If you go down to the woods today, you’ll get a big surprise! In the beginning there was our Old Bear Oracle, a 52-card, personality-driven pack with a multitude of uses — it can even be used to play your favorite traditional card games! Now the bears have banded together to form a complete traditional Tarot deck, with all of Tarot’s deep symbolism intact. Having strong links to the classic Rider/Waite/Smith pack, and occasional crafty allusions to Crowley’s Thoth, this fully-evolved tarot is ready to become your hardest-working and most congenial deck. Old Bear Tarot is a full 78-card pack, featuring 42 completely new designs, including 22 original Major Arcana cards. Of the Minor Arcana, 20 images are brand-new, while...
Oh, the things I could have done in my mis-spent youth if I had had access to the kind of software and tools I have at my fingertips today! This little comical endorsement from a favorite fictional friend took seconds to knock out, but it would have been impossible in the '80s before the advent of the home computer. The same company that makes the software that allows me to create my tarot decks also creates audio and video editing software that brings professional=level tools into millions of households. And I used them recently to correct Peter Jackson's grievous exploding of J.R.R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT. Much as I loved Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films, I thought that what he...
The theatrical arts are a perfect medium to express the themes of the Tarot, and my latest completed deck, “Persephone’s Torch Tarot” is far from the first tarot pack to adopt a theatrical guise. No less an artist than Pamela Colman Smith turned to the Edwardian-era stage and its styles, manners and decorations for inspiration when drawing her famous pack; almost a hundred years earlier, what is known today as the “Swiss 1JJ” tarot took an overtly theatrical approach with its Harlequin fool and a “Maison de Dieu” card (No. 16) that is quite clearly a performance scene taking place on a stage. PERSEPHONE’S TORCH TAROT is merely one more in a long succession of traveling theatrical companies in a box,...
I recently had a letter from a customer who thought it would be a great idea to trim her second edition Arthur Rackham Oracle. No more than seven cards in, she realized what a horrible mistake she’d made, and that she’d ruined the deck. Somewhat less recently, I saw a YouTube video made by a woman who’d trimmed her Tinker’s Damn Tarot. As I looked at the cards that she had destroyed, it made me so mad that I couldn’t finish watching the video. Folks, my decks are not for trimming. Just Don’t Do It. I’m not like U.S. Games, that publishes everything to a set mass-market pattern and puts a goddamn white border around all the art of all...
On Sunday, May 3, 2020, I was forced to make the decision to end the life of my little Hunny. You know her from the SUN card from my TINKER'S DAMN TAROT revised second edition. There was a reason she graced that card with her presence. For fifteen years she was the light of my life, the best part of my life, the best thing that ever happened to me. And now she's gone. She died from a combination of heart disease AND kidney disease, both of which were farther along than I think the vet ever admitted to me. In late March, I noticed that she was breathing awfully hard. By the last week of April, I knew that...
