Mine arrived about two minutes ago. Yeah, I know it's Sunday and they don't do deliveries on a Sunday: I have a Nosy Neighbour whose flat overlooks the letterboxes, he "looked after it for me" by taking it into his home on a day when I wasn't actually away, and has only just given it to me. Fortunately, its defences haven't been breached - he didn't open it. Otherwise, I'd have to Hunt Him Down And Kill Him. (I'm contemplating doing so anyway, for various other breaches of my privacy in the last few weeks).
I saw the shrink-wrapped packaging and my heart fell. My thoughts were pretty much "Oh, my, it's going to be the Universal Dali all over again, with an unjustifiable number of layers of bio-undegradable packaging." However, I opened the magnetised swing-lid of the box (always a nice feature), to find an entirely naked deck and book in the box, so it redeemed itself on the potential wastefulness immediately.
I'm happy with the size of the deck (but then, I can go decks from the size of my thumbnail to the size of a table-top), but I understand that a lot of people will find it too large for convenient shuffling, even people with much bigger hands than my little stubby ones. I love the wide, irregular-shaped black borders, different on every card (I just wish he's been as individual as that with the sandstone borders around his Stained Glass cards years ago!), and the fact that each image forms a scroll, with the name of the card on the rolled-up bit at the end of the scroll. I love the silver gilding on the edges, too. I have few decks with gilded edges - significantly more with gilded artwork - and the only other deck I have with silver-gilded edges is the Quantum Mach One, the Kunati publication. Silver always seems so much more luxurious than gold because of its relative rarity. All these things please and delight me for purely aesthetic reasons.
I've thumbed through the deck only once as it only arrived minutes ago, but a few things strike me. Firstly, the high-gloss lamination. This will make the images hard to see on a table with overhead lighting, unless I pick up each card as I talk about it, with all that reflected light. Sadly, where I read publicly has bright overhead lights, but that won't stop me taking it! I'll just have to handle each card pensively.
The Five Coins was reversed in my deck, which in traditional Tarot terms seems like a lovely affirmation of the positive flow of prosperity in my life in the last months; but in this deck it seems to be an image of hard work, which reversed also makes sense - the universe has been inexplicably making everything easier for me, lately, as well as more prosperous.
I have just peeked inside the companion-book, and to my delight and some surprise, I find it's not in Italian, it's in English. So I'll be reading it later on, purely for pleasure. I don't read Tarot books as a study or to get to know the decks, but as I would read a novel, for pure enjoyment.
I was quite extensively Kabbalistic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but I've forgotten nearly all of it since I haven't used it very much since then. So my first impressions of the cards are not based on its theme at all, but on my personal experience of Tarot over the years. The Popess with her Venus-of-Willendorf figure and milky nipples, seems much more an Empress-figure than a Popess-figure. The Hanged Man, a city in the body of a dancing whale, seems much more in line with the Visconti World cards than any Hanged Man, even given the swinging pendulum overhead. Death, with the figures in the overflowing Cup, could be a bizarre and colourful Ace Cups. The Falling Tower, with a male figure standing at a table with objects on it, is the classic Magician image, while the World card with a great tower in its centre and a swirl of energy surrounding it, could be the classic Tower image. The Three Wands has six wands in its image. The Nine Wands would make a great Hanged Man. The Two Swords is pretty much how you'd expect a Two Cups to be, while the Five Swords reflects the idea of poverty inherit in the Five Coins.
Many other cards don't match RW imagery, but these are the ones that seem to match other cards in the RW system. To me, this deck will be immediately readable even without boning up on my QBL studies (which I think will come back to me fast if I make an effort), but there is a danger inherent on looking at the card titles and trying to use memorised meanings. Anyone who does that, will be thrown by this deck. If, however, you look at the images themselves, they are all evocative and full of power.
Once I've used the deck quite a bit and read the book, I'll be writing a proper review of it for the AT site.
