papoon
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| Joined: | Mon Apr 7th, 2008 |
| Location: | California USA |
| Posts: | 499 |
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Picked up this rather interesting French deck set, which, despite the name, has absolutely nothing to do with tarot. Nonetheless, I was attracted both by the art and by the fact that it was published (in 1994) by Albin Michel, the same company that published the French translation of my wife's novel, Rocket City. (And yes, that's a shameless plug, but I'd recommend it as a wonderful book even if I weren't married to the author.)
The set consists of 138 fairly large cards divided into three sets of 46 cards each, categorized as Alliés, Risques, and Obstacles. Each card has an image on one side and text (presumably wise words about relationships) on the other. The images (different for every card) are by the artist Elfi Cella and appear to be pen and ink and water color, with every image containing at least one eye (the regard?) and one or more trees (fertile?). There is also a game-style board to serve as the base of a spread, and an accompanying booklet.
While it appears (to the extent that I can tell with my almost nonexistent French) to be presented as a divinatory tool for relationship issues, a closer examination leads me to believe that it is really a self-help book in card form. The author, Jacques Salomé, is a social psychologist specializing in the dynamics of relationships and has written many books on the subject.
Be that as it may, the really neat thing is the art. You'd think that faced with the task of coming up with 138 different images, all with eyes and trees, there'd be a lot of repetition. But actually, the art, while decidedly consistent in style, is delightfully varied in subject. In fact, the hardest part of this post was deciding just which of the 138 cards to scan. Here are a few selected to demonstrate (none too comprehensively) their variety (scanned at somewhat smaller than actual size):
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