I included this deck just to try and make your brains explode. This is another compelling deck designed by my friend Riccardo Minetti. In this deck he plays with the idea of gender and how it influences our understanding of the cards. In the Manga Tarot, all the cards that are traditionally male are depicted as female and vice versa. Arcana V becomes The Priestess, and looks very much like a traditional High Priestess card. Arcana II becomes The Priest. For ease of discussion, I’ve pictured them together here. Many of us blend associations of the card’s number in with the name, image, symbolism, and other associations together to create a card’s meaning. When a deck

Recently I attended two Victorian-era-inspired holiday events at which the famous letters from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon and the response from Francis Pharcellus Church were read aloud. I had not heard these letters in many years and had forgotten how happy they make my heart. The older I get, it seems, the more willing I am to believe in a beneficent and wondrous world filled beauty, kindness, and happy surprises. I was, in my youth, “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” I clung to the certainty and security that various forms of fundamentalism gave me. But now I realize, along with Mr. Church, that there is far more to this life than what we can see or what

The High Priestess from the Tarot of the Elves is probably one of the most controversial images in tarot. Many people were appalled and had a very strong negative reaction to this card. However, people don’t have a problem associating The High Priestess with the Greek goddess Persephone. She was kidnapped by Hades, the god of Death, and taken to the underworld to live--kidnapped, taken from her family and a life she loved to live underground. She was, in a sense, dead. Without the experience of her death, the joy and power of her consequent rebirth could not have been. Many initiatory experiences recreate a symbolic death. We find them in most mystery religions, many modern pagan and

Tall, Dark, and Silent Recently Melanie Marquis, author and assistant editor of the American Tarot Association’s Quarterly Journal, interviewed me for their fine publication. She asked me which cards in the tarot I thought were the darkest. I responded: “For me personally, I’ll risk committing tarot sacrilege and say that I have issues with the High Priestess and The Moon. The way the High Priestess sits there with that “I know but I’m not telling” attitude and the whole “oh you know what you need to know” thing. Makes me want to scream! If I knew, I wouldn’t be doing a reading now, would I? Yep, I clearly have issues. The Moon drives me nuts, too. All that shadowy