Tarot Flamand de 1780

The record

If you’'ve ever visited the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, UK, then you wi’ll have seen the exhibit called “Joan’'s Cottage,” – a tableau depicting a reconstruction of a nineteenth century witch’s home. The figure of Old Joan, named after the historical Joan Wytte, sits at her table surrounded by the paraphernalia of her Craft: dolls, bottles of potions, her crystal ball and, laid out for a reading, the deck of cards I'’m about to describe. Of course, Joan Wytte herself died in 1813 and would almost certainly never even have heard of this or any other tarot deck, but why spoil a good story? I’'m aware that several editions of this tarot exist, but the one I own bears the title of the Vandenborre Bacchus Tarot, and was originally published in 1983 by Carta Mundi. It i’s very much a historical reproduction deck. It'’s printed on unusually thick card stock of an aged parchment shade, uncoated on the fronts of the cards (which are fairly large) and only lightly coated on the backs, with unrounded corners. These physical properties make the deck rather hard to shuffle, which suggests to me that it was primarily aimed at collectors rather than people who might wan

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