78 Card Pick-Up

OK, I have been absent from the blogosphere.

Sorry.

I have been beset by 2 things since the end of November: the flu, which despite  vaccinations for both it and pneumonia (the latter which I seem to barely have avoided by the sweet intervention of Kaiser Permanente, which in its good graces did not let me put off coming in to see a doctor) has laid me low off and on since the first day of Loscon, and the blessed persistence of my Muse.

After more than two decades, my part in producing a new Tarot deck has gone to the next step: the artist.

I was fortunate enough to meet my counterpart, the wonderful Holly DeFount, at Pantheacon over Presidents' Day Weekend in San Jose, California.  My publisher, Peter Paddon of Pendraig Publishing had decided we were a match and within days of my sending the written versions of the cards to him, he had transmitted the same to her.  She is presently soaking up all nine of the so-far published novels of The Glastonbury Chronicles and  Tales of the Dearg-Sidhe in preparation for the harrowing task of actually illustrating them.  The Tarot of the Sword and Rose will take a couple of years to illustrate, but I am so very excited at the prospect of actually sitting down with them in my hands to do a reading, I am willing to wait as long as it takes.

A little background:

I started the deck before I started the books, but not long before, based upon the experiences I have had as a Tarot  reader since 1967 and the tradition my spiritual path has followed.  When the books began to manifest in the early 1990s, it became plain that the two dovetailed and that as the unconscious backgrounds of the tradition fed the novels, so did the novels bring forth the symbolism necessary for the cards.  They are based upon a pan-Celtic mythology, folklore of the British Isles, history, and characters and situations in the novels.  I had put even the notion of doing the deck for years until in Volume IV of The Glastonbury Chronicles, "The Rose Above The Sword", the tarot cards manifested and became an important plot device, a manner in which forbidden history, lore and religion could be kept alive in symbols which only a few could read and pass down through the generations until it was possible for them to resurface to the public.

For several weeks between my appearance at Loscon and Pantheacon I was awakened in the middle of the night with symbols, pictures and instructions from that same Dark Muse who regularly rouses me from sleep to write the novels, only this time it was in a frenzy with some deadline I did not understand...the deadline which turned out to be getting them to Peter in tome for him to get them to Holly so we could meet at Panntheacon.

Now that the actual descriptive writing is done, I have a bit of leisure during which I plan to do a series of pathworkings or guided meditations to go with the major arcana, hopefully to  be released as a set of CDs to go with the cards and their book.  I have a lot of time, so the rush is not going to be nearly as intense.  The first one is already finished...only 77 to go.

Meanwhile, Mercury is retrograde, I am still recovering from the flu that the flu shot did not seem to cover, and I need to get some sleep.

Be well, all.