24 November 2010

A.E. Thierens Tarot

This one is one of the oldest esoteric tarots in my collection, printed in the 1930ies (I have no precise date but I presume it would have been printed around the same period as A.E. Thierens book  now in English as 'General Book of the Tarot' was printed)


Despite his age this tarot has many modern elements and also one of the first to attribute different people to each of the minor arcana's for example the cups are represented by mermaids and the swords by dwarfs. Thierens who was a  Dutch officer in the Royal Marines, an astrologer (he is seen as the founder of the modern astrology in the Netherlands) and esoteric author  redesigned the associations of the cards in a way different to Waite (of whom he seems to have picked up some info) and of the Order of the Golden Dawn, yet some of his influences are said to been the Theosophical movement.
One example of the changes he made in the majors is that he assigned the zodiac signs to the first twelve and planets to the remaining ten.

2 comments:

  1. Stefan,

    Love this deck - and am so enjoying your blog. Do you have any particular favorites in your collection? With so many rare and wonderful decks, it seems like it would be hard to choose.

    That would be an interesting post to read, if you haven't written something like that already.

    With kind thoughts,
    Alec

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  2. Hi Mr. La Luna. I try to get in touch with you through email but it seems to be impossible via this blog. I would like to ask you some questions about these cards. My name is Claudia van der Sluis, I am a Dutch writer (Het grote boek van de Maan.)
    How can we arrange this contact?
    Warm regards,
    Claudia van der Sluis (also available on facebook)

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