks colored Pamela Coleman Smith’s ‘medieval’ universe, and it threw Victorian Gothic lettering into moddish title lozenges. And then, unlike any tarot producer up to that point, Hoi Polloi marketed their mishmash deck as a game instead of a divination tool and put it in department stores all over the country alongside Old Maid and Uno cards. Their deck was poised to become the classic tarot deck in the American cultural subconscious.
And continues . . .
But instead, Hoi Polloi’s deck, The Tarot, sold well through the mid 1980s in three different packaging variations, and then it entirely disappeared. Today, little is known about why the deck was created, who created it, or why it quietly exited the marketplace. Other popular decks of the early 1970s, like U.S. Games’s The Rider Tarot and Frankie Albano’s The Albano-Waite Tarot, have remained staple decks in Tarot culture. Others, like University Books deck and the bootlegs of it printed by Merrimack Publishing and B. Shackman faded from production as the companies were bought or folded, but they still remained a discussed and valued part of tarot history. But the Hoi Polloi deck went the way of avocado colored kitchen appliances and pink toilets: a collective fad barely to be remembered and never to be repeated.
So Melissa set out to discover the origins and explain the fate of this curious deck. You can go along with her to find out how a Harvard-trained, market-savvy entrepreneur brought Tarot and astrology into the world of pop culture board games.
Unfortunately, that was the last post on her blog, and the only one about Tarot. But there are interesting stories about her “personal exploration of Wiccan spirituality.” This is an area I know too little about, so I enjoyed browsing her posts.
Believe It or Not . . .
The Springtide Research Institute has recently become a much-quoted source of information about the religious and spiritual interests of the “Gen Z” cohort. Findings from their surveys (both quantitative and qualitative) of fairly large sample groups, have been published in a wide-ranging series of reports.
Here are a couple of relevant snapshots:
Springtide’s survey showed that 51% of its sample population, ages 13 to 25, engage in “tarot cards or fortunetelling.” Of that percentage, 17% practice daily, 25% once a week, 27% once a month and 31% less than once a month.
According to Springtide’s report, divination practices are most popular among young people who identify as Russian or Greek Orthodox (78.1%), Mormon (69.4%) or Jewish (62.1%). Atheists had the lowest interest in metaphysical-adjacent practices at 34.4%, followed closely by those identifying with no particular faith tradition.
The numbers shift when daily or weekly practitioners of tarot and other fortunetelling arts are separated out from those who only dabble. In these cases, Orthodox youths still rank at the top at 38.8%, followed closely by those identifying as Muslim (34.6%) or Mormon (37.7%).
I’m still deciding whether this information seems credible—and what it might mean, if true. So I’ll follow up on the topic in another post. In the meantime, if any EP readers have insight into Gen Z divination practices, I’d love to hear!
Of course I won’t be able to resist posting on 11/22, and plan to share (among other things) a few updates on my projects-in-progress.
See you then. C