Caroline Smith and John Astrop
Published by OH! (2020), Viking Penguin (1988)
ISBN 9781787395947
RRP £24.99
The deck was created by husband and wife team Caroline Smith (artist) the Moon Oracle (2021).
The Elemental Tarot comes in a sturdy 155mm x 215mm x 35mm drawer box containing a 128 page paperback guidebook (a little smaller than A5) and a full Tarot deck of 75mm x 120mm cards. The cardstock is of a good thickness producing a stack of cards 30mm thick which makes for quite a handful when you’re trying to shuffle. My wife found the deck impossible to handle and we resorted to splitting the deck in two and riffle shuffling them. You might ask, “why not just put all the cards on the table and just mix them up?” It’s a good question, and shuffling the cards this way would produce a deck with reversed cards, wouldn’t it? Well, yes, but there’s a reason for not wanting reversed cards in this deck which I will explain later. The cards had a pronounced bend along their long side; a few unboxing videos also mention this problem. It was necessary to straighten the cards to make the deck more usable.
The deck follows the RWS system but takes as its main theme the Elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water plus Spirit. In addition this deck concerns itself with Astrology, Gods and Egyptian symbols. The images on the cards, designed by Smith and Astrop and painted by Caroline Smith, are drawn in a lively, abstract way with large splashes of vivid colour; they are easy to understand with symbology that is easy to find and decipher. The backs of the cards are printed with a block of two repeated images in pale grey green. The cards are finished in a clear, semi-gloss protective coating which adds to their durability and greatly enhances the handling.
The Major Arcana is straightforward. Most of the cards are recognisable from the RWS deck but with a few changes; the Magician has become the Trickster, the High Priestess is The Virgin, The Wheel of Fortune is Fate. The information on each card is easy to understand and logically laid out. You need only go through the cards a few times with the with the guidebook before you can start to shuffle some energy into the cards and begin some readings.
In addition to its image, each card has a great deal of information for the reader to uncover. On the top left corner is its two astrological symbols, and in the bottom centre its elemental symbol–a green square for Earth (Possessions – I Have), a turquoise circle for Air (Intellect – I Think), a red triangle for Fire (Creativity – I Will), a blue crescent for water (Emotions – I Feel) and a blue oval for Spirit, for the Major Arcana. On each Major Arcana card is its name, a keyword, and a few lines of poetry based on a text recovered from an Egyptian town in 1945. Each Minor Arcana card has its number, image and name, an image of a God or Goddess, a keyword at the top, and some Egyptian words in the top right corner.
In this deck the RWS court cards are called Family cards: Daughter, Son, Mother and Father. Family cards are unlike court cards in that they refer to real people rather than to events or possibilities; a Mother Family card in a spread refers to a real mother. This is similar to the interpretation used by Kim Krans in the Wild Unknown Tarot (2016).
The guidebook will be your essential companion as you learn the layout of the cards and their symbology, particularly that of the Minor Arcana, but there are easy to follow Quick Keys to the Major and Minor Arcana, a Key Table to the Egyptian words, and a list of number meanings at the rear of the guidebook so there is no need to learn a long list of card meanings before you use the cards.
Finally, reversals. Upright and Reversed cards in this system are called Positive and Negative Interpretations. Smith and Astrop describe the normal method of reversing cards in a RWS deck a ‘silly system’, adding that some cards could stay ‘stubbornly reversed for dozens of readings’. In their system, cards contain both negative and positive possibilities; ‘nothing is all good or all bad’. Their view is that the cards should only be read in an upright position and should be shuffled to accommodate this. Each card meaning in the guidebook has a positive and negative statement, a few lines to flavour the ‘In a Reading’ section.
The beauty of this deck is that you don’t need to understand something to include it into your readings. I’m not terribly au fait with Astrology but I was still able to include it in my readings because of the support in the guidebook. The deck is a lovely system of Elements, Symbols, Images, Astrology, Poetry and Philosophy that works seamlessly to provide multi-layered card readings in a very short time and for this reason I think this deck would be ideal for those new to Tarot or those with limited reading experience.
By Stephen Tucker
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