Lessons learned from the Crowdsourced Tarot Project.

It all started when my internet friend who lives in Mexico posted a photo of herself. She’s holding a giant rosary cross, with beads the size of melons, standing at a Mexican bus stop next to a giant rock wall. She called the photo ‘The Bus Stations of the Cross.”  I laughed and told her she looked like a rendition of some Tarot card.  The Hierophant perhaps.

This started a conversation that spanned a few nights…but then I got a wild idea in a year of wild ideas: What if we asked 78 different people to submit a picture for the tarot cards? What would that look like, on the ground, running?

Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good community project. I put my brain to it and thought about nuts and bolts. Excel spreadsheet? Great idea. Google Drive for images? Yes, indeed. Get an idea on the printing costs? Not prohibitive. Ready to go!

And then I put my brain to it and thought about human nature. I knew that the major arcana would be claimed over most other cards, so I came up with a system to assign cards to people on a first-come-first-served basis. Then I turned this idea loose on ALL my social media platforms.

My friends on Reddit and Discord and Imgur were thrilled to get involved. I found friends in person in my community who don’t even do social media but could take the picture. Members of my family took on at least 7 different cards. There are people who submitted cards who I have had only one interaction with before this. It didn’t matter. This project was taking on a life of it’s own.

Whatever anyone submitted, I accepted it as absolutely fine. No judgement, and no requests for changes other than mechanical issues like removing words or borders. I actually feared the worst, as I know what some people consider art. But those fears were unfounded.

Late at night when the household was asleep, I would use my wind-down time to organize the photos and herd the cats. When I was down to the last handful of cards to be assigned, I turned to a few friends who had made offers to fill in the cards that were forgotten. Thanks to a spiritual brother and a biological sister, I got the last few numbered cards handled.

What I learned was that the tarot cards would come to life in the hands of the people who accepted these roles. I took the High Priestess card myself, as this was the role I was playing in the deck.

Two of the Knights were images I went looking for. I’m partial to having horses in my knights, so I looked into photo albums of my friends who do horse things.  

The Hanged Man was dropped, picked up, dropped again. I went on Facebook to ask for submissions…and it was changed again. The whole time I was thinking of another one I liked, questioning my choice. Such is the lesson of the Hanged Man. I believe the issue is settled.

The 9 of Wands was quite the bitch. It was assigned three times and nobody was able to make it work. Finally, I assigned the card to the Midjourney Artificial Intelligence Art Robot. That way, no human had to deal with its repercussions.

The 10 of swords was a group project and we had to track down the original image and then we had to fiddle with that a thousand times,…and such is the 10 of Swords. The Ace of Swords required an epic trip up to Mt. St. Helens, which I didn’t expect, but of course, I should have. The 9 of Cups required the artist to wait for the flowers to actually bloom. Patience…ah yeah. The Wheel of Fortune was the very last card submitted, after the artist attempted to get her hands on several different types of wheels. The last one was the easiest one for her to find after all.

I then took the finished project and posted about it, again on my social media outlets. People who were never involved in the first part of the project are now ordering copies of the deck and waiting for a chance to get involved in a future project. It seems that I need to order more decks than there are cards assigned to it.

So the lessons learned for me is that all images should be submitted in Portrait, no Landscape orientation, and in 300 dpi. Also, I should use the simplest of programs to make it work, not the most complicated. Next time, we will also ask for submissions for the back of the deck: this one was made by the Midjourney bot as well, as a last minute idea. If I ever herd these cats again, I know what to do differently.

It blows my mind to think that this whole project started because one person, an internet friend in Mexico whom I have never met in person, posted a photo of herself in an interesting situation and was kind enough to help me engage in this creative act. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, is the only way to solve any problems.

In my role as Priestess to a community, I find that following my instinct to create community projects is also important in this time where hate is trying to overcome kindness. When a project contains creativity, spiritual reminders, and community input, how can it not be put into the world to help combat it’s opposition?

Thank you for participating in our experiment.