Mr. Timothy Lantz is the very creative artist who brought the tarot
world the very interesting and attractive Archeon Tarot deck in 2004.
He took some time to answer questions for us in this exclusive Witches
Codex interview. Here is a snip:
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Q: How did you get into the Tarot in the first place? And how did you
come about in 2004 to decide to do your own deck?
Tarot is one of those things that was always a fascination. The
initial draw for me was probably the artwork and just the whole
mystery of it all. My first deck was a Rider Waite. I bought it when I
was still in high school, but beyond some cursory exploration I never
really did much with it. Eventually, I lent it to a friend who let his
girlfriend use it and it moved away with her to California and I never
saw it again. LOL
How the Archeon came about is a story I've told a few times. I tend to
spend a lot of time on the internet, at work and at home, and
consequentially I see a lot of art and read about a lot of artists.
Online, it seems there is no shortage of artists working on their own
personal interpretations of the tarot. One artist in particular was
showing off their latest version of the Major Arcana and well, I
really didn't care for what I saw. Their version of The Moon
especially didn't work for me and I started thinking, "How would I do
that? What would MY version of The Moon look like?" So, I started with
that one card. I made a decent enough stab at it, and that was going
to be it. When I showed it to several of my friends, the feedback was
amazing. So much encouragement and positive feedback really spurred me
on to try a few more. At most, I had planned to maybe just do the
Major Arcana. However, by the time I had seven or so finished, I was
hooked. The combination of research, learning the tarot system and
then trying to distill it all into a visual medium was a fantastic
challenge and really just ignited a passion in me.
Q: The Devil card; you eliminated the classic bound male/female figure
and (inverted) pentagram from your final version. Could you explain
why you did such and the process you went though designing the devil
card?
I've always thought that old devil image was lame and again there's
that pentacle that I didn't want in my deck. I understand the
traditional meaning behind that image, but really I just always felt
it was kind of immature and perhaps too rooted in the Christian
mythos.
In my opinion, the Devil isn't some external boogey man. He's that
tiny voice inside your brain, saying "go ahead, have that second piece
of cake." So keeping with that idea, I tried to make him look a little
more like a satyr to kind of imply that whole indulgence aspect, while
still retaining some of the elements that traditionally symbolize the
devil.
Full interview:
http://www.witchescodex.net/Articles/Interviews/tabid/63/Default.aspx
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