I was taught to read the I Ching by my mother when I was a very small child and for years it was my go to, even using the skill to read professionally in my early 20's. Regardless of this, I never really felt drawn to it. It was more of an inheritance than a choice - which you may argue that often the best magick is, but in this case I will disagree. I became more estranged from the system as time moved on until I stopped reading entirely and dropped divination from my practice. Over the years, the tarot popped up at regular intervals (at one point a tarot deck was even proposed as a project for the couture house I owned) and I felt more and more drawn to it but also completely intimidated by it's complexity until it won me over.
As an artist and practitioner, the Tarot is a perfect symbiosis of everything I work with, and as those things I wasn't quite comfortable working with someone else's vision and nothing I had seen fully integrated with my practice. Creating my own deck was a natural step and the biggest project of my life began to gestate.
The Tarot of Arcana Verte is unusual, even for a tarot deck where unusual is to be expected. To start, It features no human figures, only animals, insects and plants, secondly, it can be read as an oracle deck and as a tarot deck equally.
This deck seeks to teach us about the natural world. About the relationships and symbiosis between every living thing on this planet and how they and we all weave together in the web of wyrd. We are frequently so estranged from the natural world that we no longer understand that we are a part of it, and it of us. Although we may not realise it, no creature is superfluous. They all have a wisdom to impart. With this deck, I hope to help to rekindle our relationship and maybe help us to find our place again.
Although the cards are based on a Rider-Waite style, their meanings and readings do vary from that base and I am creating a grimoire to to accompany them. Each card gets a full essay of it's meaning and details including history and mythology of that creature (or set of creatures - many of the cards feature more than one)
In the meantime. the cards with their write-ups are published in my blog as they are completed.
The cards are not actively planned - I don't sit down and decide that X card should feature this animal, they are dreamed. They approach me. Much of my art is created from dreams and while in trance state and this is no different. Once I have chosen which card to paint, I wait for the dream that will tell me which creature is going to inhabit that card, then I work with that creature within a trance state for the finer details of the card.
This deck is still a work in progress, and will be published and for sale once complete.
