(Roughly) Daily

In Lewis Carroll’s Nursery Alice (an abridged edition he created for very young children), Alice snaps at the Queen, “Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

Well, Elie Bursztein does. Currently the AI cybersecurity technical and research lead at Google and Deepmind, he has had a storied career in tech. He also has a long and loving relationship with cards. In 2023, he established the Etteilla Foundation to house and build on his collection of antique decks (and related books and historical artifacts) and to “democratize access to this unique art form, its history, and its secret role in occult practices.”

Standard decks, transformations decks (where the artists incorporates the card’s pips into their art), classic tarot, divination tarot, and oracle decks– they’re all on display at…

“Discover amazing playing cards from ancient times,” courtesy of @ebursztein.bsky.social.

* Steven Wright

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As we come up aces, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that an ancestor of the art featured above was discovered: a teenager named Marcel Ravidat found the entrance to Lascaux Caves in southwest France when his dog investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree. Ravidat collected three friends, then followed his dog down what turned out to be the narrow entrance into a cavern, where they came upon (part of) the now-storied collection of wall markings— 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of animal representations– that are among the world’s finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic period.

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