As promised in my previous post on the topic, here I will break down how I organized my personal deck inspired by Sakura Kinomoto’s cards throughout Cardcaptor Sakura and Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Arc and what creatively liberties I took in order to ensure the most complete representation of the various card fairies depicted in these works.
I hope that by sharing this process you can start thinking about how you would formulate your own cartomancy system!
This post is part of my Magi Praxis series. If you have any suggestions for future topics, or you have attempted anything I have shared and want you share your experiences, please send me a message! I am always happy to go back and provide further explanation as well. ☆
When creating this particular deck, not only did I want to have a non-dogmatic framework to build off of, but I found this was the perfect opportunity to immerse myself further into a system I have been helping my partner cultivate and improve over the last several years. You can find their work outlined here.
Emanant Void Magick is a meta-magick system developed by deconstructing, extracting, and recontextualizing concepts from chaos magick and Hermetic Qabalah. Where groups like the Golden Dawn used Qabalah to interpret, deform, and bind unrelated systems of magick into a single syncretic monolith, the explorations of Emanant Void Magick instead seek to merely provide tools to generate new systems: rather than imposing structure through dogma, Emanant Void Magick provides the magician with building materials with which they are free to innovate.
Like Qabalah, Emanant Qabalah maps out a sort of creation story for reality but, unlike traditional Qabalah, proposes that each step of manifestation is itself a complete whole and that manifestation does not stop at the manifest, Malkuth, and now moves beyond manifestation to incorporate postmodern philosophy and metaphysics.
Emanant Qabalah provides twelve steps of manifestations, each grown from the Void or Non-Being and organically emerging from the previous iteration. Of these, the seventh, ninth, and twelfth steps have a particular property of being in the form that can be “walked” in what in mathematics is called a “Eulerian trail”: in this, each path of the tree is crossed only once and all paths are touched while traversing from the first to the final sphere.
Qabalah is of particular interest to cartomancy since Éliphas Lévi connected the meaning of the Tarot to the Qabalah and the Tree of Life. In Tarot, the sequence of trumps is associated with the “Fool’s Journey”, connecting the meaning of each card in a sequence. The Eulerian trails of Seventh, Ninth, and Twelfth Trees also provide clear associations for the Fool’s Journey while also suggesting novel systems of divination inspired by this structure. Eventually, the plan is to complete a 93-card deck that illustrates the full 12-sphere tree but the 42-card system I developed and prototyped was a major undertaking in itself.
As I mentioned previously, I tend to refer to my deck as Lenormand Plus™: at 42 cards, this deck is significantly smaller than a standard Tarot deck and slightly larger than the traditional Lenormand. While the organizational structure is heavily inspired by Tarot, I was inspired by how Lenormand is read—with the goal in mind to ultimately read my cards in a Grande Tableau—but I also wanted a system that could easily utilized for smaller, more utilitarian/traditional readings and pathworkings.
For the purposes of this deck, I utilized an iteration of the Emanant Qabalah Tree up to the 7th sphere, the point where the Self (the Agents) encounters the Other (the Knaves).
The Agents correspond to the sixth sphere. These cards represent aspects of the Self. There are four representations, one for each of the elements, and Cardcaptor Sakura fans will recognize these cards as Windy, Watery, Firey, and Earthy. The Agents tend to be very straightforward and forthcoming but like all of the card fairies they can be mischievous when left to their own devices.
The Knaves correspond to the seventh sphere and represent the Other. There are four elemental representations for these cards as well and can be viewed as shadows of the Agents or obstacles the magician can encounter—whether that is another person, an event, or a concept. The Knaves are Struggle (Fire), Through (Air), Rain* (Water), and Wood (Earth). Unlike the Agents, the Knaves have more of a trickster energy as their purpose is to challenge the magician.
* Note: This is where some of my creative license starts coming into play, in terms of which cards I ultimately decided to depict. There are several cards in this deck that contain influences from two or more of Sakura-chan’s cards throughout her magical journey. For example, my Rain card includes aspects of Storm and Snow.
The elemental suits are organized like so:
This is probably where most of the consolidation in terms of card representations takes place. When I have documented readings I have done with these cards on my blog, I tend to acknowledge when individual cards contain aspects of more than one of the card fairies from the source materials.
Then we have the Path cards. These are most similar to the trumps or the Major Arcana of a traditional Tarot deck and even though I used the Emanant Qabalah system, it follows the traditional Fool’s Journey incredibly well (up to the representation of Death). There path cards are as follows:
0. Song (The Fool)
I. Silent (The Magus/Magician)
II. Repair (The High Priestess)
III. Flower (The Empress)
IV. Sword (The Emperor)
V. Light (The Hierophant)
IV. Sweet (The Lovers)
VII. Move (The Chariot)
VIII. Libra (Justice)
IX. Dark (The Hermit)
X. Shot (Wheel of Fortune)
XI. Shield (Strength)
XII. Seige (The Hanged Man)
XIII. Shadow (Death)
And that’s how I organized my personal deck! While I took a lot of time and consideration into creating this structure, I am continually surprised and humbled by how the cards decide to manifest in my daily life and practice. With time they only become more nuanced and powerful and it has been an absolute joy to work with them! ☆
I know I didn’t jinx the shutdown of the CBBC channel by saying that live action people are the worst, comparing their Cartoon Song to 4Kids licensed cartoon characters singing the American national anthem. The sweet spot of birth just happens to be 1988 for me.
