Fournier Tarot Genoves

Now I know for a fact that the subject of today's post will not be everyone's 'bag', for reasons which will become apparent. On Friday I met a friend in Wolverhampton & I bought this deck in an esoteric shop there. I've been coveting it for ages, and finally took the plunge.
The Tarot Genoves is a reproduction of a late 19th century deck of the Soprafino type, with one major difference: the Major Arcana cards have the upper half of the image printed twice abutting each other, just like the court cards in modern playing cards (the pip cards are just that). I've commented before that I don't do reversals, but I've finally found a deck with which reversals are almost impossible! - almost, because ironically you could do reversals with the aces.
The reason is that this deck was designed for playing the game of tarocchi, with no divinatory, fortune-telling, or esoteric pretensions. Think pre-Waite, pre-Golden Dawn. It was admittedly in the midst of the French occult revival, but this deck is untouched by that. At the time this deck was published, if you wanted to divine with a tarot deck you would have to use one of the gaming decks available, a Marseille deck (& probably do a Majors-only reading), an Etteilla deck, or a Lenormand deck. This literally comes from a different age in the tarot world, and also speaks of the origin of the tarot as a deck of cards to play *games* with. It is untouched by the ahistorical theories of Egyptian origins for the tarot (& surely nobody still believes the Fez theory?). This is the simplest theory for the origins of tarot & the one requiring fewest historical contortions, always a good sign.
Because of this the deck feels very different to, say, RWS (& I'm still rather in awe of Marseille). The cards feel like playing cards, they are the exact right size for my hands, they feel laminated but not overly, so they don't have the stodgy feel of plain cardboard or the over-plasticky feel of a US Games RWS. The backs look like, well, the back of playing cards. The best sign is that they felt like friends as soon as I took them out of the packet (the LWB has conventional fortune-telling rules & meanings, & an account of the Celtic Cross).
I feel that a good divination tool will lead you to the right questions rather than answers, & in fact this one has already given me an answer I didn't want in response to asking a question to which I knew the answer really - metaphysically slapping me across the head & saying, 'Stupid boy.'
And boy, does this deck answer the right questions. There is a great secret to divination, only normally revealed to far advanced initiates, which I'm going to let out here: after a few drinks it becomes much easier & everything starts to fall into place. So we christened it in a pub, where it responded to the milieu well be joining in as we asked what various people look like naked, or do in bed. Nothing compares to a tarot deck with a sense of humour.
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