Lee
I ordered this deck on a lark and received it a few days ago. Benebell Wen has a very nicely-done review on her site with lots of photos of the cards.
This is a 65-card deck with a mostly tarot structure. There are 22 Majors and 36 Minors. There are no 10's in the Minors, and no court cards. Then there are an additional 7 chakra cards. The cards are numbered as in tarot, and each has a title, non-traditional, which is more like a keyword or phrase. There is nothing to differentiate the Majors and the Minors, or the Minor suits, from each other, other than the color of the border. These colors are non-traditional, so you have to be careful about what suit you're looking at or whether it's a Major or Minor (for the record: Majors=black, Wands=violet, Cups=green, Pentacles=red, Swords=blue).
The art, by John Matson, is excellent. It's beautiful and very professionally-done. The pictures aim to communicate some of the same ideas as the corresponding tarot cards but without using the traditional tarot icons. So the Death equivalent (here titled "Release") shows a man beginning to disrobe, suggesting that death is a laying-aside of the shell of the persona. The scenes have a surreal quality to them which makes it easy and fun to free-associate during readings. I like the fact that different ethnicities are depicted. I also like the faces -- while they're all attractive, they also look like real people.
Just as the Majors use traditional tarot concepts, so do the Minors use RWS concepts. So, for example, the 6 of Cups card is called "Giving & Receiving" and shows several pairs of cupped hands, holding colored balls of glowing light.
What I like about this deck is that you can use it in different ways. You could entirely ignore the tarot aspect of it and just go by the images and titles. Or you could call to mind the RWS equivalent of each card and let that inform and deepen your card interpretations. Or something in between.
It's a fun exercise for someone who is really into RWS-type decks to explore the Minors and see which cards open up new avenues or possibilities which one might bring back to one's RWS practice.
The keywords and phrases are all verbs. For this reason, this is a good deck to use for "how shall I handle this" kinds of questions, but perhaps not such a good one for questions like "will I pass my test tomorrow?" For example, I just laid out five cards and the titles told me, "Observe," "Balance," "Release," "Giving & Receiving," and "Choose Your Battles." If you did want to ask more predictive-type questions, you might want to lean more towards bringing to mind the equivalent RWS cards as you do the reading.
For this reason this might be a nice deck for a tarot beginner to use, because the cards' messages as contained in the titles are more direct, while still allowing for creative interpretation of the images. But as I say, I also think they're good for experienced tarot readers to suggest some new possibilities.
There's also an overall comforting aspect to the deck, as befits it as a Hay House publication. The traditionally negative cards are still negative but the images often give a positive aspect as well to the situation. I know this kind of thing bothers some readers. I'm okay with it, since the negativity, while a bit muted, is still there, and since we all could use some comfort sometimes (especially this week).
This is also a good deck for those readers who sometimes get very frustrated with the existence of court cards. (Am I one of those readers? No comment!
)
Through reading about tarot over the years, I've certainly become informed about other esoteric subjects, but chakras is a subject I've somehow managed to remain ignorant about. I wouldn't know a chakra if I tripped over one. The chakra cards in this deck are also not particularly evocative, so I simply laid them aside.
From reading around on the Internet, I gather that there have been two printings of this deck. The first printing has gilded edges, and there have been problems reported by readers that the cards arrived stuck together, and pulling them apart damaged the cards. Then there's a second printing with no gilded edges, presumably done to fix the problem. I don't think there's any way to tell which you're going to get until you open the box.
My deck is the one with the gilded edges. When I opened the box, the cards were indeed sticking together in clumps of ten cards or so. I took each clump and gently bent the clump back and forth a few times to loosen it, and then was able to separate the individual cards without difficulty, and now it's fine.
I do want to note one puzzle: what was Ann Hentz's contribution? At the back of the book, there are bios for "The Author" (John Holland), "The Artist (John Matson), and "The Tarot Consultant" (Ann Hentz). In the intro, Holland definitively states he created the deck. I don't mean to insinuate that there's anything fishy going on, but in the tarot world we're used to knowing generally what roles deck creators played in their creations. For this set, there's no indication as to who did what. Who guided the artist (if anyone) in terms of what to put in the images? Who came up with the card titles? It would be nice to know.
For anyone interested, there's a Youtube interview about the deck with John Holland and Colette Baron-Reid, who has very cute dogs.
This is a 65-card deck with a mostly tarot structure. There are 22 Majors and 36 Minors. There are no 10's in the Minors, and no court cards. Then there are an additional 7 chakra cards. The cards are numbered as in tarot, and each has a title, non-traditional, which is more like a keyword or phrase. There is nothing to differentiate the Majors and the Minors, or the Minor suits, from each other, other than the color of the border. These colors are non-traditional, so you have to be careful about what suit you're looking at or whether it's a Major or Minor (for the record: Majors=black, Wands=violet, Cups=green, Pentacles=red, Swords=blue).
The art, by John Matson, is excellent. It's beautiful and very professionally-done. The pictures aim to communicate some of the same ideas as the corresponding tarot cards but without using the traditional tarot icons. So the Death equivalent (here titled "Release") shows a man beginning to disrobe, suggesting that death is a laying-aside of the shell of the persona. The scenes have a surreal quality to them which makes it easy and fun to free-associate during readings. I like the fact that different ethnicities are depicted. I also like the faces -- while they're all attractive, they also look like real people.
Just as the Majors use traditional tarot concepts, so do the Minors use RWS concepts. So, for example, the 6 of Cups card is called "Giving & Receiving" and shows several pairs of cupped hands, holding colored balls of glowing light.
What I like about this deck is that you can use it in different ways. You could entirely ignore the tarot aspect of it and just go by the images and titles. Or you could call to mind the RWS equivalent of each card and let that inform and deepen your card interpretations. Or something in between.
It's a fun exercise for someone who is really into RWS-type decks to explore the Minors and see which cards open up new avenues or possibilities which one might bring back to one's RWS practice.
The keywords and phrases are all verbs. For this reason, this is a good deck to use for "how shall I handle this" kinds of questions, but perhaps not such a good one for questions like "will I pass my test tomorrow?" For example, I just laid out five cards and the titles told me, "Observe," "Balance," "Release," "Giving & Receiving," and "Choose Your Battles." If you did want to ask more predictive-type questions, you might want to lean more towards bringing to mind the equivalent RWS cards as you do the reading.
For this reason this might be a nice deck for a tarot beginner to use, because the cards' messages as contained in the titles are more direct, while still allowing for creative interpretation of the images. But as I say, I also think they're good for experienced tarot readers to suggest some new possibilities.
There's also an overall comforting aspect to the deck, as befits it as a Hay House publication. The traditionally negative cards are still negative but the images often give a positive aspect as well to the situation. I know this kind of thing bothers some readers. I'm okay with it, since the negativity, while a bit muted, is still there, and since we all could use some comfort sometimes (especially this week).
This is also a good deck for those readers who sometimes get very frustrated with the existence of court cards. (Am I one of those readers? No comment!
)Through reading about tarot over the years, I've certainly become informed about other esoteric subjects, but chakras is a subject I've somehow managed to remain ignorant about. I wouldn't know a chakra if I tripped over one. The chakra cards in this deck are also not particularly evocative, so I simply laid them aside.
From reading around on the Internet, I gather that there have been two printings of this deck. The first printing has gilded edges, and there have been problems reported by readers that the cards arrived stuck together, and pulling them apart damaged the cards. Then there's a second printing with no gilded edges, presumably done to fix the problem. I don't think there's any way to tell which you're going to get until you open the box.
My deck is the one with the gilded edges. When I opened the box, the cards were indeed sticking together in clumps of ten cards or so. I took each clump and gently bent the clump back and forth a few times to loosen it, and then was able to separate the individual cards without difficulty, and now it's fine.
I do want to note one puzzle: what was Ann Hentz's contribution? At the back of the book, there are bios for "The Author" (John Holland), "The Artist (John Matson), and "The Tarot Consultant" (Ann Hentz). In the intro, Holland definitively states he created the deck. I don't mean to insinuate that there's anything fishy going on, but in the tarot world we're used to knowing generally what roles deck creators played in their creations. For this set, there's no indication as to who did what. Who guided the artist (if anyone) in terms of what to put in the images? Who came up with the card titles? It would be nice to know.
For anyone interested, there's a Youtube interview about the deck with John Holland and Colette Baron-Reid, who has very cute dogs.
