More Card Images!
Well, it's been an interesting summer, what with forest fires, evacuations, and writing-in-exile. And yet, here we are again.
Here are some images for the Earth suit, symbolized by Bones. I always thought Coins/Pentacles got a bad rap -- there's more to Earth than money and work. For me (and for indigenous people), the physical is the absolute anchor of our spiritual experiences. You can't separate one from the other. Some of our spiritual experience, too, is anchoring, and enables our drawing from and journeying to other realms, much like the skeleton of the body enables us to use muscles and blood and viscera to dance and swim and smell the first rain of the autumn. This deck reflects that in its entirety, but the foundation is here in the Bones.
One of the primary ways in which I depart from the traditional structure of Tarot is deciding not to invite numbers into the Primal Tarot. I don't arrange the Minor suits in any sort of order or assign them numbers, nor do I put the Kindred (Court) cards in a hierarchy. You're given the opportunity to see how they interact and order themselves for you.
This also means that the meanings of the Minors don't derive anything from numbers -- or, for that matter, Kabbalah or astrology. There are plenty of reasons for this, which I can go into if anyone is curious. The implication is that I wasn't constrained to use the meanings that other decks had before, and found that the freedom let me imagine what sort of symbols and meanings would be important in a deck that prized the life of every living creature, that emphasized the just-another-animal quality of Primal cultures that let them live in real, sustainable balance with the land for tens of thousands of years.
There are plenty of Minor cards with similarities to the Waite-Smith deck (and I'm sure others, though I don't know Thoth or Marseilles very well), but there are many that depart from tradition -- really, many traditions, because the Tarot has been changing all through its five-hundred year history.
The Hearth, the Basket, and the Root are all cards that go in different directions from the concerns of classic Tarot. I hope you like 'em.
P.S. I don't think I mentioned this yet, but the I found out that the monitor I'm using to edit the art was showing me something different from most monitors; I didn't know this until I looked at them on another computer and swore. Just think of all these images as works-in-progress.