Upon a recent read-through of The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume II, by Stuart Kaplan, I spotted a deck on page 337 with a similarly unusual ordering of the cards, particularly The Fool, who appears on card XV (see photo below). The High Priest and High Priestess appear as cards II & III, while the Emperor and Empress (called The King and The Queen) appear as cards IV & V. Also unusual is the fact that The Moon card features a stag, a bird, and a bull, rather than the traditional pair of dogs (photo available in Volume II of T.E.o.T.). The deck is called Le Grandprêtre Tarot and is listed as being in the possession of the United States Playing Card Company Museum.

This discovery gives me some hope that the Masque of the Red Death cards may have come from an existing deck, rather than having been created by the art department for the movie. Based on what I have been able to find out so far, the museum appears to no longer be in operation. This is unfortunate because their collection of cards was reported to span at least 500 years and to contain many unusual decks from around the world. They may have been able to assist in identifying the Red Death cards.

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Last edited on Thu Aug 26th, 2021 11:32 pm by Marcus