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It's been awhile since I've posted anything for Tarot Tuesday and I promised last What Am I Reading Wednesday to review this deck, so let's talk about Secrets of Tarot.
I got this deck and book "gift set" for five dollars at my neighborhood pop culture curios store. Taken in toto it's something of a mixed bag, but the deck itself is solid. The cards are 7 x 12.5 centimeters; closer to playing card dimensions that many Tarot decks. The deck is printed on bona fide card stock, meaning I can actually bridge and riffle when shuffling. It's a nice change from the stiff heavy stock Llewellyn, Lo Scarabeo, US Games, and most Kickstarter decks use, which is good for preserving the cards as art objects but much less useful when trying to read with them.
As far as art goes, the deck is a photographic recreation of the Smith Waite, right down to the figures' poses and clothing, and the backgrounds and patterns on each card. The print quality is quite good, with sepia and cracked gesso effects applied to the images. I used to read with the Vision Tarot back in the day, so the photo recreation aspect appealed to me. And unlike the Vision Tarot, the pips in this deck are in the Smith Waite style, not the Marseilles.
The guidebook says the deck uses "real imagery instead of drawings," which implies the illustrators started from scratch, but I wonder. Some cards are pretty awkwardly done, with stranger proportions or faces that don't match the angle at which the rest of the figure's body is posed.
I'm pretty sure the author, one Amanda Hall, has photoshopped herself into at least one of the cards.
By contrast, other cards are quite nicely done. I love the gradation in the sky's colors on in this card; the photograph isn't doing it justice. The colors and contrast here really get at the joyousness of the card for me.
And The Moon is just lovely—maybe my favorite card in the entire deck. I love these shades of blue and green together, and the gold color used for the moon is just luminous. I love how the artist captured the phantasmagoric meaning of this card through photographic collage.
This is another nice card. I really like the rich burgundy of the main figure's robes, and the color palette here in general. As you can see from this card, some of the meanings Hall assigns to the cards are close to the standard Smith Waite interpretations.
But in general, her interpretations for each card are minimal and very (very, very, very) focused on fortune telling; the meanings are closer to those you'd expect from a Lenormand deck than of a more esoteric or Golden Dawn-type deck (which is a bit ironic, as Hall lifts her imagery directly from the most famous Golden Dawn deck in existence).
Hall often doesn't make much use of the standard 19th century texts on the cards' meanings and just assigns some words she associated with the images, or her own interpretations. This can result in some pretty left field interpretations for anyone who is used to the standard meanings.
How on earth does one get “delays will prove necessary” as the sole meaning of The Empress?
The 7 of Swords has several positive meanings, but why does Hall say that it's the “highest card of the Minor Arcana”?
Similarly, she says the High Priestess is “the highest card in the deck,” but why? That said, this card does a fabulous job of recreating The High Priestess from the Smith Waite deck. I particularly like the glimpse of the ocean we get behind the pillars and curtain.
In addition to being highly focused on fortune telling, Hall's interpretations are really focused on MONEY!!! Not only the Pentacles, but many of the Cups and even the Major Arcana are explicitly related to money troubles or concerns in this deck.
The guidebook was clearly thrown together to justify turning this deck into a "set" and doesn't add much value. It's full of meandering, unfocused prose that doesn't convey much. Many of the pages just reproduce 14-16 miniature images of the cards without any further explication of their symbolism or meanings,but why bother when the physical cards already have the Hall's meanings printed directly on them?
The guidebook's section on layouts is similarly unhelpful. It illustrates where Hall wants you to place a given number of cards on a table, but not how to interpret what the positions you place them in mean.
So, nine cards that when read horizontally, vertically, and diagonally along with the center card, will give a reading for "the next couple days or a week." But how should one interpret any of this? Is each column a day? A week? If the answer is "Whatever the reader wants them to be at that moment" why bother with a diagram at all?
And then there's the section Psychic Protection - What Is A Spirit Guide?, which contains the following memorable passage that I had the (mis?)fortune to encounter right before going to bed on a night when I was already slaphappy from 11+ hours at work:
So there was that.
TL;DR: I wouldn't recommend this set to anyone trying to learn to read the cards, unless they intend to jettison the guidebook in favor of other learning resources. But the deck alone was worth what I paid for it: I like the art and the physical deck is easy to shuffle and read with.
これで以上です。
I got this deck and book "gift set" for five dollars at my neighborhood pop culture curios store. Taken in toto it's something of a mixed bag, but the deck itself is solid. The cards are 7 x 12.5 centimeters; closer to playing card dimensions that many Tarot decks. The deck is printed on bona fide card stock, meaning I can actually bridge and riffle when shuffling. It's a nice change from the stiff heavy stock Llewellyn, Lo Scarabeo, US Games, and most Kickstarter decks use, which is good for preserving the cards as art objects but much less useful when trying to read with them.
As far as art goes, the deck is a photographic recreation of the Smith Waite, right down to the figures' poses and clothing, and the backgrounds and patterns on each card. The print quality is quite good, with sepia and cracked gesso effects applied to the images. I used to read with the Vision Tarot back in the day, so the photo recreation aspect appealed to me. And unlike the Vision Tarot, the pips in this deck are in the Smith Waite style, not the Marseilles.
The guidebook says the deck uses "real imagery instead of drawings," which implies the illustrators started from scratch, but I wonder. Some cards are pretty awkwardly done, with stranger proportions or faces that don't match the angle at which the rest of the figure's body is posed.
I'm pretty sure the author, one Amanda Hall, has photoshopped herself into at least one of the cards.
By contrast, other cards are quite nicely done. I love the gradation in the sky's colors on in this card; the photograph isn't doing it justice. The colors and contrast here really get at the joyousness of the card for me.
And The Moon is just lovely—maybe my favorite card in the entire deck. I love these shades of blue and green together, and the gold color used for the moon is just luminous. I love how the artist captured the phantasmagoric meaning of this card through photographic collage.
This is another nice card. I really like the rich burgundy of the main figure's robes, and the color palette here in general. As you can see from this card, some of the meanings Hall assigns to the cards are close to the standard Smith Waite interpretations.
But in general, her interpretations for each card are minimal and very (very, very, very) focused on fortune telling; the meanings are closer to those you'd expect from a Lenormand deck than of a more esoteric or Golden Dawn-type deck (which is a bit ironic, as Hall lifts her imagery directly from the most famous Golden Dawn deck in existence).
Hall often doesn't make much use of the standard 19th century texts on the cards' meanings and just assigns some words she associated with the images, or her own interpretations. This can result in some pretty left field interpretations for anyone who is used to the standard meanings.
How on earth does one get “delays will prove necessary” as the sole meaning of The Empress?
The 7 of Swords has several positive meanings, but why does Hall say that it's the “highest card of the Minor Arcana”?
Similarly, she says the High Priestess is “the highest card in the deck,” but why? That said, this card does a fabulous job of recreating The High Priestess from the Smith Waite deck. I particularly like the glimpse of the ocean we get behind the pillars and curtain.
In addition to being highly focused on fortune telling, Hall's interpretations are really focused on MONEY!!! Not only the Pentacles, but many of the Cups and even the Major Arcana are explicitly related to money troubles or concerns in this deck.
The guidebook was clearly thrown together to justify turning this deck into a "set" and doesn't add much value. It's full of meandering, unfocused prose that doesn't convey much. Many of the pages just reproduce 14-16 miniature images of the cards without any further explication of their symbolism or meanings,but why bother when the physical cards already have the Hall's meanings printed directly on them?
The guidebook's section on layouts is similarly unhelpful. It illustrates where Hall wants you to place a given number of cards on a table, but not how to interpret what the positions you place them in mean.
So, nine cards that when read horizontally, vertically, and diagonally along with the center card, will give a reading for "the next couple days or a week." But how should one interpret any of this? Is each column a day? A week? If the answer is "Whatever the reader wants them to be at that moment" why bother with a diagram at all?
And then there's the section Psychic Protection - What Is A Spirit Guide?, which contains the following memorable passage that I had the (mis?)fortune to encounter right before going to bed on a night when I was already slaphappy from 11+ hours at work:
A spirit guide is chosen to guide and protect you on your earth journey. My personal belief is that a spirit guide is a family member who has passed over to the other side and who decides, for a number of reasons, to protect and guide you throughout your life. There may be many different reasons why they choose you rather than another member of our family. They may feel a close affinity with you because you remind them of their personality and have a similar belief system to them. They may like the way you conduct your life and feel their skills can help you achieve more of your ambitions. The reasons are diverse and differ in each individual situation. We may not have personally known them before they passed over to the other side."Wait," said the GC, after I'd stopped cackling long enough to read this to him. "Wait...did the president write this?" and then dissolved into cackles himself.
Now we need to learn how to perform psychic protection.
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in some form of gold. It could be a triangle, a coat, under a shower of gold rain, in a car or anything meaningful to you. This only takes a couple of seconds and should be carried out before you commence every reading.
So there was that.
TL;DR: I wouldn't recommend this set to anyone trying to learn to read the cards, unless they intend to jettison the guidebook in favor of other learning resources. But the deck alone was worth what I paid for it: I like the art and the physical deck is easy to shuffle and read with.
これで以上です。