All Eternals Deck[1] [2] [3]
Liner Notes
(sleeve):
the Mountain Goats thank all named above plus Alyson, Juan, Jacob, Adam, Boche, Mac, Laura, and Hate Eternal [4]
The All Eternals Deck predates Crowley's 5 tarot 6 by at least ten years; 7 its earliest known issue arises three months after the first recorded appearance of the Inhuman Impulse Deck,8 to which it owes stylistic debt. Beyond these few details, its exact provenance is less certain. The two differ in several ways: the IID was printed on rough stock in purple and black ink, the AED in full color on gloss; both decks are printed on stock sourced from the same supplier, but the former's press can't be identified, whereas the latter's has been positively traced to a pre-Depression print shop in Oklahoma City; the IID's instructions offer only one layout, the AED's three; etc.
The IID was a "trade" deck, sold by card-readers to other card-readers and to readers-in-training. It did not circulate among the general public. The AED, known to have been commercially available in various locations across the U.S., England, and in places farther afield (two decks, both heavily used, were found several years ago in Poland), may have been marketed to families as a parlor game, or to collectors of spiritualist arcana. The numbers in which it circulated are not known and estimates vary widely.
The cards themselves are derived from a common source (see several nearly identical cards, e.g. the Rose, the Cave-Dweller, and the Sick Twins9) but seem to have been drawn by different artists. The IID's drawings are less detailed than its successor's. The AED is also more hopeful than its predecessor, which may account for its wider reach; even its least favorable readings can be left open to more cheerful interpretation. It shies away from calamity. The IID, on the other hand, was almost unique among fortune-telling devices in that it freely predicted dire consequences and unhappy endings.
While the original plates for the AED have been lost, secondary plates were struck in 1951 using careful tracings of the originals as models, and these in the main are the cards that have come down to us. Several copies of the deck's original instructions, which came tucked into the pack in the form of a miniature 12-page pamphlet in small type, remain in the hands of private collectors; they refer to a card called the Half-Dragon, which is not found in any surviving or catalogued copy of the deck.
(booklet): 10
the room filled suddenly with the sound of a passing train 11
(raps under table with fist: "who from future time dost summon, I slumbering in memory," etc ad lib) 12
check for something behind floral arrangement 13
most spirit guides instruct the novitiate to send away any demonic spirit animals. we trust the seeker 14
in a former incarnation you struggled but knew great joy 15
a person known to you will make sudden contact 16
everything eventually takes place on film 17
expiation candles 18 available in bulk; our most popular candle 19
damn also their friends 20
re-scan everybody for disguises. somebody's hiding something 21
past life regression 22 is your best vacation value 23
roughly equivalent to the Tower 24 in standard tarot — avoid 25
turn over crossing card; pause 26
(booklet back):
'Fortune-telling cards with their evocative yet enigmatic images are signposts on the path to the inner self.'
from the preface to the instructions of the Biedermeier Jóskártya 27 (Gipsy fortune telling cards), Hungary, year unknown
(vinyl back):
The tab on the tea bag said
"Love what is ahead
by loving what has come before."
But what came before was no dream
you wake from, it was human sacrifice...
Jean Valentine, 'Diana' 28
Track listing
Bonus tracks
Footnotes
1. Prior to releasing the album, John made this post on the Mountain Goats front page:
Hi everybody. Hope you have all been well and are keeping warm as the colder months close in. So yeah: as you may have learned yesterday, we spent much of 2010 inside recording studios, safe from the vitamin-giving rays of the sun. I wrote a bunch of new songs, and then we recorded them all and set some aside because they didn't quite fit in with the others, and then there were thirteen survivors when we were done, which are now ready to claw their way to the surface.
The album is called ALL ETERNALS DECK, and if you have ever watched say a 70s occult-scare movie where one of the scenes involves a couple of people visiting a storefront fortune teller, getting their cards read, and then trying to feel super-hopeful about what they hear when what they're visibly actually feeling is dread, then you have a pretty decent idea of what the album is all about. If you know the feeling of exultation that comes with having recognized the oncoming train of fate, then that's the other thing the album's about. JD, wouldn't it be easier to write an album of, like, love songs? Probably, I would not know, my focus is mainly death scenes and downtown Portland. It's not like there aren't people in love either dying or getting arrested at 3rd and Yamhill, so really, if you can stretch your definition of "love song" we can all be happy. Other possible points of reference include Burnt Offerings, Go Ask Alice, and that one scene in The Warriors where they're on the train and the sun's coming up and they're safe but you know the scars are permanent now. Reversals of fortune and faces at the window and sudden unexpected screams of triumph here and there. Possible exits from the long-locked basement. These sorts of moments.
As with the last album, we treated the recording sessions as commando raids on several studios with a few different producers: at Fidelitorium with John Congleton; at Q Division with Brandon Eggleston; at Mission Sound with Scott Solter; and, as I said yesterday and am still jumping up and down about, at Mana Recording Studios with Erik Rutan. The album's coming out on Merge in the U.S. on March 29th, 2011; Moorworks has got it for Japan, and our good friends at Remote Control in Australia are holding it down down under, and will release it on March 26th. I hope we get to tour all those places and more next year!
Here are the songs on All Eternals Deck. Their names, I mean. It would be totally premature to just post all the songs. See you soon!
1. Damn These Vampires
2. Birth of Serpents
3. Estate Sale Sign
4. Age of Kings
5. The Autopsy Garland
6. Beautiful Gas Mask
7. High Hawk Season
8. Prowl Great Cain
9. Sourdoire Valley Song
10. Outer Scorpion Squadron
11. For Charles Bronson
12. Never Quite Free
13. Liza Forever Minnelli
Mountain Goats news. Paging Jean Noblet. December 9, 2010. Retrieved November 25, 2015.
Jean Noblet was a tarot deck from the Tarot of Marseilles, restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy.
On the album as a whole:
A lot of ghastly things and crystal-ball symbolism run through it, but there's more to it than that. There's a lot of abuse-survivor stuff, like 'The Autopsy Garland', which is about Judy Garland. And then 'Birth of Serpents', 'Outer Scorpion Squadron', and 'Never Quite Free', which are all more or less about me. It was a weird five a.m. revelation. Like, if The Sunset Tree was about living in the middle of abuse, this is more of a surviving record...
The signal piece for me is Burnt Offerings, which is a movie that's almost exclusively about mood. In it, there's all this build-up to a chaotic last 10 minutes. There's this feeling of dread, which is a different thing from horror or terror; dread is just that awful sense that something terrible is going to happen. For those of us who are into horror, dread is a nice, sort of powerful feeling. It's not that you're afraid of something; you're riding that feeling. And that's what I think surviving stuff is about — learning to ride stuff like waves instead of letting it crush you.
Breihan, Tom. Mountain Goats' John Darnielle Talks New Album. January 17, 2011. Pitchfork. Retrieved November 25, 2015.
"For me, every album is a concept album — whether you're spelling out a story or not, it's whatever mood you're in when you're making the record. I think there's an idea of luck that tends to run through my stuff, the idea that you construct your own fate but you don't get to look at it until after you've already been through it. That's the heart of tragic vision, of Sophocles, who was sort of my muse: Our fate is not predetermined, but you will go through stuff because of the nature of how you are, and you don't know what that fate was until you've come through the fire. It's about coming to terms with your doom."
Gross, Joe (2011). The SPIN Interview: John Darnielle. SPIN Magazine. Retrieved November 25, 2015. (Credit: Annotated TMG)
2. As the liner notes describe, All Eternals Deck is a fictional tarot deck. John has confirmed that it never physically existed: (Tumblr)
SPOILER ALERT FOR ANYBODY WHO, LIKE ME, PREFERS AMBIGUITY TO CERTAINTY
DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS LINE IF YOU VALUE AMBIGUITIES IN YOUR LIFE
There was no physical deck. The deck is a conceit described in the liner notes and is a governing concept that unifies the songs. Depending on how you define “exist,” the deck does or does not exist. I myself side with Plato, for the most part, and will go further and say that if I imagine something, then it exists. But the deck itself did not come with any limited edition release. The deck has not been seen in this world, or, at least, those who have seen it are not talking. (Credit: Annotated TMG)
3. All Eternals Deck was released in Japan with markedly different liner notes, as mentioned above. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find someone to translate these - if you'd like to do so, please let me know! You can see the Japanese liner notes here, thanks to the transcription efforts of Andrew Fazzari and some partial translation by Flynn Germain.
Similarly to the liner notes for On Juhu Beach, which were translated into Japanese by Kazuharu Miyagawa, a member of the postrock band Jamaican Cheek, the Japanese text in All Eternals Deck was written and translated by Tooru Yamamoto and Hiroaki Sakai, two members of the indie band moools. They mention that they added some explanations, so I'm curious what's in the text.
Additionally, there are mentions of Burnt Offerings and Logan's Run, presumably related to High Hawk Season, and items from the Mountain Goats, Superchunk, and Extra Lens discography. We'll need to translate the liner to find out more, so if you can help with that, please be in touch!
The Japanese edition also includes a page showing the discography of the Mountain Goats, beginning with Taboo VI: The Homecoming in 1991 and ending with All Eternals Deck in 2011. Notably, it includes Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg in 1995, listing it as "Unreleased". I am not aware of any other place where John has acknowledged this album as an official part of the Mountain Goats canon. Jack and Faye, for instance, is not listed, perhaps because it only included full-length albums. Transmissions to Horace, Taking the Dative, and Yam, the King of Crops, were also not listed, while Come, Come to the Sunset Tree was — an altogether strange list. (Credit: Annotated TMG)
Hate Eternal is a Florida-based death metal band. Erik Rutan, the group's frontman, helped record All Eternals Deck. Interviewed about the record, Rutan explained:
That was one of the best experiences of my career! They're great guys, talented musicians, and it really challenged me, because it took me out of my comfort zone. The Mountain Goats are completely different from what I usually do. John was a fan of Hate Eternal and Morbid Angel, and he said he got the idea to contact me and see if I wanted to produce some songs after seeing a video of me working in my studio. I produced four of the sixteen songs on that album, and one of the songs that I did ended up being the single — they played it on the David Letterman show! And I remember seeing articles where they're talking about working with a death metal producer, and it was this big hoopla, you know — "Are the Mountain Goats Making a Death Metal Record?" — and I think John kinda ran with it. Seeing my name mentioned in any of those kinds of publications was kind of ridiculous, you never expect that, but the whole thing was a great learning experience for me, and I would work with them again in a heartbeat.
And in another interview:
Interviewer: I saw a few years ago you produced The Mountain Goats and then an Agnostic Front record. I think it's cool that you don't just stick to one thing. A person can't just stay put, you have to evolve and stay moving.
Erik: Yeah, and when I think about death metal and all the bands I've produced, there are still bands I'd like to work with. The thing about other types of music is that it really challenges you. It's a whole different perspective. So I try to approach each album I do individually and try to make it have a unique sound to it rather than just making it the same. Growing up in New Jersey I grew up around Agnostic Front and back in Ripping Corpse we did a lot of shows with Sick of it All and Biohazard, a lot of hardcore. So I did a record [Empire] and an EP [Rebellion EP] with Madball, I did the Agnostic Front record [My Life My Way] then I did The Mountain Goats[(four songs on All Eternals Deck]. That was an awesome experience and learning experience as well. John [Darnielle, Mountain Goats writer/composer/guitarist/pianist/vocalist] is a super talented guy, the rest of the guys as well. So that was just awesome to do. It's a different style of music so it requires a different focus. If you listen to any of the albums I've done in my whole career, it's always been challenging. So I guess I just like to challenge myself to be better all the time. I want to be better at what I do and be a better person period.
Kelly, Kim (2015). Hate Eternal's Erik Rutan Is Still the Nicest Guy in Death Metal. Vice. Retrieved November 25, 2015.
Echoes and Dust (2013). Interview: Erik Rutan from Hate Eternal. Retrieved November 25, 2015. ↩
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist. He founded the religion and philosophy of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. Crowley created the Thoth tarot deck. ↩
Tarot is a type of card deck both originally and presently used for card games. However, occultists began to use tarot decks for divination in the late 1700s, and they are primarily used for this purpose in the English-speaking world. Tarot decks have suits (which vary), cards 1 through 10, face cards, and a joker in the form of the Fool.
Jean-Baptiste Alliette was the first to revise this standard deck for the purpose of occult divination, developing a 78 card deck based on the Book of Thoth, the Egyptian ibis-headed god of wisdom. This deck is divided into two components. First is the Major Arcana, which has no suit and contains the Chariot, Death, the Devil, the Emperor, the Empress, the Fool, the Hanged Man, the Hermit, the Hierophant, the High Priestess, Judgement, Justice, the Lovers, the Magician, the Moon, the Star, Strength, the Sun, Temperance, the Tower, Wheel of Fortune, and the World. Second is the Minor Arcana, which is split into four suits (swords, wands, coins, and cups), each of which contains the ten numbered cards and the King, Queen, Knight, and Jack face cards. This modified form persists through many modern tarot decks. ↩
Crowley's Thoth tarot deck was created between 1938 and 1943, but was not published until 1969. ↩
Inhuman Impulse, to the best of my knowledge, is neither a Tarot Deck nor a reference to anything else in particular. ↩
As far as I can tell, none of these cards have basis in real tarot. ↩
Each of the following lines were in white-on-black text in front of a corresponding image. Although allusions to some songs appear clear (such as "damn also their friends" with Damn These Vampires), there does not seem to be any key which conclusively pairs lines with individual songs, although there are 13 lines and 13 songs. I therefore cast aside speculation and allow the reader to determine any connections themselves. All of the images are black-and-white. Several images are of static with no text above them.
There does seem to be a kinship between this image-poem and the ones seen in the We Shall All Be Healed microsite, particularly in Camera and Book, although truly the connection is throughout the entire site. ↩
Backed with an image of a revolver, a person's finger on the trigger. ↩
Backed with an image of the two of hearts. ↩
Backed with an image of the upper right part of a person's head with curly hair, their right eye looking up. ↩
Backed with an image of two hands holding each other, one with long nails. ↩
Backed with an image of two skulls. ↩
Backed with an image of a gas mask which has an upper row of teeth on the bottom. ↩
Backed with an image of two floating bodies facing away from the viewer, one apparently heading downward, the other upward. ↩
'Expiation' simply means the act of righting a wrong, atoning for a sin, or similar (from 'to expiate', a synonym of 'to atone'). While I've been unable to find any practice which uses the term 'expiation candle', this may refer to votive candles, candles lit as offerings, usually in a church (but potentially at home or elsewhere), to symbolize prayers made for one's self or another. ↩
Backed with an image of a hand reaching towards the viewer. ↩
Backed with an image of a crowd. ↩
Backed with an image of a palm tree. ↩
Past life regression is a spiritual technique in which one individual hypnotizes another to recall memories of past lives. Such practices presume the existence of reincarnation and or some other mechanism by which a persistent spirit could experience multiple incarnations. The practice — at least, under this term — is strongly related to the spiritualist and occultist movements in the late 1800s, and presently to the New Age movement. ↩
Backed with an image of roses, the same image as on the cover. ↩
The Tower is a card in the Major Arcana of typical divination tarot decks. It is associated with danger, sudden change, and catastrophe. The card usually depicts a tower in flames, being struck by lightning, and people falling from it. The card is the 16th of the Major Arcana, following The Devil. ↩
Backed with a split image of — potentially — hands on the bottom with long nails, almost talons, and something on the top hard to identify. ↩
Backed with an image of what might be a horse from a carousel. ↩
Unlike the other tarot decks referenced in the liner notes, the Biedermeier Jóskártya tarot deck is a real Hungarian tarot deck. Specifically, these instructions are from the preface of the 36 card Cigány Kártya deck (literally, 'Gypsy Cards'). The English instruction preface reads as follows:
Playing cards have been used for the purposes of fortune-telling since they came into existence some six centuries ago. Indeed, cartomancy is the most widespread technique of foretelling the future.
Recent years have seen a notable revival of interest in cartomancy. Two factors account for this trend:
First, mankind has always had a hankering for knowledge of what the future has in store not merely out of curiosity but often for immediate practical reasons, as a guideline in making important decisions.
Second, in the early stages of his evolution man possessed a far more highly developed intuitive sense than today. Many people are now rediscovering that faculty as they explore their own inner selves.
Fortune-telling cards with their evocative yet enigmatic images are signposts on the path to the inner self. Merely by focusing on our subjective perceptions we regain an awareness of an intuitive understanding which has long since been suppressed by the technological superficiality and the hectic pace of modern-day life.
It should be added that cartomancy also possesses a high degree of entertainment value. Yet this is not to deny the possibility that the cards may reveal a great deal of truth. It is left to the discretion of the individual to decide how much trust he or she places in what the cards have to say.
Herein lies the true fascination of cartomancy: it opens up a new approach to human understanding without prescribing literal conclusions.
Instructional pamphlet, Cigány Kártya card deck, Hungary. ↩
Jean Valentine is an American poet and former New York Poet Laureate. Her poem Diana references the Roman virgin goddess of hunting and the moon, who was seen bathing naked by Actaeon while hunting. As he stared, she cursed him to be mute, or be changed into a stag, so that he might never tell anyone about her nudity. However, he called out to his fellow hunters, and immediately became a stag and was devoured by his own hounds.
The poem in full is as follows:
The tab on the tea bag said
"Love what is ahead
by loving what has come before."
But what came before was no dream
you wake from, it was human sacrifice:
Diana was herself, and Actaeon, who saw her naked,
and the stag he was turned into
(who was God)
and the blind dogs
and the death of God
"for the sin of seeing." God
still childbearing, naked, seeing.
Do we get another life? Oh yes.
Maybe not in this place. Maybe in different forms.
Valentine, Jean (2010). Break the Glass. Washington: Copper Canyon Press. ↩
When announcing the preorder of All Eternals Deck:
Yea verily, the hills echo with the cry of the people, and the people cry, what is up with the preorder, JD. And lo, JD has heard the richly echoing cry of the people, or at least of the one or two people hitting him up about it on his Twitter. So here is the deal, and when I tell you it was hard to keep this stuff under wraps, I mean that somebody should totally give me some candy or something, or hire me to keep their secrets, because I have now totally proven that I am Good At That.
So: anybody wanting to order the new Mountain Goats album, All Eternals Deck, can now do so right now, here. You have your choice of formats; while supplies last, each pre-ordered CD or LP comes with a free copy of All Survivors Pack, an audio cassette in a hand-colored sleeve old-school style, containing 12 songs that make up the surviving demos for All Eternals Deck. A couple of these songs aren't on the album, and a couple of songs that made the album don't survive in demo form; the tape's tracklisting is available at the link. This is our first tape since Yam, the King of Crops. Typing that last sentence has given me more raw pleasure than I can faithfully detail. A few select independent record stores will also have copies of the tape-and-album package, and my clairvoyance is indicating that somebody's getting ready to ask me "which stores?" but the spirits are mute on this question. Fellow vinyl hounds should be advised that clear vinyl in small numbers, and blue vinyl in very very small numbers, will be randomly mixed in with the first thousand copies of the LP, divvied up between mailorder and retail.
We are so excited for everybody to hear these songs. Feel like we're emerging from a cave with glowing alien rocks we found hiding in a reflecting pool. Time to step outside soon and test the hills for echoes. As Number Six used to say: Be Seeing You!
Mountain Goats news. Our New Tape. February 17, 2011. Retrieved November 25, 2015. ↩
Etc
(Annotated TMG)
All Eternals Deck had foreign releases in Japan and Australia. Two songs were extras solely on these releases: Brisbane Hotel Sutra on the Australian release, and Used to Haunt on the Japanese release. The Japanese release of the album contained strikingly different liner notes. You can see the original Japanese text here. Thanks enormously to Andrew Fazzari for transcribing these! Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find someone to translate these, and so there's potentially information about the songs hidden in the Japanese text. If you speak Japanese and would like to assist by translating the liner notes, please email me!
Early preorders of All Eternals Deck came with a bonus cassette, called All Survivors Pack, which included demos of many songs (Beautiful Gas Mask, Birth of Serpents, The Autopsy Garland, Estate Sale Sign, Soudoire Valley Song, Age of Kings, High Hawk Season, Never Quite Free, For Charles Bronson, and Liza Forever Minnelli) and several outtakes (Catherine Antrim's Kid and Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece).29 Finally, a fully unreleased studio recording of Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece exists.30