Strength Tarot card from the Major Arcana.
© 2024 Sarah Hudock, all rights reserved.
This is a reprinted post from my other Substack, called My Frequency. If you would like to follow more of these posts in the future, please consider subscribing to that in addition, as after this I won’t post them here. This is just to let you all know what I am up to.
My Frequency:
So here we go. I am creating a new Tarot deck.
I began this project in December of 2023, and it is unlike any art I have done before. While throughout my life I have largely painted animals (plenty of animals in the Tarot also, thankfully), I have rarely drawn or painted so many human images, clothing, castles, and other such things.
I started playing around with Tarot at around age 12. Over the years many, many different Tarot decks have been made out there in the world, but I seldom find artwork that I genuinely admire in them, and I am including the Rider-Waite deck in this. As time goes by the new decks just seem to get worse. They are full of random stuff like anime, cartoons, comic-book art, cryptic fantasy art, and lately, endless variations of Woke. Even AI has crept in. While some of it is pretty, and I am fine with the general creativity of other people, in my opinion much of this newer Tarot art is just not well done, it is often cheaply printed, and too often favors dark, negative imagery leaving out beauty and light.
It doesn't do the Tarot justice. Meanings have been distorted and lost, and many decks don't include any recognizable symbolism at all. To me, Tarot cards are most useful when full of deeply meaningful, rich pictography with ancient significance, echoing archetypes our souls recognize. Tarot, when the cards' significance is respected, can be a profound metaphysical method of communicating with our own higher consciousness and soul.
My deck will include many recognizable scenes to those of you familiar with the Rider Waite Tarot deck, but will also include some which are very different, as several of Smith’s images do not make sense to me regarding their meanings. I have also cut out much of the Hebrew symbology in favor of Egyptian, Astrological, and Alchemical.
My Major Arcana will also have a very different order to it. Within the standard popular Tarot decks such as Rider-Waite and Thoth (which have generally informed all which came after them), it is my opinion that the existing order may have been purposely scrambled in an effort to keep the Tarot "occulted" (hidden), and thereby confusing and misdirecting the ordinary person into thinking they just aren't wise enough to understand them. On the other hand, too many people also regard those decks as gospel set in stone, and I believe this is a mistake. More on all of this later.
But first, the sketches. Starting on December 1, 2023, I did 78 rough sketches in 82 days - it took all winter. Now I am refining the drawings and soon will begin the paintings. There being 78 Tarot images in all, this means 78 finished pencil drawings, and then 78 paintings on top of that, so this will take time. In the end each card will have an original sketch and an original painting associated with it.
Lastly, I will begin in Photoshop to adapt my paintings to an actual printed deck of cards.
Follow my progress and wish me luck!
What a fascinating project! A huge amount of dedication. Best of luck with it and I look forward to the art and inspiration.
That's an incredible undertaking you're working at. Finally got my first deck a few days ago after being a student of the major arcana archetypes for some time.
I agree with you with how most all decks are not trustworthy as far as speaking to the archetypal deep mind that is Universal and most likely held in the collective Akashic. Many revamped systems likely go straight to Aquarian Saturn without first have a strong foundation and respect for Capricornian Saturn, if you know what I mean. That would make those decks very Luciferian in nature, in my estimation. But being a very new student to Tarot I have to go with Rider-Waite since it seems to be regarded as the most trustworthy.
The little hip pocket manual that was included in the deck I just bought claims that the only change was that the Strength and Justice cards got switched in position, but I imagine that the occulted nature you are talking about goes much deeper than this change, no?
Also, maybe this is a noob assertion, but wouldn't some say that Hebrew archetypal symbolism IS Egyptian in the sense that esoteric Judaism emerged from Egyptian esotericism? Or would this be an over-simplification?
Also, I'm curious what your opinion is on what makes certain decks trustworthy as far as connecting to the actual deep mind archetypal psychology of humans goes? (And as a side note, with all this paranormal/alien agenda stuff going on nowadays, being ...injected into humanity's consciousness, I wonder if all that extra archetypal stuff in the new decks are real archetypes of ...some other beings' consciousness, just not humanity's...)
Looking forward to seeing your deck, and do hope you will share your reasoning and meaning behind your changes ...that is, if the magickian doesn't mind revealing her tricks.