Danse Macabre: Caught in a Rapturous Dance with Death.
Our new Danse Macabre card continues an old tradition of Memento Mori imagery The tradition of Danse Macabre pictures (known as Dance of Death in English or Totentanz in German) dates to the European late Middle Ages, with its earliest manifestations appearing in the form of murals, manuscripts, and…
Cats are faithless but dogs are trustworthy? A new look at Bohemian fortune telling
Our Bohemian Fortune Telling cards do show a cat for “Falsehood”. But not in the traditional way. Falseness and Faithfulness are one of the pairs of cards that are nearly always seen in the Central European/Bohemian fortune telling card system. Falseness is commonly the Fox that we see in…
Mercury’s Fortune Telling Cards
This fortune telling deck – from the city that is now Lviv, in Ukraine – is one of our favourite historical “fortune telling cards” decks. We’ve painstakingly restored the original images and added cold-stamping to make this a unique fusion of old and new. This is a distinct type…
Our Bohemian Fortune Telling cards – a fresh look at an old tradition
In 2023, we published The Bohemian Fortune Telling Cards – a deck created by us which follows a system that we were very familiar with during our time in Prague. Often called “gypsy cards”, in Czech these are usually known just as “vykladaci karty”, which can be loosely translated as “cards for…
