A couple of weeks ago Arthur’s Jay Babcock tweeted that he had stumbled upon a fascinating two-page Hawkwind spread while “trolling thru the online International Times archive.” It turns out it wasn’t just any Hawkwind spread, it was a full Hawkwind tarot deck! Here’s a look at the spread, rotated 90 degrees. (If you click on the image, you can see a much larger version.)
This spread appeared in Issue 117 of International Times, or IT, which bears a publication date of November 18, 1971, a date that coincides neatly with the release of Hawkwind’s second album, In Search of Space or X In Search of Space, depending on who you ask, which had come out just a few weeks earlier. Linking to Babcock’s tweet a couple of days later, John Coulthart speculated, “Is this an overlooked Barney Bubbles design?”
Bubbles had designed the cover for In Search of Space, which featured a die-cut interlocking foldout. Coulthart himself designed the covers for the 1980s Hawkwind comps Zones and Out & Intake. According to Paul Gorman’s Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles, Coulthart once credited Bubbles with inventing “cosmic art nouveau” in his early work for Hawkwind.
For any readers of IT wanting to make a deck of their own, the following instructions are provided: “Paste this page down onto a stiff sheet of cardboard. Wait till it’s dry. Then cut out each card until you have a pack of 21. Shuffle and deal into three rows of seven. Read the image / word combinations thus formed. The Galactic Tarot does not speak of the future or the past, for all galactic time is contained in the present.” Yeah, man, faaaar out….. (Cannabis and quaaludes are not mentioned.) If you’d like help deciphering the text, this page is very helpful.
Here are the cards. The text on the cards is a little bit puzzling. If you forgive a transposed word or two, the cards contain the full text of two Hawkwind songs: “Born to Go” and “Infinity.” (If you order the cards Earth-Atlantis-Pluto-Jupiter-Flying Saucer-Sun-Pyramid-Alien-Horus-Machine, you get the verses and chorus for “Born to Go,” and if you order the cards Winged Hero-Icarus-Mercury-Time Card-Aquarian Age-Galaxy-Mars-Saturn-Venus-Infinity, you get the verse and chorus for “Infinity.”) The truly bizarre thing is that neither of those songs appears on In Search of Space—“Born to Go” first appears on the live album Space Ritual, which was released in 1973, while listeners had to wait eight solid years, until 1979’s PXR5, to hear “Infinity.” (Since not everything works out so neatly, the left-over “Space” card has a line from “Black Corridor.”)
Earth: “We Were Born to Go / We’re Never Turning Back”
Pyramid: “We Were Born to Go / As Far As We Can Find”
Atlantis: “We Were Born to Go / And Leave a Running Track”
Flying Saucer: “We Were Born to Blaze / A New Clear Way Through Space”
Space: “Space Is the Absence of Time and of Matter”
Alien: “We Were Born to Blow / To Blow the Human Mind”
Time Card: “Infinity So Beautiful / Has Turned My Soul to Ice”
Machine: “We’re Hatching Our Dreams”
Sun: “A Way Out of the Maze / That Held the Human Race”
Winged Hero: “I Used to Be of Human Kind / I Had a Life to Lead”
Galaxy: “I Met Her in a Forest Glade / Where Starbeams Grew Like Trees”
Horus: “We’re Breaking Out of Our Shell / We’re Breaking Free”
Icarus: “But Now I’m Frozen in a Dream / My Life Is Lost It Seems”
Aquarian Age: “And Crystallized Eternity / For All My Future Time”
Infinity: “In a Dream / Infinity”
Mars 12a: “I Did Not Take Her for a Witch / She Wasn’t What She Seemed”
Jupiter 12b: “We Were Born to Learn / We Were Born to Grow”
Saturn 12c: “She Led Me to a Palace Gate / With Constellation Towers”
Venus 12d: “She Is the Keeper of My Fate / I Sleep Locked in Her Powers”
Pluto 12e: “We Were Born to Go / And Leave No Star Unturned”
Mercury 12f: “She Turned the Key / Of Endlessness and Locked Me”
“Born to Go”:
“Infinity”: