Birthed during the global pandemic, The Fool’s New Journey Tarot is a 60-card deck that reorganizes the familiar order of the traditional 78. “Sixty Triumphs for a New Dawn.”

Per the deck description on the box: “In 2020, the world changed. The arrival of a worldwide pandemic ensured it could never be quite the same again. In the same way, facing new issues at every level of life, it is time for Tarot to change. The Fool must begin a new journey.”

“The Fool represents the soul of everyman . . . and goes through the life experiences depicted in the 21 cards of the Major Arcana,” wrote Eden Gray over half a century ago. The Majors, noted Gray, were like archetypes of the subconscious.

But why only these 21 cards of the Majors, as depicted by Pamela Colman Smith no less, as the immutable model for every tarot deck produced?

So begins the questioning that led to The Fool’s New Journey, a new sequence of cards that speak with the archetypal voice governing all beings on earth (to borrow language from Caitlin Matthews).

John Matthews then collaborated with artist Charles Newington for these new archetypal tarot images. Together, the two set out to create imagery that would be stripped of the traditional imagery as much as possible, and to keep these picture cards simple. Matthews then set these images into a new order, a reset of the tarot.

These 60 trump cards present a new look at the tarot, literally a new journey for The Fool. And yet it’s funny that we think of this as a diverging path from traditional tarot, because in its heyday, circa 15th and 16th centuries, we had the Minchiate Tarot of 96 cards, the 50-card Mantegna, which was also considered a tarot, and the quite popular pre-Golden Dawn Etteilla Tarot that has an ordering of the Majors to confound today’s RWS readers.

The journey of The Fool represents the journey of life itself, and so the premise here would be that we, the everyman, all begin before The Maze (Key 1). In the natural course, we then must embody The Believer (Key 2), but before we can move into the role of The Magician, we must confront The Shadow (Key 3). If The Magician is skill and cleverness, The Priestess (Key 5)  is wisdom and intuition. I love that in this New Journey, The Priestess is Key 5, what had been the traditional position of The Hierophant.

Continue reading “The Fool’s New Journey Tarot by John Matthews and Charles Newington” →