Talisman Tarot deck
Limited 2nd edition of the Talisman Tarot! Now with a silkier finish for playing-card style shuffling.
Pictured are the trumps from the Talisman Tarot. For now, please see more card images @talisman.tarot ✨
* * *
The Talisman Tarot is informed by magic, cartomancy, and Tarot de Marseille. Channeling blazing emblematic stamps of power via entranced monoprint, pen & ink, & paint, the deck delivers incisive, potent doses of power & discernment.
Riffing on the TdM and shooting it through with raw subtle magic, the Talisman Tarot cross-pollinates its visual vocabulary with the straight-shooting language of cartomancy. With the Talisman Tarot, TdM lets down its hair a bit, forgets rigid rules, and dances with raw power.
The deck, printed here on the East Coast of the U.S., features premium 410 gsm silk cover, satiny silk coating, & a durable, gorgeous post-consumer recycled silk-cover box. The card backs and box design radiate the beauty of azure and gold lokta paper. The accompanying book also features a sumptuous cover & the finest paper.
If you've been stymied by TdM decks or left cold by overly-rigid systems, Talisman Tarot and its accompanying Amor Fati book will ignite a slow-burning fire in your heart for the power of this style of Tarot. Want to learn most how to do the most deeply rhythmic, lucid, stunningly & stingingly accurate readings, how to use Tarot as a tool for greater trust & manifest delight? Treat yourself or a pal to the Talisman Tarot deck and accompanying Amor Fati book.
* * *
More details on the Talisman Tarot:
Tarot has been experiencing a boom in popularity lately, but to me Tarot transcends trends: it's about distilling power, clarity, & insight into talismanic images that unlock practical wisdom.
Following up on the success of my Jewitchy deck the Hidden Light Tarot (first printing 2016/5776), my new Talisman Tarot deck is inspired by magic, cartomancy, and the Tarot de Marseille. Channeling blazing emblematic stamps of power via entranced monoprint, pen & ink, & paint, the deck delivers incisive, potent doses of power & discernment.
A queer descendant of the Tarot de Marseille, the Talisman Tarot participates in its iterative tradition— passed down over the past few centuries via woodcut runs, artists’ innovations, & printers’ errors— riffing on the TdM and shooting it through with raw subtle magic & cross-pollinating its visual vocabulary with the straight-shooting language of cartomancy. With the Talisman Tarot, TdM lets down its hair a bit, forgets rigid rules, and dances with raw power.
The trumps began as sigils drawn in pen & ink while in an entranced state. The aim was to allow their powers to come through in a recognizable riff on their established forms, yet with an aleatory looseness doing justice to their numinous arrival. Brought through in inspired ink strokes initially, the cards could then show themselves more fully through the cut & stamp of monotype printmaking.
I chose planographic printmaking as my method because I wanted the cards’ production to enact their power: the cards themselves as stamp & seal, where each cut counts & makes an indelible mark. Though the deck is stylistically unified, attentive eyes will notice some subtle differences as the trumps blaze through cutting their way from ether into ink, the court cards subtly comport themselves according to their station & style, & the pips array the kaleidoscopic ebb & flow of their respective suits.
Blazing portals, the powers of the Talisman Tarot trumps are bold, stark, shining: macrocosmic, archetypal if you’re into that, anchoring you in particular qualitative states if you’d like. But the important thing to remember is that like all powers they are relational, contextual: you read them not by fixed meaning but according to what they’re activating in a particular context, what their power implies there, in this pattern, in this sequence, in response to this articulate or unuttered inquiry. The Talisman Tarot invites you to get to know the trumps as individual, ineluctably relational, powers.
The pips sip from the stream of cartomancy, where suits boil down into black (spades & clubs) & red (hearts & diamonds), court cards boldly figure their constitutive powers, & simple intervals of number account for the incalculable intricacies of lived experience. So the swords & wands are figured in indigo, the cups & coins in ruby red. In the Talisman Tarot, I preserve the court cards’ strangeness— the uncanny sense that we’ve wandered into their landscape as much as they have into ours— while whittling away some of the calcified ethnic & gender elements of their forms. From those stripped-down cuts into the inked printing plate emerge figures who embody particular modes of being and acting in the world.
The Talisman Tarot folds in cartomantic tradition as a way of honoring the earthy roots of divinatory inquiry. If divination is a practice of discernment, alignment, & attunement, getting good at it entices you to become impeccable, clean, razor’s edge sharp, even if only in that interval of reading. Ultimately the aim is increasingly impeccable action— otherwise, why bother to inquire? The Talisman Tarot equips you to engage divination as a practice of honing practical wisdom.
