Waking
the Wild Spirit Tarot by Poppy Palin
Review by Lee A. Bursten
Waking
the Wild Spirit Tarot by Poppy Palin
Review by Lee A. Bursten
The artwork on many of these cards is truly remarkable.
Poppy Palin is a visionary illustrator who is capable of producing
wonderfully evocative and mysterious pictures.
Unfortunately, not all the pictures in the deck are as good as the best
of them; and, also unfortunately, I don’t think the author/artist has pulled
the pictures together into a conceptual framework which makes sense from a Tarot
standpoint.
Let me be clear; although I have a great fondness for
traditional Tarot decks, I’m not a strict traditionalist.
I don’t get terribly upset because an author has changed a card’s
title or because an artist has come up with a new way of illustrating one of the
traditional archetypes. I like very much, for example, the Robin Wood
Temperance card, in which the angel is juggling silver and gold balls instead of
pouring water from one cup to another. But
I do feel that the traditional concepts, the original archetypes, need to be
more or less intact even if they’re shown in a different way. Voyager, in my opinion, qualifies as a Tarot deck
because at least some facet of what has come to be accepted as the basic
concepts of each Major Arcana card has been retained.
But if those basic concepts are going to be thrown out the window
whenever the author/artist feels like it, then in my opinion it’s not a Tarot
deck. It could perhaps make a good
non-Tarot divination deck, but since this deck has been titled “Waking the
Wild Spirit Tarot,” I think it’s fair to judge it as a Tarot deck.
(Interestingly, in her book Palin variously refers to the deck as “the
Wild Spirit Divination Pack” and “Waking the Wild Spirit Tarot,” as if she
is perhaps herself unsure of how she wants us to regard it.)
The titles of the Major Arcana are all changed, and
subtitles added. Other decks do
this, and of course it’s a matter of personal preference as to whether these
changes are successful or not. Personally
I don’t feel that each card requires two titles; one is plenty for me.
If the Fool card is entitled “Wandering Minstrel,” do we really need
to have a subtitle, “Free Spirit”? And
does anyone really think that “Sky Dancer/Morning Star” is an improvement
over “The Sun”?
The deck certainly starts off well with the aforementioned
“Wandering Minstrel/Free Spirit” (Fool) card.
A more-or-less traditional Fool card, it shows a man in motley, with a
fool’s cap and a bundle on a stick and a guitar, running or leaping into the
air, accompanied by a dog, while a merry sun shines in the sky.
This card is the perfect embodiment of the phrase “riot of color.”
If Palin had fulfilled the promise of this card and created a set of
Majors which illustrated the traditional concepts in a similarly fresh and
colorful manner, then this would have been my kind of deck.
Unfortunately, that card is the beginning and end of any
recognizable Tarot symbology (except for the Moon and
Sun cards, which do show a moon and a sun).
Some of the Majors do retain some aspect of the traditional concept, and
in some Palin seems to abandon the concept altogether and substitute one more to
her liking. Her Temperance card,
for example, is titled “Inner Child/Spirit of Purity” and shows a young girl
sitting amid roses, along with a unicorn and two elves.
This picture in my opinion has nothing to do with the concepts of
balance, flexibility, or moderation which are usually assigned to this card.
The corresponding chapter in the accompanying book (also by Palin) speaks
mostly of purity and innocence, although Palin does throw in the words
“harmony” and “balance” often, as if by repeating them enough she will
convince us that this is a Temperance card.
I do like the “Transformation/Awakening
Spirit” (Judgement) card, which shows a pair of baby shoes which have been
gold-plated for posterity, a nice illustration for the concept of graduating to
another level of life, which is one valid interpretation of the traditional
Judgement card.
Palin takes an interesting approach to the Minors.
Eschewing the Rider-Waite-Smith-derived pictures of most decks, she has
instead chosen to use a number-plus-element system to arrive at an
interpretation for each card; that is, each number, 1 through 14 (11 through 14
are the Courts), is assigned a meaning, and the card’s meaning is arrived at
by combining the number meaning with the meaning of the suit.
This is a common method often used by readers who use decks with
unillustrated pip cards (i.e., cards Ace through 10), although readers often
differ as to the meanings of the numbers. Palin
uses (without attribution) the set of meanings written by Gail Fairfield, which
is to be found in Fairfield’s books Choice-Centered Tarot (recently
republished as Everyday Tarot) and
Choice-Centered
Relating and the Tarot. Palin
then creates a scene for each card which embodies the concept of the
number-plus-element meaning.
Some of these scenes are rather limiting.
The Knight of Earth is shown as the Giant in the tale of Jack and the
Beanstalk. The book describes him
as a “dirty, smelly, stingy tyrant” with no positive attributes, which seems
a rather harsh and narrow way to view a Court card.
Several cards in this deck are strikingly different in
style from the others, which may bother some people, for example the Five
of Fire.
The Page of Water, “The
Fortune Teller,” is a lovely card, showing a young woman sitting with her
dog on a street corner, with a crystal ball and three Tarot cards (that is, real
Tarot cards).
The Four of Water, “Blood
Bond,” shows a pair of lovers who have performed a ritual in which they
have drained a rather large amount of their blood into a cup.
It does not state in the book that they actually drink the blood, but
from the way the woman is offering the cup to the man, it certainly looks that
way. Yuck.
The Ace of Earth is a wonderful card in which a male nature
spirit waves his branch-like arms and coaxes a shoot
out of a seed.
This deck could possibly be a good one to work with, if one
were to treat it as a non-Tarot divination deck. I particularly liked the way older people are pictured with
grace and dignity, which I would like to see other deck authors and artists
emulate. But to me this deck is not
Tarot, and I don’t care for the way Palin has cavalierly tossed out important
concepts for apparently no good reason.
Actually, the reason does become apparent when one turns to
the accompanying book, Stories of the Wild Spirit.
After reading Diane Wilkes’s review, I was
determined to read the book with an open mind and to try to not let myself be
influenced by Diane’s articulate and impassioned views.
After reading the book, I have come to the conclusion that the book is
not as bad as Diane said it was. It’s
worse.
First of all, after the introductory chapters, the book is
written entirely in the first person, as each card’s character gets to tell us
its story. This device gets real
old, real fast. And let me tell
you, it’s quite a struggle to make it to the final card on page 285.
Readability has been sacrificed so that each of Palin’s characters gets
to make his or her point; and these points start to become distressingly similar
as one slogs through the book card by card.
Palin’s basic method is to take a me-against-the-world
attitude, which becomes more or less strident according to the mood of the card.
Some of the chapters, like the High Priestess and the Empress (sorry,
I’m giving up on Palin’s card titles), are relatively gentle; others, like
the Fool or Magician chapters, are quite harsh and harangue the poor reader.
The problem is that, after assuring us in the introduction
that her method is “friendly, unpressured, and gentle,” like “chatting
with a friend over a cup of tea at a farmhouse kitchen table,” Palin then
proceeds to cast the reader as her enemy, who must be alternately cajoled and
beaten into submission. She assumes
the reader embodies everything she hates in life.
I’ve never read a book which has made me feel so insulted.
The reader is referred to as “frowning,” “protecting yourself from
other people,” “smirking,” “like a bunch of stupid sheep,”
“daydreaming, reminiscing, distracted, busy,” “sick, moody, confused and lethargic.” What a downer. I
could go on, but you get the picture. And
that’s only from the first few cards.
The cards’ characters are avatars for the author herself,
who after insulting us then proceeds to lecture us on the proper way to live,
which is of course Poppy’s way. And
this, more than anything else, is what offends me about the entire set; Palin
has hijacked the traditional Tarot archetypes and used them to push her agenda.
Rather than seeing the Tarot as a system of symbols which can be used to
describe ourselves and the world around us for greater insight, she sees it as a
tool for proselytizing her ideas about how we ought to be conducting ourselves,
and she thinks nothing of tossing out large chunks of traditional Tarot if they
don’t serve her purpose. So
every card becomes a little didactic lesson in life, and if we don’t agree
then we are held in contempt.
I think one would have a hard time following Palin’s
commandments anyway, because they sometimes contradict themselves.
In the Fool chapter we are exhorted to “play the music of your teenage
years as you chop the vegetables for supper and you will still remember all the
words to those songs!” But in the Magician chapter we are berated for being “full
of meaningless song lyrics.”
Likewise, the Fool commands us to “turn away from the
bank and go into the travel agency,” and tells us he “won’t let you feel
guilty or out of control for spending more money than you have or buying an
uneconomical car.” But at the same time the Magician pities us “if you
cannot even think quietly, sensibly, reverently for one moment in your
high-pressure, high-achieving existence.”
“What do you truly achieve,” we are asked, “if you run hither and
yon, earning more and more yet gaining less and less in terms of real gold?”
Palin seems to have contempt for people who get up every morning to go to
work (whether at the office or at home), but she seems not to have made the
connection that if we do not earn our keep, we will be unable to make those
recommended detours to the travel agency or the Porsche dealership.
There are other oddities, such as in the Lovers’ chapter,
which is told from the point of view of the woman (I suppose the man’s
perspective doesn’t count). The
odd thing is that she describes a love affair which has ended, while the picture
shows them being quite cozy with each other.
The bottom line for me is, if Poppy Palin has so little interest in and respect for the traditional Tarot forms, I really don’t understand why she bothered to create a Tarot deck. I think she would have been better off creating a non-Tarot divination deck, where she could lecture and berate us to her heart’s content, without anyone expecting traditional Tarot symbols or concepts.
You can view a sample reading with this deck here.
If you would like to purchase this book/deck set, click here.
Waking the Wild Spirit Tarot by Poppy Palin
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN #: 0-7387-0097-5
Images © 2002
Llewellyn Worldwide
Review © 2002 Lee Bursten
Page © 2002 Diane Wilkes
