Our story
The Psychosophy Cards deck is a collaborative philosophy-art project created by the artist Avinoam Sternheim and the philosopher Menahem Goldenberg. The cards came to be through the meeting of visual and conceptual content; an amalgamation of a mystical experience with philosophy and art.
A culmination of a shared journey that started fifteen years ago. Along the road, the common motivation became clear: To place philosophy and art – quite literally – in the hands of people, for them to use it as part of their everyday life. The concerns were similar: Questions about what exists, what disintegrates, and what vanishes and falls into oblivion. Abandoned texts, a sculpture that returned to the studio. Elusive meaning, significance that slipped away. open wounds and ones that have already healed.
How do you turn yourself, your personal interests, your private desires and anxieties, your idiosyncratic gestures, your singular existence into something worth sharing, worthy of being displayed in public? Something that deserves to exist – continue to survive – in relation to others? How does a fantasy become real, come into being in this world? How does it become a motivation in another person, who in turn creates a reality for someone else, and so on and so forth? What can you offer those who have everything, who live in an age of excess, for whom fantasy is within reach? How can you influence, support and encourage, and do good? Make a difference, leave your mark now and for the future to come? How can we link our fate with others?
The Psychosophy Cards were shaped, first and foremost, by our specific life circumstances, from the loneliness and ecstasy in the studio to the ecstasy and loneliness in life. The
cards were conceived, drawn, and written from a contemporary perspective. With strong conviction in the relevance of creative thinking to human life in general, and specifically in our time.
In this sense, the Psychosophy Cards do not wish only to offer and activate “ancient knowledge”; rather, they wish to harness this ancient knowledge (actually, any and all knowledge: ancient, new, mystical, scientific, imagined) for our use and benefit. To bring “them” to us, on our terms, into our reality.