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All decked out
Prague looks lustrous in a new tarot By Raymond Johnston Staff Writer, The Prague Post (October 9, 2003) Prague has often been called the Magic City, and not without reason. Occult and arcane arts have flourished practically since the city was founded. Under Rudolf II, alchemists, astrologers and fortunetellers all found a home here. There has been one notable absence: a set of Prague tarot cards. "It's been a tradition in Italy and France for cities to have tarot decks with local images," says graphic designer Karen Mahony. "I was surprised that Prague didn't have a deck." It does now, thanks to Mahony and Alex Ukolov, her colleague at Baba Studio, a local graphic design shop. They spent more than a year creating one from scratch -- finding appropriate images and symbols, designing each card anew and packaging the deck in gold ribbons with an accompanying English-language handbook. As much a work of art as a divining device, the deck mixes Baroque and Art Nouveau images taken from local buildings, monuments and murals. "We started with using real people on the cards," Mahony says. "The result looked kitsch and a bit crude." They regrouped, borrowed a better camera and started to scour the city's architecture for usable symbols. The results are magical, though Mahony is very down-to-earth about the tarot. The history section of the Prague tarot book eschews the cards' legendary trappings and traces them to a game similar to bridge, with four suits and trump cards, played in 15th-century Italy. Over the years, each card acquired an esoteric meaning that came to be illustrated in modern decks.
Mahony also has a practical take on tarot readings. "I think it is a sensible method of thinking things through, a visual form of therapy," she says. "If you read well, [the subject] does most of the work. [It's] rather like a good therapist would do." She doesn't completely discount the mystical possibilities, however, noting that certain ideas and themes recur for some people. "Nobody has a convincing explanation for that." Elusive images A lot of research went into selecting the right images for the Prague deck, with Mahony seeking advice from Internet tarot chat groups. One question involved a traditional element of the Moon card, a lobster. She asked online if that symbol was essential. The overwhelming answer was yes. She and Ukolov finally located a suitable crustacean on the facade of a house on Spalena ulice. One of Mahony's favorite images is of a nervous lion on the Two of Swords. He comes from a relief dating from 1714 on Dum u zlate studne (House of the Golden Well) on Karlova, near the Charles Bridge. "Many people think it is a modern image," Mahony says. "People don't realize that artists in the past also had a sense of humor." Some images Mahony and Ukolov felt they had to use, such as the statue of St. Jan Nepomucky on the Charles Bridge. "But we couldn't figure out where," Mahony says. "Finally it just clicked." The 10 of Pentacles traditionally features a man and a dog. On the base of the statue of St. Jan is a man and a dog that has been touched so often by tourists, it has become highly polished. The characters were incorporated into the card's setting, a street scene in front of the Castle. The final images on the cards are almost all composites. Assembling them was often difficult, starting with collecting individual elements. Many come from murals high above street level, which led Ukolov to some challenging photo assignments. "I had to ask people to let me in their flats so I could shoot some images from across the street," he says. Digital techniques had to be used to clean up many of the images. Even then, some were suitable only for backgrounds. Some statues had to be shot from different angles and digitally recomposed. "If you look at the original statue [from the Three of Wands], it is quite different," Ukolov says. Not only did he have to join three photos to create the perspective he wanted, but he also had to digitally remove layers of dirt from the image. The original statue -- a man and a bull -- is near a busy street and hasn't been cleaned in years. Other images among the thousands collected never got used. Among those that remain in the files are the Faust house, Romanesque rotundas and Vysehrad. All have nice historical associations but simply didn't fit any of the meanings of the cards. There were also several images the designers wanted but were not allowed to use. "There is a nice image of Libuse [a Czech mythical figure] in Obecni dum, but we weren't allowed to take a picture of it," says Mahony. Nor were they allowed to photograph an impressive mural in the grand ballroom at Troja, even though the room has been used as a movie set. The accompanying book explains the legends associated with the images, though Mahony is careful to draw a line between fact and fiction. After recounting a legend of three possessed violin players who vanish nightly to hell, she adds the more mundane explanation for the symbol of three violins on a house in Nerudova ulice: A family of violinmakers once lived there. Based on requests for copies of specific images, the most popular card so far is the Moon, portrayed as a female figure. While it is striking card, Mahony is surprised that people want it. "It has some slight negative connotations," she says. Bewilderment and strange dreams are among its meanings. Ukulov thinks the romantic setting, a view of the Vltava by moonlight, explains its popularity. Double death Most tarot decks have 78 cards. The Tarot of Prague has an extra, as Mahony and Ukolov were torn over which of two images to use for Death. They finally kept both -- one fairly gruesome and the other more sedate, with the choice left up to the user. "One person e-mailed us that they were using both Death cards," Mahony says. "That might lead to some pretty negative readings." While the card doesn't usually mean physical death, getting two of them dealt at once could be disconcerting, to say the least. Future printings will probably have only one Death. Another innovation of the Prague deck is that several of the traditionally male cards have been rendered androgynous. This gives women twice as many cards to identify with in certain kinds of readings. Mahony also invented a new spread, or method of reading, that can be used with the deck. "It's kind of a new tradition over the last 10 years," she says. "It's not as complicated as some of the classic spreads, and good for beginners." Her method plays on the idea that Praha might come from the word prah, meaning "threshold." The reading looks at factors involved in deciding to make a change, or cross a new threshold. The cards are already traveling the world via sales over the Internet. One buyer is a young girl in Hong Kong. "She e-mailed us that she wants to come to Prague because of the deck," Mahony says. "She says she sleeps with the deck by her pillow and dreams of Prague." For people who have lived here a long time, the images on the cards can make you open your eyes -- if not to possible predictions of the future, at least to the beauty of the Magic City.
Raymond Johnston can be reached at
rjohnston@praguepost.com
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