Eclectic

Some decks argue for one system; Josef Machynka's Eclectic argues for a bibliography. Painted in 1986, it folds numerology, the I Ching and the Qabalah into a traditionally structured seventy-eight-card tarot, so a single card can carry correspondences from three traditions at once. That is not clutter for its own sake. It is a record of one artist's actual course of study, the deck as annotated reading list, and the name is a plain self-description rather than a marketing flourish. The consequence for readers is equally plain. As a first deck it would overwhelm, because every image speaks several symbolic languages simultaneously and assumes you can tell them apart. As a later deck it connects rooms: readers who already hold tarot and some Qabalah or I Ching find the cross-references doing real work, one system illuminating another on the same card face. It suits comparatists, syncretists and students of how twentieth-century European tarot absorbed its neighbours.