Tag: Philip Carr-Gomm

English Magic Tarot (Weiser Books)

On By benebellIn deck reviewLeave a comment

The English Magic Tarot was first published in 2015 by Weiser Books. According to its tagline, this deck is “rumoured to be the very key to the English Hermetic tradition . . . here restored in full.” Okay, you have my attention. Keep going.

This deck places you in that heyday of English magic, between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Early Modern period. These cards are set in the turbulent times of King Henry VIII and onward for about a century. The courtier on The Sun card is wearing clothing in the style of the mid-1500s, which the guidebook likens to Sir Francis Drake. Judgement features a giant Wicker Man going up in flames.

How would I describe the art style? Dramatic, hardboiled pulp fiction featuring swashbuckler protagonists set in 17th century England. Think John Constantine meets Three Musketeers with lots of mystery and mysticism. Also, with the mannerisms of 1950s comic book illustration.

Now let’s get into the depths of the tarot deck’s premise.

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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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