And now...the end is near...

Visconti-Sforza Golden Tarot

Today's the very last day at my old job. Yesterday was my last day to be there for both opening and closing...today is the last day indeed. I won't be back for 12 months, and who knows what could happen in 12 months. It's possible I won't be back at all.

So who else could I draw but Mr Death?

My current job draws to a close. The current moon phase draws to a close (it's a new moon tomorrow). Mercury retrograde draws to a close (today's the last day!). It is a day of endings in many ways.

I like this Death card. He's not so much a skeleton as a dried up corpse. Eventually he'll be a skeleton...He wears a bandage around his head like some sort of martial arts competitor, but most likely they are the bandages of his winding sheets, the rags he was wrapped in for burial. It could also be a blindfold that he has pushed back off his eyes (or that has just slid off). The striped item he holds in his left hand could be a serpent or it could be the remains of a long bow. The wand in his right hand could be the remnants of an arrow, or it could be a riding crop...I believe they are a bow and arrow: Dal Negro.

For further reading on Death imagery: Death Takes a Grisly Shape.

Interesting iconography, and I can see the significance of the card for me today. But Death is only card number 13 in the trump sequence -- there are many cards to follow. So onward and upward!

With good comes right

Golden Tarot (Visconti-Sforza)

This week I will be drawing from the oldest decks in my collection: Visconti-Sforza, Tarot de Marseilles, Soprafino, and Rider-Waite Smith.

Today I've drawn the 3 of Coins from the Visconti-Sforza. It's the oldest almost-complete tarot known, painted for the Vistconti-Sforza family. Their family motto, 'A bon droyt' (With good, right), appears on many of the cards, particularly in the coins suit. The coins themselves are the sun from the Visconti-Sforza family crest.

The 3 of Coins often means team work to me, which makes perfect sense for today, because I will be working with two colleagues to  shortlist for two new members of staff. We will need to work quickly, efficiently and with a spirit of cooperation in order to get this task done in the allotted time, and of course the outcome of our work is very important. It's always vital to recruit the right people, even if the job is just a part time of very few hours a week doing relatively mundane tasks (which this is). You still need someone who can do the job and is reliable!

I quite like the Visconti-Sforza deck, and the Golden Tarot is a nice kit, but be warned. Some of them are printed crooked. Mine is one of the crooked ones. (This card is slightly crooked, some of them in my deck are very off-centre indeed!) Instead of an exchange, I settled on a refund, because I didn't want the hassle of possibly getting a second poorly printed one and having to go through the returns process again. The good folk at Book Depository let me keep the flawed copy, so I use it anyway. Though the crooked cards are quite off-putting I must admit, it is a nice deck to have in my collection, however flawed. :)