Tarot Helmets

Imagine driving through the city and seeing different tarot cards whizzing by you.  Would you see this as a message from the Divine?  Or visualize having the protection of the Emperor on your head while you dart through the mid-day traffic.  Would you feel protected? If artist Danielle Baskin has her way, we’ll get Tarot on our heads and on the move with her cool concept, The Human Tarot Project.

Danielle (that’s her in the picture above) creates beautiful hand painted bicycle helmets adorned with images from the Rider Waite deck.  She says this about the idea on her site:

“hopefully helmet-wearers can transport fragments of ancient wisdom and act as agents of pattern-perception for fellow pedestrians… forming a massive deck of cards shuffling in motion across cities.”

I was very intrigued with the concept so I did an interview with Danielle to learn more about these Tarot Helmets.  Here is what she had to say:

How did you get the idea to paint tarot cards on helmets?

Parrot earrings and a priori knowledge. While selling hand-painted helmets at a fashion fair in Brooklyn, an intuitive medium came across my table and I was immediately drawn to her earring of a small wooden parrot dangling inside a silver ring. I told her I liked her earring and she slipped into this story of why she wore it, which  traced back to her grandmother appearing in a dream where animals transfigured themselves into birds. I fell into that dreamworld then started talking to her for bit about her work as a professional seer. I asked her if she rode a bike and if she wanted a tarot card painted on a helmet in exchange for some knowledge about tarot and parapsychology. Effectively the idea flew into my mind or maybe I had the notion a while ago and it didn’t surface until then. I knew I really wanted to use the Rider-Waite deck. I got the idea to do the entire deck when looking at the image of the Magician card.

What has been your experience with tarot cards?

I started researching tarot cards about two years ago while I was studying psychology in college (at NYU) and writing an essay about the subadditivity effects of memory retrieval, illusory correlation, self-serving biases, and anchoring effects for a Cognition course: using fortune-telling tricks as a means to explain why one might really want to pay for psychic treatment rather than psychological counseling. I think I stumbled upon some images of tarot cards online. I was most attracted to the drawings, because I’m also an illustrator and the drawings seemed familiar. My interest in tarot is completely unrelated to everything I wrote in that essay (as I was only referring to the way con-artists might phrase things in order to get someone to believe them… like believability increasing with specificity of information but decreasing the accuracy of its likelihood) – but really could have been spewed out of a rebellion to the idea that psychologists keep demonstrating how people are really poor at predicting things and continuously destroy the illusion of being human while shining a spotlight on being human. (Mystics might see psychologists as demons… but maybe the two worlds can eventually coexist somehow.) I believe magical thinking could do wonders… at the same time, finding out how you’re really really wrong can do wonders.

So far have I only examined the deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith (also called the Rider-Waite deck, created under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, both members of the Order of the Golden Dawn.) The simplicity of her illustrations makes the pictures easy to enter and quite memorable. They are minimal, but still symbol-rich and color-brilliant. You can also see her wavering hand in the work, which reveals the care and presence of a person behind the image. And the way they were created – I believe, by first placing colors down before tracing the edges, provides the illusion of quickness and spontaneity. As for the art of tarot itself, I think the cards are a framework for storytelling and exploring hypotheticals. A set of corporeal images that can conjure alternate images or volition is what interests me. I don’t believe the cards possess power – I think attributing magical causality to tarot cards illuminates the powerful malleability of the mind. The idea that you’re forcing or imagining connections to things does not indicate that they are more or less connected in reality; it’s the process of constructing or denying connections that is very real.

The cards have existed for such a long time in so many different contexts. Going from the story of Jews in Ancient Egypt using tarot as a way to secretly study Torah (if each of the twenty-two figures in Major Arcana stands for a different letter they could be telling stories under the disguise of playing card games) to street psychics in modern New York with neon Clairvoyant signs. Their long existence in mutable forms with ever-changing audiences is fascinating.

How long does it take you to complete one?

I have no idea how long they take to create. I lose track of time when I’m drawing and painting. Let’s say… no less than three hours and no more than three days. The trickiest part, which I love the most, is figuring out how to map the images onto the curved surface. After researching and reacting to the card, I try to take into consideration the curvature of the helmet, thinking about its shape as different regions of the human brain and thinking about the notion of the relationship of the left hemisphere to the outward ‘conscious’ mind and the right hemisphere to inner ‘unconscious’ mind. (This is a spurious idea that exists in other forms of divination: like the significance of the right and left hand in Chiromancy). It’s like a mixture of neuroscience, pseudo-science, and following through with a guess.

When writing interpretations of the cards as helmets, I’m thinking about different views that occur if the helmet is moving towards a pedestrian versus moving away from a pedestrian and the content looming around the head of the wearer.

For example, the three of swords card to the observer is about the temporary jolt of heart-break or the imagined feeling of loss of love. If it’s moving away from us (the observers, the pedestrians), we can see the clouds on the back of the helmet (on the area related to vision: the occipital lobe) conveying the idea of emotions clouding vision. At this angle, we can see the handles of swords floating midair, appearing to connect to nothing. This image shows the potential harm of negative thoughts – and reveals our ability to disconnect ourselves from our weapons or potential destructiveness. If it’s coming towards us, we see tips of the three swords emerging behind the tip of a heart. Since the view that these swords have been stabbed through the heart is obscured, the image could indicate that the heart itself yields swords and warns us of the dangers of attempting to move towards a heart too quickly. The region of the tip of the red heart is associated the motor cortex. The visibility of someone’s heart in its raw state could affect one’s actions physically.  To the wearer of the three of swords, to imagine the heart as a system of support within a storm – the permanent attacks to it are making it stronger. The bold red of the symbolic heart is still recognizable and primarily visible before noticing the gray-blue shapes of the swords attacking, which blur into the background from a distance. The number 3 is on the left side of the helmet to show an outward appeal to logic and rationality after a deep assault to the heart. The storm is painted in a green-tinted gray. On the right side, only the gray sky, clouds and rain are visible. The lines of the rain move from the upper-left towards the lower-right which indicates motion against the imagination…  as our eyes gaze the upper left when visualizing or imagining things… to the upper right when imagining text and recalling semantic information… it could also be the confusion of imagination with facts because the rain is actually moving from the upper-right to the lower-left [side note: cognitive psychologists have proven that people have a more difficult time answering questions when they aren’t allowed to divert their gaze – which shows that eye movement triggers different modes of thinking, and so the positioning of images in a visual field really affects the way you’re receiving it on some level.] The smidgeon of red from the heart without seeing it as a symbol  renders the gray color as more green. Green is a color symbolically relating to natural healing which indicates hope and potential growth from the wound. I could talk about this card some more but I’ll end here for now.

People that purchase the helmets can receive little booklets of my notes if they’re interested or not interested… yet.

What is your vision for Tarot Helmets?

I think I’m creating something that cannot really be captured or documented; it’s really about the unseen aerial view and a concept constantly in motion. I’m excited to see what sorts of permutations this project will bring about… like if people start repeatedly running into certain cards in sequence and it becomes completely relevant to their inner-lives, or if people in one certain region of the world start ordering the same card or if people wearing tarot cards helmets will cross paths with each other. I’m also interested in finding out new ways of interpreting the cards after looking at them on a curved plane.

The meshing of bike culture with the fashion industry has helped promote the alternative transportation movement and I’m fascinated to see how introducing tarot to different audiences will alter the marred image of mysticism in the modern world.  It’s a way to get people to stay safe while riding bikes (some people are attracted to these helmets before realizing that they are tarot cards), interested in the history of their surroundings (it’s unfortunate that the wonderful artwork of Pamela Colman Smith is associated with gypsy scammers) and to examine their own minds (everyone can interpret cards themselves without visiting a tarot-card reader). It’s an illusion of connectedness (you’re a part of larger deck) or a functional and stylish product (you’re just wearing an aesthetically appealing helmet). Whether or not one believes in the supernatural, synchronicity or chance I’m ideally trying to introduce a consciousness of the self thinking while its thinking in the context of life in the street or commuting… and trying to sell items as a sort of… teacher and crafts-maker. It’s an exploration of imaginative faculties and a trade.

Whether you are a tarot lover or a cyclist – or better yet – BOTH – you’ll want to check these out.

You can learn more about the helmets at Danielle’s site: The Human Tarot Project and you can contact Danielle directly at: tarothelmets@gmail.com.

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A big thank you to Danielle for taking the time to chat with me!

Blessings!

Theresa

PS On a side note, I used to work for a bike messenger firm years ago.  I didn’t ride the bikes (I am a terrible fearful cyclist) – I just sat in a cushy office.  But I have always had mad love for bike messengers because of that job!   😉