Strange Attractor - The Austin Osman Spare Tarot

I have not been picking up esoterica for very long. Year and a half, basically, and I’m somewhat eclectic with it – not really focusing on a single area of the strange, because I’m one of those annoying people who feels like it’s all interconnected – difference lenses through which we view the same phenomenon. As is probably made abundantly clear by this Substack, one of those facts that gets a fair amount of attention from me is cards, and the different ways you can utilize them. Probably this comes from 30 years of playing Magic: The Gathering.

One piece of esoterica I am glad to have acquired is the Austin Osman Spare Tarot, from Strange Attractor. It’s a very high-quality direct reproduction of AOS’s personal custom tarot. I feel very fortunate to have a copy, as it was a limited print, and I found out about it after the official crowdfunding ended – they were kind enough to let me in anyway.  The art is amazing, it has personal notes about cards and meanings – including things that change the meaning if they’re beside other cards – and any number of eccentricities. Looking through the cards honestly feels like looking at another person’s state of mind decades later. It also is worth mentioning that this deck is not anything that has been mass produced until now - it is, very much, a high copy facsimile of something very personal to Spare.

Strange Attractor has a companion to the deck called Lost Envoy, and it is amazingly detailed.

The deck’s booklet suggests using AOS’s personal spread, which is… reading the entire deck. Wild.

Spare is one of the most interesting occult artists out there. There is an EXCELLNT biography on him by Phil Baker that I would suggest to anyone with even a passing interest in these topics. A pioneer in sigils and chaos magick, Spare is an important figure in esoterica.