Christiana Cook
Tarot Deck
Lover Squirrel Cup Priestess Teacher Snake
I'm making a tarot deck...
My dreams have been talking to me since I was a child. Sometimes they're beautiful—a world exploding and ending in flower petals,—sometimes strange and epic—a long adventure with Val Kilmer ending by sliding out of a wall into my elementary school cafeteria onto the stage,—sometimes horrifying—a voice getting louder and louder repeating the word, 'money' over and over. Dreams talk, but not clearly. They feel, in a messy, sensational, indistinguishable way. They have meaning, but it's not a meaning you can easily dissect.
Dreams, journals, poems, French Surrealism, sensations, automatic writing, Archetypal Psychology, songs, songwriting, Jung, metaphor-making, and the tarot. For me, all of these deal with image overlapping feeling overlapping meaning. The edges of image, feeling, and meaning are blurry. They need to be squinted at, or seen sideways, or heard echoed down a long hallway. Interestingly, it's better if you don't take them apart. They need to be what they are.
For example: The sunset, the song, the doorway bright in a dimming room, the smell of growing sage and damp red dust, the rustle of muted voices, my fingertips pressing into guitar strings, a warm human next to me on a low chair, close—all of these images together evoke for me a peculiar feeling of wide love and preemtive loss. I know the feeling was meaningful. The meaning of it burnt deep down into the heart of me, but I can't take one thing out and decide that that is what it all meant. It must exist as one messy beautiful complicated whole.
So. I am making a tarot deck. I am studying and reading. I am automatic writing. I am walking, writing poems, dreaming, and listening. Sometimes I'll read a sentence in a book about the tarot and an image will come to me. Sometimes I'll be drawing and a feeling will come over me. The deck I am creating is researched (It will include a comprehensive, exhaustive, delightfully long bibliography!) but it is also felt, sensed, and imagined! Making it is an exercise in qualitative research, in image making, and in intuition. Most importantly it is about playing, telling stories, making meaning, and making magic!
-Christy
I hope to have this deck published by January 2022. Please sign up here for updates if you are interested in purchasing!