Tarot of Chateau Avenieres by Eugene Vinitski and Elsa Khapatnukovski

The Tarot of Chateau Avenieres is a faithful reproduction of the tarot art found on the walls of a chapel at the Chateau Des Avenieres in France. Eugene Vinitski and Elsa Khapatnukovski have produced an absolutely breathtaking deck for those who would like to collect a token of history.

If you appreciate good food and tarot mysticism, then when in southeastern France, visit the Chateau Des Avenieres near the commune of Cruseilles. From the Chateau you get a view of Mont Blanc and then, should you wish to visit Switzerland, it’s just a car ride away.

Source: chateau-des-avenieres.com

The Chateau was built some time between 1907 and 1913 by Mary Wallace Schillito, who commissioned a Hindu designer for the chapel, which was built around 1917. Mary Greer has blog post that shares more about the Chateau’s history, here.

Schillito was deeply fascinated in the esoteric arts and frequently visited the Parisian salons along with Papus and Oswald Wirth. She married a Hindu occultist, Assan Farid Dina.

View inside the tarot chapel

This was also the site where Oswald Wirth completed Le Tarot, des lmagiers du Moyen Age, or better known today as Tarot of the Magicians. In the above snapshot from inside the chapel, left to right you’ll see The Magician card, Death, Justice, and The Fool.

As Greer writes in her Foreword to the 2012 Weiser reprint of Tarot of the Magicians, “The chapel makes it clear by the way its images ascend into the vaulted ceiling, that Wirth’s own deck, rather than being a psychological or fortune-telling one, was created as a moral and initiatory Tarot that describes the apotheosis of human kind.”

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Golden Venetian Lenormand

The Golden Venetian Lenormand is a sister deck to Eugene Vinitski’s Venetian Tarot, which I’ve reviewed before here. Vinitski has teamed up with author, philologist, and art historian Elsa Khapatnukovski to produce a masterpiece of a Grand Jeu Lenormand, which consists of 54 cards (rather than the popularized Petit Lenormand or Petit Jeu Lenormand, which consists of only 36).

However, you can also select out the 35 Petit Lenormand cards and work with this deck as a Petit Lenormand. So in essence, you’re getting two decks in one. You’ll definitely want to purchase your copy of the Golden Venetian Lenormand via Vinitski’s Etsy shop here.

Like Vinitski’s Venetian Tarot, the Golden Venetian Lenormand is crafted in a High Renaissance style with a design focus on classical humanism.

The Lenormand oracle is a predictive fortune-telling system from the late 18th century based on the Game of Hope by Johann Kasper Hechtel, an illustrated edifying card game steeped in Christian allegories. In the 19th century, 16 more cards were taken from other well-known European cartomancy systems of the time and the 36-card Petit Lenormand was expanded into a 52-card fortune-telling deck, plus the additional 2 jokers.

By the way I love the little details of insight from Khapatnukovski. For example, the Fox card, No. 14, Khapatnukovski acknowledges that you’re not likely to come by a fox in Venice, but because it’s common symbolism in the Lenormand system, here it is. This particular fox is running over a canal holding a seagull in its mouth. The seagull, symbolic of freedom and a desire to dream, locked in the jaws of a fox, show the anguish of mind of a trapped individual.

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