Timothy Leary, Ph. D.'s Game of Life Tarot

[sKenn]

(I think) i uploaded a virtual rough draft of a tarot deck to accompany the book The Game of Life (New Falcon Publications, ISBN 1-56184-050-5) by Timothy Leary, Ph. D. (with considerable work also by Robert Anton Wilson). As far as i know Leary never created an actual deck though he revised the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith trumps and used them to represent progressive stages within his theory of neurogenetic evolution in his book. He barely mentioned the minor arcana with the exception of the tarot courts which he revised using illustrations of the King, Queen and Jack from more traditional playing cards and replaced the Page (or Princess in Crowley's deck) with Jill. I took liberty to extend his exposition of the major arcana by creating a minor arcana using the illustrations based on their associated nuerogenetic circuit. Since i now had a minor arcana to work with i also took the liberty of stripping the borders of the illustrations of the trumps with their minor arcana symbols which Leary had used to mark the first 12 trumps (0 Fool through XI Justice) as terrestrial and the remaining 10 trumps (XII Hanged Man through 21 The Universe) as extra-terrestrial or universal.

I consider this a rough draft or working copy and apologize for the unprofessional and unrefined nature of the deck.

Anyone wishing to discuss The Game of Life, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, and the ideas involved in this tarot deck feel free to email me.


Kenn