Halloween Tarot - Kipling West written by Diane Wilkes
If you wish to purchase this deck, click here.
If you wish to purchase the deck/book set, click here.
When I first glimpsed U.S. Games' advertisement for this deck,
words like
one-off and rip-off came immediately to mind. Once a tarot
collector
realizes that she can't buy every tarot deck ever created and
eat, she
becomes the personification of Justice, discriminating sharply
with sword
and scales. The idea of a Halloween Tarot got slashed and dumped
in my
(frankly prejudiced) mind--until I read Michele Jackson's
positive review
of the deck and really looked at the pictures displayed.
Yes, the deck's a Rider-Waite-Smith clone. But it's such a
cute, clever,
Rider-Waite-Smith clone that only the most deadened vampire could
resist
it. Instead of the traditional Wands, Cups, Swords, and
Pentacles, we have
Imps, Ghosts (as opposed to the more intense and negative Ghouls,
I
assume), Bats, and Pumpkins. The cardboard box shows the Six of
Pumpkins
(read Six of Pentacles), with a Wednesday
Addams-turned-adolescent doling
out candy and trinkets from her pumpkin to a costumed cat and
ghost, as a
real cat looks on from her/his perch on a windowsill. It's a
kinder,
gentler, and no doubt less-archetypal image of the person favored
by fate
dispensing noblesse oblige to lesser mortals. But it gets its
point across
despite the whimsy.
One could gripe that a Halloween deck should be really dark
and
scary--this deck is fun with a capital F. But to me, Halloween is
a time
for candy and costumes and fun with a capital F. A little macabre
goes a
long way with me...and this is scary like the Munsters, not the
Solleone.
The Six of Bats (aka Six of Cups) shows a pumpkin-headed
individual
rowing two figures across troubled waters--but this time a cat
sits at the
prow (better than a rainbow any time). The Juggler in the Two of
Pumpkins
(Pentacles) balances pumpkins instead of coins while the
omnipresent puss
observes all, but the message, again, is more than kin to the
traditional
R-W-S. If you are passing familiar with that deck, you can pick
up the
Halloween Tarot and read with ease and delight as you look at the
offbeat
yet R-W-S-faithful renderings.
Two major differences between the deck and R-W-S are that 1)
most of the
scenes in the Halloween deck are at night and 2) all contain a
cat. The
second fact endears the deck to me even more than the clever and
twisty
take Kipling West brings to this project. That she created Tarot
for Cats,
an equally adorable and clever deck, just adds more icing to this
particular tarot cake. It's Halloween--blow your diet! Buy it and
don't
count pentacles (or pumpkins).
If you wish to purchase this deck, click here.
If you wish to purchase the deck/book set, click here.
Diane Wilkes
http://geocities.com/~oldgreycat
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