Merrimack Deck - A Funky Midcentury Pirate RWS

[Wooden_Nickel]

Tired of the Fool's Journey, self-discovery, psychological nuance, and Hermetic analysis in your tarot? Come back with me to the days when American tarot was just for fortune-telling. Come with me to a time before the Beatles, before Eden Gray; back to the Kennedy administration, when New York publishers didn't blink at saying to hell with British copyright. I'm talking about 1961-63, when the Merrimack Publishing Corp. hoisted the skull and crossbones and released a swipe of the (already pirated) University Books RWS deck.

 

Squeezing their pennies till they gasped, Merrimack condensed Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot into 5 columns of tiny type on 11 inches of folded paper — the LWB is just an unstapled 8 page pamphlet — jammed the Keltic Cross spread into two plain horizontal rows to save space on a divination sheet, and printed up their deck in Hong Kong.

 

Unsurprisingly the names Rider or Arthur Edward Waite (not to mention Pamela Colman Smith) are nowhere to be found on either box or pamphlet.  This was not the kind of publisher that gave respect to the creators of the product. 

 

What (besides terrible color separation) makes the Merrimack deck different from the University Books version?  First, the card backs are different. Instead of University Books’ pink ankh, the Merrimack deck sports a brown mosaic tile pattern on the back that's kinda charming.

 

But more importantly, the face of each card shows keywords from the PKT on the margins. The keywords are ugly and expert Tarot readers probably would not find them in keeping with their dignity, but to the poor novice reader they’re a tremendous advantage. In view of the difficulty of learning how to read Tarot cards in 1961 — even in New York, copies of Waite, Crowley, or P.F. Case’s books can’t have been easy to come by then— putting the keywords on the cards showed real consideration for Merrimack’s potential customers.

 

What’s funny about the Merrimack keywords is how very strange the ones printed on the Minors seem. The keywords split the deck in two: the Majors are mystic, the Minors pragmatic. When choosing keywords the Merrimack editor evidently skipped PKT pages 1-282 with their involved and verbose interpretations and went for the pithy lists of straightforward meanings in the back of the book.  That is, Part 3 Outer Method of the Oracles, section 3, "Greater Arcana and Their Divinatory Meanings," and section 4, "Some Additional Meanings of the Lesser Arcana." Now, Waite’s meanings for the Majors in Section 3 are just what you’d expect. For instance, the Empress is “Activity, Growth, Fertility, Productiveness.” But instead of using Section 4, on the Minors, to make concise restatements of his own interpretations, Waite used it as attic to hold miscellaneous interpretations found in Etteilla, Paul Christian, and others.  They’re old-fashioned, pre-Qabalist, straight from the fortune teller’s lamp: 7 Wands stands for a dark child , Q Swords for a widow, and Q Cups is ‘a woman of uncertain character.’ 3 Pent is ‘Celebrity for a man’s oldest son;’ 4 Pent. is ‘Pleasant news from a lady;’, 3 Swords is ‘Flight of a lady’s lover.’  As a result, doing a reading with these cards can be a real trip if you try to take both Minor and Major keywords equally seriously!

 

Edited July 4, 2024 by Wooden_Nickel
punctuation

[Wooden_Nickel]

Another two pictures with puzzling keywords for the minors. 

If you search for "merrimack" on the Aeclectic forums you'll find some discussion of it as "the deck everyone loves to hate."  And then the same contributors talking about buying it on eBay.

[Wooden_Nickel]

The last three, I promise!

[DanielJUK]

Love this, thanks for posting it @Wooden_Nickel 

I don't want it in my collection but it is highly amusing to see this RWS version 🙂 

I cannot relate the minors to the obscure part of the PKT meanings for each card, like it seems so irreverent! I guess an interesting lesson about choosing part of an author's meanings for a card.

[Laura Borealis]

Fascinating! And amusingly written. 😸 

 

Those meanings are really off the mark, aren't they? Even Zolar's funny little mishmash deck seems more thoughtful. Merrimack must have smelled on the wind how popular tarot was about to be, and quickly slapped this together to take advantage of the coming trend.

[Wooden_Nickel]

5 hours ago, DanielJUK said:

Love this, thanks for posting it @Wooden_Nickel 

I don't want it in my collection but it is highly amusing to see this RWS version 🙂 

I cannot relate the minors to the obscure part of the PKT meanings for each card, like it seems so irreverent! I guess an interesting lesson about choosing part of an author's meanings for a card.

Yeah, when I see "Alienation" under the Wands Knight I begin to wonder if galloping boisterously round pyramids in armor and a salamander coat is really as much fun as I've been led to believe.😉

 

What strikes me about Merrimack's disrespectful presentation is that the RWS deck -- now the English speaking world's baseline Tarot for longer than I've been alive -- first endured decades of being shamefully ripped off in America. And that some of its eventual success was due to the American publishers who ripped it off and packaged it with slapdash keywords.

 

[Wooden_Nickel]

1 hour ago, Laura Borealis said:

Fascinating! And amusingly written. 😸 

 

Those meanings are really off the mark, aren't they? Even Zolar's funny little mishmash deck seems more thoughtful. Merrimack must have smelled on the wind how popular tarot was about to be, and quickly slapped this together to take advantage of the coming trend.

Thanks! 

I wonder what it felt like when American mainstream business began to take a commercial interest in occultism in the 50's and 60's. Were there publishers and distributors other than De Laurence? That makes me wonder; did Stuart Kaplan ever write an autobiography?

I've never laid my hands on a Zolar's Astrological.  The idea of Majors and Minors printed back-to-back on the same cards makes me a bit queasy -- how on earth do you work with that? -- but it could be fun to play around with! 

Edited July 4, 2024 by Wooden_Nickel

[Laura Borealis]

I haven't tried to seriously work with Zolar's, I just pull it out now and then for funzies. But to be fair, it's not designed to use Majors and Minors together. You either separate out the Majors and just read with those, or just the Minors. Or you can remove the Knights from the Minors and use the 52 remaining as a playing card deck (meanings provided in the booklet) or just use the astrology cards. It's "four decks in one!" Honestly I think more decks should offer customization like that. Alternate Lovers cards and whatnot are great, but multiple decks with interchangeable cards? Not many creators have that much vision! 😸

 

It must have been interesting to be in the publishing world then! You had the occult book market, tarot decks becoming more available... when did horoscopes become common in newspapers? There were Ouija boards and Magic 8 Balls in the toy aisles. In the music world you had the Beatles and other stars hanging out with the Maharishi or other gurus. You could tune in to yoga lessons on PBS. Such a wild time! Publishers must not have known where to jump next.

[Wooden_Nickel]

2 hours ago, Laura Borealis said:

It must have been interesting to be in the publishing world then! You had the occult book market, tarot decks becoming more available... when did horoscopes become common in newspapers? There were Ouija boards and Magic 8 Balls in the toy aisles. In the music world you had the Beatles and other stars hanging out with the Maharishi or other gurus. You could tune in to yoga lessons on PBS. Such a wild time! Publishers must not have known where to jump next.

After an intense 15 minutes wrestling with Google & Wikipedia, here are my findings:

The Ouija board was patented in 1890, the Magic 8 Ball in 1946, and a syndicated horoscope column started appearing regularly in US newspapers in 1916, though horoscopes of public figures appeared as individual features even earlier.  Ouija boards were a direct commercialization of the "talking boards" used by Spiritualists as a speedier alternative to table rapping.  [Insert gratuitous Norman Rockwell image as evidence of sexualized commercial exploitation of divination]:

[Wooden_Nickel]

 

All this suggests to me that Anglo-American pop culture has been dabbling in the occult for a long time, maybe even as long as there's been pop culture, and the widespread acceptance of tarot was relatively late!

[Guest]

Lol you're quite the raconteur @Wooden_Nickel. If I lived back then and the Tarot is a very scarce commodity, I don't think I would've resisted arr matey'ing the RWS. And getting terribly confused learning and applying those keywords ahahaha. How many times can a lady's lover flee? Its cartomantic focus on interpersonal relationships smacks of the chatty Italian Sibilla to me. 

[Natural Mystic Guide]

On 7/4/2024 at 8:11 AM, Wooden_Nickel said:

The last three, I promise!

Super Fun!  Thanks for sharing.