78 Steps

Posted By Jade on September 16, 2009

The Empress’ perfumes: sandalwood, myrtle, rose, sage

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Posted By Jade on September 15, 2009

The Empress’ magickal weapon: girdle or belt

Belt - Strength, alertness, integrity. Control over one’s instincts.

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Posted By Jade on September 10, 2009

The Empress’ plants: corn, myrtle, rose, clover, cypress

Clover

Protection. Youthfulness. Luck. Love, fidelity. Money, success.

Corn

Protection. Luck. Divination. Fertility. The cycle of birth, death, rebirth.

Cypress

Protection, comfort. Consecration. Death, eases grief, helps the deceased gain luck and love after death. Longevity, healing.

Myrtle

Love. Fertility. Youthfulness. Peace. Money.

Rose

Love. Fertility. Clairvoyance, divination. Healing. Luck. Protection, purification. Beauty.

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Posted By Jade on September 9, 2009

The Empress’ animals: sparrow, dove, swan

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Posted By Jade on September 8, 2009

Finally, we come to the end of our list of divination decks. If I’ve missed any decks you’d like to see covered, please feel free to leave me a comment. If I get enough, I’ll do a “reader’s choice” list.

• Ukiyoe Tarot: A deck based on Japanese Ukiyoe prints. Created by Koji Furuta, this 78 card deck has illustrated Majors, but “pip-style” Minors. The Minor Arcana do have some minimal background illustration that can help a reader find the mood of the card, if not the actual meaning.
• Viscounti Sforza Tarot: Created by A. Atanassov & Giordano Berti, this deck is a reproduction of one of the oldest known tarot decks. The cards are extremely large — making them awkward to shuffle. The Majors are fully illustrated, but the Minors are pips with some decorative foliage. The cards have no captions or other wording. This is a great deck for tarot history buffs.
• Witches Tarot: This deck by Ellen Cannon Reed is not the Tarot of the Witches made famous by the James Bond Movie Live and Let Die. This is a pagan/Wiccan-focused deck. All 78 cards are fully illustrated and the Major Arcana show the Sephiroth that border each card’s corresponding Kabbalistic path.
• Xultun Tarot: Based on Mayan imagery, this 78 card deck by Peter Balin has fully illustrated Majors and Minors. The Major Arcana are numbered only, using the Mayan numbering system and can be fitted together like a puzzle to form one large picture. The Minor Arcana have captions in five languages, including English.
• Yeager Tarot of Meditation: Created by Marty Yeager, this deck has a dramatically illustrated Major Arcana only loosely similar to the RWS (Rider Waite Smith) deck.  The Minor Arcana are pip cards set against colored backgrounds (different colors for each suit) reminiscent of space scapes and are less dramatically rendered, almost cartoon-like.
• Zerner-Farber Tarot: This richely illustrated deck by Amy Zerner & Monte Farber is a feast for the eyes. All 78 cards are illustrated using a unique type of collage, incorporating illustrations, fabric pieces, trims and other odds and ends. This is a smaller sized version of the couple’s Enchanted Tarot.

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Posted By admin on September 2, 2009

The winner of this month’s contest is … Reshet. Please send me a mailing address and I’ll get your tarot bag out to you as soon as I can. .

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Posted By Jade on September 2, 2009

After a long wait, here’s the P – T of our list of divination decks:

• Pomo Tarot: A post-modern tarot deck by Brian Williams, the creator of the Renaissance Tarot. A fully pictorial deck, the images are simple watercolors based on famous works of art. The four suits have been “updated”: bottles (cups), money (coins/pentacles), guns (swords), and TVs (wands/clubs). Williams has also “updated” the court cards as Man, Woman, Boy, and Girl. Many of the Major Arcana have also been renamed to reflect the post-modern theme. For example: Wheels (Chariot), Idiot (Fool), Mom (Empress).
• Quantum Tarot: A photographic collage deck by Christopher Butler & Kay Stopforth, it uses a variety of images to capture the essence of the sub-atomic world. Originally published as a 22-card art deck, there is also a 78-card version available from Amazon.com.
• Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg: A 78 card, fully-pictorial deck begun by Russian artist Yuri Shakov and completed by another unknown Russian artist after Shakov’s death. The artwork on this deck resembles traditional Russian miniature paintings and depict scenes of Russian fairy tales. The colors of the deck are rich and vibrant, particularly because of the deck’s black background. Some cards’ imagez seem based on the RWS (Rider Waite Smith) deck, but many others divurge greatly.
• Stairs of Gold (Tavaglione) Tarot: An Italian deck by artist Tavaglione, The Stairs of Gold Tarot is useful for anyone working with Elphas Levi’s magickal systems. The card names are in Italian and each card depicts several correspondences, including Hebrew letter, Sanskrit letter, Kabbalistic path, playing card suit, astrological and elemental glyphs, and more. Only the Major Arcana are pictorial — the Minors are simple “pip” cards.
• Tantric Dakini Oracle: Created by Penny Slinger & Nik Douglas and originally published as The Secret Dakini Oracle, this 65 card divination deck uses photographic collage to illustrate Tantric ideas. Though the cards are numbered 0 to 64, they do actually break down into 22 cards (cards 0-21) that correspond to the Major Arcana of a traditional tarot deck and 40 cards (cards 22-61) that correspond to the Minor Arcana “pips” (no court cards), as well as three addtional “timing” cards representing the past, present, and future.

That’s the end of part four. Next time, we’ll finish up the list with decks U – Z.

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Tags: decks

Posted By admin on August 27, 2009

First off, let me apologize for not finishing the A-to-Z list of decks. I have a chronic rheumatoid condition that flared really badly, finally ending in a trip to the urgent care clinic last night and a cortizone shot. Things are better but my brain is still a little foggy. I’m hoping to resume normal posting schedule on Monday, when I’ll pick up the list where I  left off.

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Posted By Jade on August 18, 2009

The Empress’ gemstones: emerald, rose quartz, coral, turquoise

Emeralds help us to see our spiritual sides more clearly. They promote healing mental and emotional wounds, strengthen the mind and memory, ward off nightmares and insomnia, and give positive energy. Like many green stones, they attract prosperity, abundance, business success and wealth. Additionally, emeralds help boost the immune system, clarify psychic energies and impressions and bring us equilibrium and peace of mind. They’re also said to attract faeries and elves and to aid divination and meditation.

Rose Quartz – Stimulating the good in humanity, it promotes art, culture, and relationships. It helps us keep our emotions soft and under control. It’s also the “stone of gentle love”; it helps us when we wish to reconcile with someone or when dealing with our children. It helps ease pain, especially emotional pain, and teaches us to forgive. It emits a cooling energy to help soothe away negativity and harmful emotions. Rose Quartz also helps us recover our sense of self-worth and helps us deal with stress.

Coral - A good stone to help ward off depression. Coral is also protective; it can be used to ward off the Evil Eye, possession, and other psychic/magickal attacks. It can also help protect us from theft, accidents, acts of violence, sterility, and poison. Additionally, Coral is good for helping our gardens grow and produce  foodstuffs. It can be considered a manifestation of Spirit or the “fifth element” and can be used to symbolize the Divine. It’s frequently placed on graves for protection.

Turquoise - A stone of protection, turquoise helps protect the wearer and is particularly good when traveling. It can help draw wealth. In relationships, it can strengthen faithfulness. It’s also use to dispel negative energy and promotes meditation. It can help counter insomnia and bring us rest. Turquoise helps bring us love, luck, courage, beauty, healing, and friendship. It helps us connect with our spirit-nature (or Higher Self) and promotes integration of all of our selves. It’s a very good “all-purpose” stone.

Sources:

• Gemstone Magickal Properties
• Gemstones and Crystals: Properites and Magickal Uses
• Healing and Magickal Properities of Gemstones (multiple letters)
• Magical Properties of Gemstones

Related Posts:

• The Empress
• The Fool: Color and Gem
• The Magician: Gem Stones
• The High Priestess: Gem Stones

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Tags: Correspondences, Empress, gemstone, Major Arcana, weekly card

Posted By Jade on August 17, 2009

Today, we cover decks K-O. I apologize for this getting posted much later than I’d originally intended; I’ve been fighting the creep crud. But we’re (cross fingers) back on schedule. As always, please share your favorite decks in the comment section below and remember to enter our contest for a hand-knitted tarot bag. More on that at the end.

• Kabbalah Cards: Not a tarot deck, the Kabbalah Cards (by Paul Roland and Sylvia Gainsford) are 33 cards consist of 11 Major Cards (one for each of the Sephiroth) and 22 Minor Cards (one for each of the paths that connect the Sephiroth). The cards are very cheerful and colorful.
• Legend: the Arthurian Tarot: As an amatuer Arthurian scholar, this is one of my all-time favorite decks. Creator Anna-Marie Ferguson does a wonderful job of blending the tarot with Arthurian tales, not an easy task where you can have multiple versions of a single story. As a more intuitive reader, I generally don’t buy books about a particular deck; rather, I let my own intuition, guided by the card’s imagery help me arrive at a cards meaning. I make an exception for this one. I highly recommend buying the book-deck combination pack. For those of you who already have the deck, I believe you’ll find the book, A Keeper of Worlds, well worth the investment. All of the cards, except the Pages, are heavily pictorial, each one depicting a scene from an Arthurian legend. The page are animals that represent the fundamental nature of their suit. The illustrations on the deck are breath takingly beautiful.
• Mage Tarot: This deck was created for use with White Wolf Publishing’s Mage: the Ascension roleplaying game. And it definitely shows. The game is set in a “world gone wrong” version of our modern world. The world of Mage is dark, corrupted, and the deck shows that in striking detail. Created by Jackie Cassada & Nicky Rea, the cards are fully pictorial; many of the cards take the imagery of the RWS (Rider Waite Smith) deck and twist them to suit the Mage setting. Even as someone who’s played the game since it came out and has been reading tarot for 25+ years, I find I can’t use this deck for anything other than in-game purposes.
• Morgan-Greer Tarot: Like the Hansen-Roberts, this deck is a re-visioning of the RWS deck. Created by Bill Greer & Lloyd Morgan, many people find this to be a very “friendly” deck. The colors are pleasantly bright without being garish or child-like. This is a great deck for beginning readers and for doing public readings.
• Nature Speak Oracle: Created by Ted Andrews, who also wrote the books Animal-Speak and Nature-Speak, this deck has 60 cards divided into four suits:
  • Landscape Oracles
  • Flower Oracles
  • Tree Oracles
  • Seasons and Climate Oracles

  Photographs illustrate each card’s meaning.

• Ocean Oracle: At 200 cards, this is the largest deck I’ve seen. Deck creator Michelle Hanson has brought seashells from the ocean to even the most land-locked and urbane cities. Each of the cards in the deck sports a photograph of a different type of sea shell; each of the shells is fully described in the accompanying book. Many of it’s users claim that the Oracle’s answers can be extremely direct.

That’s end of part three. Tomorrow (if my body cooperates), we’ll cover P-T.

As I mentioned above, please feel free to comment on your favorite deck below. Also, you can enter our contest to win a free hand-knit tarot bag. Just put a note somewhere in your comment that you’d like to be entered for the drawing. The winner will be announced on this blog.

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