the AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE TAROTSo that black AOS monolith contains the most prized deck in my collection. I dunno how explicitly I've said this, but my personal esoteric path/craft is chaos magic. So, without getting into the weeds with Lore, I'll tl;dr it: Austin Osman Spare was a cool weird artist and occultist back in the day. Crowley noticed he was a cool weird artist and occultist, and invited him to do pretentious magic secret club stuff. AOS did this for a few years, but figured out Crowley was a pretentious turdhuffer, so he quit and invented chaos magic. The end.Ok, technically, Spare predates chaos magic by a couple decades, at least. But let's quote the ol' wikipedia here, from the Origins and Influences section on the wiki page for chaos magic:Austin Osman Spare's work in the early to mid 1900s is largely the source of chaos magical theory and practice.[13] Specifically, Spare developed the use of sigils and the use of gnosis to empower them.[14][15] Although Spare died before chaos magic emerged, he has been described as the "grandfather of chaos magic".[16] So yeah, Spare = Pretty Important to Cryptica's craft.And then I stumbled onto the crowdfunder to print replicas of his hand drawn tarot deck, which in 2013 was discovered in the collection of a museum for stage magic. This deck was made when Spare was around 20 years old, a few years before he met Crowley. It's got a standard structure, 22 card standard major arcana array, and all the normal cards in the four suits you'd expect, just marked with standard french-suited playing card suits. He wrote copious notes directly on the cards, and used a fascinating marginalia technique where certain cards match up and there's a picture that straddles across the two cards. The deck reproduction has the original cards backs individually reproduced as well, since there's 4 different colored backs (Though there doesn't seem to be a pattern in what cards have which color backs).So that black monolith box with the AOS monogram holds two books and the deck. The hardback book is Lost Envoy, a full color throughly exhaustive look at the deck itself, exploring pretty much every detail of the origin of the deck, and then cataloged the deck itself, with photos of each card, and complete transcripts of the exact text that appears on each card. The little grey book is actually two books, complete 180 degree back-to-back reprints of the two books Spare sourced his card meanings from.There was some sundry other ephemera available, like a bag, a pin, some postcards, but I only shelled out for the books and deck itself.I don't actually use this one, it's just for study, really.
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