Deck review: Tarot of the Divine

I have come to realize that the reason I fell so instantly and fully in love with tarot is because they are in essence about storytelling, and I am a storyteller through and through. I love all forms of story-telling, from taking portraits with my camera (I’ve had a family photography business for more than a decade) to the rich traditions of oral stories handed down through generations.

The Tarot of the Divine by Yoshi Yoshitani mixes the traditions and archetypes of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot with folklore, fairy tales and deities from around the world. It is, in a word, exquisite. It is a gorgeous, clever deck with an almost limitless potential for telling tarot stories. I am absolutely smitten with it.

What makes this deck special? Well, first and foremost, the thoughtful matching of each card and the story it tells. The Emperor is King Arthur, who (per the guidebook) “rules over his kingdom […] with a just and firm hand. He unifies the fractious, defends the weak, and lends his knowledge and understanding to all his subjects.” And Sleeping Beauty makes perfect sense as the Hanged Man, enduring a forced pause as a symbol of stasis and the decision to hold fast. Some other pairings are less obvious, like Fenrir, the terrible wolf who brings on the end of the world in Norse mythology as the Four of Swords. But as soon as I read the interpretation in the guidebook, I loved the unique slant: “The Norse gods know that Fenrir will bring about the end of the world, so they have him bound and chained. While he still represents a threat, for now there is respite.” And the magic beans from Jack and the Beanstalk is a stroke of genius as the Ace of Coins (Pentacles): “The origins of this gift may be unexpected – like magical beans – but through nourishment and support, the benefits could be miraculous.

I love these interpretations so much, and the explanations of how each story or character ties in to the card meaning offer some fascinating new insights and interpretations – so much so that I added copious notes to my tarot notebook so I’ll have them at my fingertips for later reference. Really, I could recommend this deck on the strength of the little (not white) book alone.

The illustrations are gorgeous too, from the moon phases on the card backs (fully reversible) to the richly detailed and thoughtful illustrations of each story or deity. There are some calls to traditional Rider-Waite-Smith symbolism where it works for the card, but other cards forgo it entirely. For that reason, I am not sure this would be an easy deck for a first-time tarot reader to learn with (as I am a strong believer in learning the RWS traditional meanings first, and then moving on from there) but the guidebook could make it easy for a more intuitive reader to start with this deck.

The cards even feel good to the touch. They’re thick and lightly embossed with a linen texture, and slide together without sticking. The base colour scheme in shades of dusk is soothing and pleasant. Really, there isn’t a thing I don’t like about this deck, but I really loved just flipping through the guidebook and reading about stories familiar and new from cultures all around the world.

The wheel of fortune and the fool

But really, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so how does it stand up in readings? Gloriously. I did a handful of three-card readings this weekend for curious friends who have never had a tarot reading before, and this deck soared on my simple question of “tell me a story about [name]”. I loved the extra nuance and depth of the readings as I contemplated how the folklore fit in to the interpretation I was seeing. It made the readings richer and more interesting.

So, in case you didn’t catch the theme, I love this deck that I pre-ordered on a whim because I love stories. I really adore it and highly recommend it, especially if you fancy yourself a teller of stories. It’s wonderful!

2020 is my Death year

One of the most feared and misunderstood cards in the tarot deck is Death. People assume it is a predictor of a person’s death, or maybe even your death. What it actually means is much more nuanced and interesting, though. Death is about transformation, and about clearing out old habits and possessions and ideas to make room for what really matters. It’s like a Kon Mari for your soul! That’s why when I found out that 2020 is a Death year for me, I nodded my head in understanding and said, “Oh, that explains a LOT!”

I have been reading Mary K. Greer’s Who are You in the Tarot, and listening to the most recent season of the Root Lock Tarot podcast. They both talk about what are variously called birth cards, personality cards, soul cards, year cards, or beacon cards. The idea is that you distill down the digits of any date to a number that is less than 22 and interpret the aligned major arcana. You can read for your year of birth, the current year, today’s date or any significant date in your life.

For example, if your date of birth is September 3, 1970, you’d add 9 (September) plus 3 plus 1970, which is 1982. You’d then add the 1+9+8+2, which is 20. So your birth year card, variously also known as a personality or soul card, can be read as either 20, which aligns to Judgement, or further distilled down to 2+0=2, the High Priestess. Mary K. Greer goes in to all sorts of detail about constellations and hidden factor cards and all the tangential things you can look into for a really thorough analysis. If you’re interested, I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy of Who are You in the Tarot – it’s quite the deep dive, and a bit of a mathematical mind trip when you look at the patterns in the major arcanas as the years progress.

Beyond your birth/soul/personality card, you can calculate the major arcana aligned to any calendar date or year. That’s how I came to realize that this is my Death year. My day and month of birth (August 1) plus 2020 adds up to 13, which aligns to Death in the major arcana. And what an incredibly transformative year this has been. I turned 50 years old last summer and decided I was going to embrace my crone years with enthusiasm; it’s been a time of choosing to follow my heart and stop trying to live up to external measures of conventional success. I’ve let go of many, many old habits and routines (hello pandemic!) but found so many new things, not least of which is this tarot project. It’s been a year of letting go of some things to make room for new and wonderful things that make me feel like a better version of myself. It has been a tough year, even aside from the pandemic, but I feel like the sacrifices and pauses of last year’s Hanged Man year have truly made my life richer.

I was also interested to see that my personality or birth year card is the Chariot. This makes sense when I think about how I am never still for very long, and no-one close to me would disagree with the fact that I have control issues. I do love the challenge of harnessing the competing forces in my life, but being pulled in opposite directions has been a lifelong challenge.

You can apply this to calendar years as well. 2020 is an Emperor year (2+0+2+0 = 4), all about authority, rules and structure. I see this in the pandemic and how governments have had to step in to basically shut down society to prevent the spread of the virus, and imposing unprecedented laws and rules to keep us safe, but also providing safety nets in the form of financial aid packages.

So from a basic math perspective, you’d assume that since last year was the Hanged Man year for me, and this is Death, then next year would be Temperance, right? Nope. 8+1+2021 = 2030; 2+0+3+0 = 5. Next year is a Hierophant year for me, which is actually really exciting because my whole goal with my tarot project was to teach tarot in workshops. And 2021 is also a Hierophant year (2+0+2+1=5). I can hardly wait to see what next year has in store now!

Have you calculated your birth or personality or year card? Did you find them insightful?

Book review: Holistic Tarot

At well over 800 pages, Holistic Tarot by Benebell Wen is a brick of a book, and is truly a soup-to-nuts tarot reference booked chock full of history, facts and helpful information for tarot enthusiasts of every level of experience. However, the pedantic tone of the author wears a little thin through the first several hundred pages. And it feels like maybe the author tried a bit too hard to aim for a scholarly, intellectual study of the tarot, eliminating the magic along the way.

TL;DR? Too much swords, not enough cups and wands. 😉

The first chapter had me hooked. The author and I are in complete agreement about the nature of tarot cards and how they work. Throughout the first chapter, I underscored and made asterisks and boxes and made copious exclamations in the margins. Choosing just one pull quote to share was a task, but I particularly like this one that explains the author’s opinion on how exactly tarot works:

When we study the imagery and symbols on the cards in a tarot spread, we activate our imagination. That imagination then activates our intuition, which is often the only instrument we have that channels a clear path for us to the truth of a matter.

Benebell Wen, Holistic Tarot


I love this, and I love how she likens consulting tarot to consulting a friend or confidant. I nodded along vigourously to the the author’s explanations of how she views and uses tarot for personal growth, and I enjoyed the history of tarot in the second chapter, too. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the rest of the book, I just found that it was a lot of information presented in a relentlessly overbearing style. The author has very clear ideas about how the tarot is or is not used, and doesn’t brook much argument or leave any room for dissension.

I think it was the section on spreads that lost me. My own approach to tarot is very flexible and utterly without dogma or ritual. I was reading a thread in a Facebook group recently about rituals and how one prepares for the act of a tarot reading. People talked about meditating, cleansing rituals, channelling spirits, and using crystals or other talismans, and for me, the extent of preparing for a reading involves giving the table a good swipe to make sure I get the crumbs out of the way. Benebell Wen advises a very disciplined and rigorous approach to the tarot, whereas I’m a little more “whatever works for you, it’s your practice” in my philosophy.

There’s a lot of solid tarot information in this book, and just about every facet of tarot seems to be at least touched upon. But for such a magical art, it’s a surprisingly dry tome. If I had to choose between the breezy, esoteric woo of Rachel Pollack’s 78 Degrees of Wisdom and the encyclopedic collection of facts that is Holistic Tarot, I think I’d lean more toward Rachel Pollack’s approach. I’m glad to have both books on my shelf, though, and I know I’ll go back to each of them in different circumstances as I progress on my tarot journey.

Have you read this one? What did you think?

Tarot cards and copyright

As a photographer who licenses her photos professionally, I’m particularly sensitive to intellectual property laws around copyright. When I launched this site and wanted to use photos of my cards and spreads for posts, I started looking into what kind of permissions I might need to display a copyrighted tarot card design.

In short, any published tarot card is protected intellectual property, and using that card in any manner, except personal readings for yourself and friends and family, may infringe on the creator’s rights. In order to use tarot card images online or in any published material, you need to secure permission or face a potential lawsuit for copyright violation or be at risk of having your site or social media account shut down. Some tarot card creators may be happy to have you share their designs, some may require attribution, and some may require licensing fees for certain types of use. The onus is on you to find out what the conditions for use are before you use images of the cards online.

Copyright holders vary in how stringent and aggressive they are about enforcing their rights. Posting your card-a-day pulls on Instagram is unlikely to attract undue attention (though is still technically an infringement and violates the terms of service for Instagram that you agreed to but probably didn’t read when you signed up for the service) while publishing and selling an e-book with images of cards and spreads is a serious violation. In between are websites and blog posts, YouTube readings, tarot courses, and even online readings for profit.

What does this mean? If you want to use someone’s intellectual property on your website or for reasons other than entirely personal use, you need to secure permission at minimum, and potentially pay a licensing fee. Look for the copyright symbol © on the cards, the box, or in the little white book that came with your deck, and reach out to the copyright holder. Some of the larger publishing houses like US Games Systems and Llewellyn provide explicit guidelines on what you can do without explicit permission or licensing fees, and in some cases supply a form to fill out. Llewellyn and US Games Systems both state, for example, that you can use digital images of their cards in an email tarot reading for profit without explicit permission, but to use the card images in a tarot course you deliver for profit will incur licensing fees.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck is an interesting study in the complexity of copyright law. It was first published in the UK in 1909, before the establishment of copyright law. There seems to be some debate as to whether the original card designs as commissioned by A.E. Waite and published in his book, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, move into the public domain 70 years after his death, or 70 years after the death of the artist, Pamela Colman Smith. US Games Systems published their version of the commonly known and used Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1971 and hold the rights to that design, which is a very slight variant on the original. This article provides some interesting context to the debate about the copyright status of the RWS deck. General opinion seems to hold that the images as originally published are now in public domain in the US, and that they will pass into public domain in the UK in 2021.

Copyright, like most legal issues, is a complicated field and I am not a lawyer. Finding yourself on the wrong side of a copyright infringement suit can be an expensive and unpleasant endeavour, and it’s definitely worth the time and effort to learn the basics and protect yourself. It’s also the right thing to do to respect the intellectual property of creators by giving them attribution at all times, and paying licensing fees when necessary.

SWOT: A tarot spread for planning and making decisions

A SWOT analysis is a classic business tool to help you visualize the important aspects of a decision or project for strategic planning. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and opportunities are things you consider favorable and within your control, while weaknesses and threats are unfavorable and dictated by external forces.

The SWOT analysis offers insight on what you’re doing well, where challenges or obstacles may lie, and options for how to use that information moving ahead. You could run a SWOT analysis on virtually anything: a company, an idea, a product, or even yourself; it can be a great tool for personal insight. In a traditional SWOT analysis, you brainstorm points under each category, but here we are looking to the tarot cards to provide the insight. Why use tarot cards for a SWOT analysis? Tarot cards can help you see things from a new perspective, and give you options you might not have come up with on your own. Tarot cards help to deepen your connection with your intuitive, inner wisdom, and might help you see through blind spots that would otherwise inhibit you.

The SWOT Tarot Spread comprises four cards: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Shuffle the cards while thinking about the situation you are analysing. Draw the cards as you see fit; you may wish to make four piles and choose the top card from each pile, or fan the cards out and pick four at random, or cut the deck and draw the top four cards. Regardless of how you draw the cards, ensure you decide before turning over each card which category that card will represent.

Strengths set you apart from others and are your building blocks to success. What are you naturally good at or what skills have you developed? What do others see as your strength? What are your unique talents or gifts?

Weaknesses are areas that need your attention to improve, so they don’t become obstacles to your progress. What could you improve? Where do you have access to fewer resources than others? What might others identify as your weakness?

Opportunities are the external factors you can pursue to move ahead in your journey. What opportunities are open to you? How can you turn your strengths into opportunities?

Threats are the factors or obstacles that might prevent you from reaching your goals. What threats could harm you or prevent success? How could your weaknesses threaten your progress?

So now that you’ve done your spread, what should you do with it? Insight without action won’t lead you forward on your journey. Match up your strengths to your opportunities to make an action plan, and consider ways to improve weaknesses in order to mitigate potential threats. Turn your opportunities into goals, and set up a step-by-step approach so you can get from here to there. Make each milestone in your path meaningful and measurable. And don’t forget to celebrate your success!

If you use this spread, I’d love to hear how it worked out for you. And I’d be happy to do a tarot card SWOT analysis for you, for a situation you are facing, or for your business. Readings will be delivered by email, and the fee for this type of reading is $20 Cdn. Contact me for details!