Tag: Druidry

DruidCraft Tarot: Meeting of Wicca and Druidry

On By benebellIn deck review, tarot community8 Comments

A while back Lisa, Dani, and Dustin of Three Fat Readers talked about the DruidCraft Tarot, and that inspired me to chat about the deck here in a blog post. This isn’t a deck review. It’s me sharing my personal experiences with the DruidCraft. Another reason I wanted to go out of my way to post this is as a bit of a passive-aggressive defiant response to a recent “most influential” or “best of” publication on contemporary tarot decks where the DruidCraft Tarot by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm, illustrated by Will Worthington was noticeably missing from that “best of” list. Like… whut?!

This was one of my go-to public reading decks from back in the day. When I was in my 20s, I did countless parties and social events with the DruidCraft. Some of the cards in these photos are going to be upside down because I wanted to show you my copy of the deck straight out of its tattered old box and I read reversals with the DruidCraft. What you’re seeing here is the exact order, upright and reversed, that the cards were in the very last time I used them… which was about a decade ago.

Click on photos for high-res, close-up viewing.

The premise of the deck is to be a synthesis of Wicca and Druidry, to express a path that the guidebook calls “The Old Ways.” The deck is also inspired by the Golden Dawn, which united “many of the disparate strands of the Western Magical Tradition . . . A quantum leap in the understanding and application of the Tarot occurred thanks to the stimulus of the Golden Dawn, and so we have drawn on this in The DruidCraft Tarot Deck for its intrinsic worth, and for its historical connection with the evolution of Druidry and Wicca” (cited from the guidebook).

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Cleansing a Tarot Deck

On By benebellIn Uncategorized5 Comments

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Many traditional Asian societies follow the lunar calendar (I once litigated a case involving an elder Taiwanese woman and all the document evidence she had was dated per the lunar calendar, which completely tripped us lawyers up and a lot of conversion work had to be done, but that is neither here nor there; just mentioning it to affirm that it really is still used today) and the super-traditional even believe that certain energies are more dominant during certain phases of the moon. Not kidding: they’d schedule major surgeries around certain phases of the moon because they believe they’ll bleed less and chances of success will be higher. They consult the Chinese almanac, which is based around the lunar calendar, for everything, from when to launch a business or throw a wedding ceremony to the optimal time for a funeral.

I’ll say that I haven’t lived or observed the universe long enough to confirm whether there is any validity to following moon phases, but if it worked for my ancestors and there is no actual adverse effects from continuing the tradition and it makes me personally feel closer to my heritage, then why the heck not. My mom was adamant about calibrating Hubby’s and my engagement and marriage to moon phases. Did it work? So far so good I’d say.

Anyway, that was a long tangent of an introduction. Sorry. This post is about cleansing a tarot deck.

1 cleansing tarot deck

To demonstrate, I’m using the DruidCraft Tarot deck by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm and Will Worthington (a highly recommended deck, by the way; though there is a great bit of nudity in the illustrations, which I understand why would be featured in a Wiccan-Druid-based deck, but just does not resonate well with me).

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