Toward Ecosophy

My wife Sara was looking up Tarot decks online earlier this evening, with  an eye toward helping a correspondent choose a suitable deck, and suddenly started laughing in that curious way that signals a certain amount of, well, existential dread. Or something. 

She had just encountered, for the first time, the Kilted Rubber Chicken Tarot. Yes, you read that correctly, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a tarot deck in which each card includes a rubber chicken wearing a Scottish kilt. 

I consider this an omen, and not especially a favorable one, but to explain it a few words about the history of the tarot in America might be in order. 

Back in the dawn of time, when dinosaurs stalked the earth -- we're talking the mid-1970s here -- you had your choice, if you were lucky, among four different tarot decks in the United States. You could get a badly colored knockoff of the Waite-Smith (aka Rider-Waite) deck; you could get the IJJ Swiss tarot; you could get the Marseilles tarot; and you could get a thing called the Tarot of the Witches, which was cooked up for a James Bond flick and got into circulation thereafter. That was it. It wasn't because there was some kind of embargo on tarot cards; it was because the demand was so low that this was all there was a market for. 

I recall with some fondness when a good clear reproduction of the Waite-Smith deck got into print -- I snapped one up -- and even more fondly the appearance of David Palladini's Aquarian tarot, which I used for many years. Then the floodgates opened, and tarot decks began piling up at an astonishing pace. There are now tens of thousands of decks in circulation, and one of them has rubber chickens in Scottish kilts. 

I have nothing against rubber chickens in kilts, but I suspect the great tarot boom that kicked off in my teen years may finally have jumped the shark. If you have favorite tarot decks that are on the exotic side -- say, anything other than the Waite-Smith or a few dozen others of the more popular decks -- you might want to pick up a second copy and stash it somewhere, as the decade or so to come may see a lot of decks drop permanently out of print.