Tarot Deck of the Day - The Deviant Moon Tarot

[msesheta]

Hello,
I finally received my copy of The Deviant Moon tarot. I had been in a panic for weeks because all of my pre-orders kept falling through. Jeannette at The Tarot Garden came through in spades!

I love this deck. It speaks to the melancholy, lunar images of our dreams and bring to life some of our most closely held fears. Despite the disturbing (to some) artwork, this deck is easily used for readings. If you look at the 3 of Swords below you will see that the figure is touching one of the blades (there is a small drop of blood there) - she needs to know if the pain she feels is real or imagined (this is, after all, the suit of the intellect and the mind - quite often we think things are worse than they really are or we invent pain for various manipulative reasons). It seems to be real.

The Ace of Cups is perhaps the most beautiful rendering of this card that I have ever seen. From the LWB:

"An Angel lovingly cradles the golden chalice against her body. Her warm spirit invigorates the liquid she holds, inviting the moon to sip of its contents.
Upright - Abundant pleasure, fullness of spirit, beautiful situations in life.
Reversed - Unfortunate and abrupt changes, loss of love, stagnation."

Below are images and reviews taken from aeclectic. The last is an interview with the illustrator - he talks about some of the clocks in the images and their meanings.

Not for fluffy bunnies or the eternally sunny optimists. This deck is for those of us who see shadows moving out of the corner of our eyes and KNOW something is there :)

I would not hesitate to recommend this deck - even if you don't wish to use it, buy it anyway. This is going to be a collector's item one day. I have 2 copies and might even get a third. I plan on wearing this one out and will need a back-up *lol*

Here is the authors MySpace page with lots of images and info:

http://tiny.pl/27b1

And here is the official website of the deck:

http://www.deviantmoon.com/wordpress/

Shelley

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/deviant-moon/review.shtml

Deviant Moon Tarot

The Deviant Moon Tarot has surreal, very unique, and sometimes disturbing moonlit artwork. It's inspired by (and incorporates) images of cemetaries and mental asylums, and designed to illuminate deeper parts of the subsconscious. The talented illustrator is also a tarot student, and the deck is the result of three years of artistic work.




Review by Solandia

Long awaited by the online tarot community, the Deviant Moon Tarot has also been thirty years in the making by artist and storybook illustrator Patrick Valenza.

Patrick developed his artistic style in adolescence and has been working on his imagery for many years. Not only an accomplished artist, he also has knowledge of tarot and has studied the traditional cards closely. His website shows thirteen hand-painted major arcana cards made when he was fifteen, with very recognisable characteristics – some only slightly altered in appearance (though recreated via photo manipulation) for the published deck. His very unique style has been expanded across the full 78 card deck, with no less attention to detail and variation in the theme.

Artistically, the cards are incredibly strong and equally consistent from the Fool all the way through to the King of Pentacles. They are dark on the surface and underneath; photographs from cemeteries and tombstones have been morphed and twisted into other elements of the cards: clothing trim, headgear and shoes. The backgrounds are urban and industrial, scenes are often set outdoors but there is little natural environment; the moon rises over smokestacks, dull and dirty skies, fortified buildings – all created from photographs of a mental asylum. The figures in the cards are non-human, with layered faces and moon-like masks, wide staring eyes, bird-like feet and often elongated bodies. Despite the lack of regular human facial expressions and body language, the figures are remarkably expressive.

It’s a deck of the subconscious, of bad dreams, of visions from a bad trip come to life. Patrick’s symbolism comes from childhood dreams and imagination, a visual dedication to his interest in the ‘more melancholy side of life’. It’s reminiscent of its Rider-Waite heritage but really has a feeling all of its own. It’s a nice change to see imagery with such polish and dedication that also has an obvious familiarity with the tarot’s symbolism; it stays true to tarot but brings to it a new and disturbing approach.

The cards depart from traditional elements of symbolism in many ways but the card’s tarot meaning is still clear. As in the Nine of Cups, the well-dressed character releases a genie from the bottle and looks on with surprise; a very appropriate image for what is traditionally known as the ‘Wish’ card. The King of Wand isn’t seated on a throne, and instead holds woodland creatures by the hand and strides through the scene, but still comes across as the confident, charismatic leader.

The Moon card is literally the puppet-master of the figures below, holding the strings that connect them and controlling their movements. Ugly but strangely elegant, Death has a red scarf wrapped around her skeletal horse head and a pregnant belly, signalling both the end and the beginning inherent in transformation of Death. The cards do have an uncomfortable edge, even in traditionally positive and usually pretty cards like the Star.

The companion booklet is entirely in English and for each card shares a description of the imagery and a few keywords for the upright and reversed aspect of each card. Reading the booklet really not necessary to use the cards – all of the depth is in the imagery itself, there is little further background or explanation needed. There’s an original ten-card spread as well, based on cards arranged simply in a circle.

As is common for recent decks from US Games, the card stock of the Deviant Moon is very slick and heavily laminated. The backs are reversible and have a dark brown background with geometrically arranged crescent-moon designs. There are two extra non-tarot cards; a title card with the angel from the Judgement card, and a card ‘About Patrick Valenza’ with his background and artistic history. The cards have their own box that holds them and the booklet, and this sits with a fold-out spread sheet inside an equally glossy outer cardboard box with a slipcase cover.

A little tarot knowledge is always useful, but it’s not mandatory to use the Deviant Moon. The dark and strange beauty of its imagery takes a new approach but is true enough to the tarot archetypes to be useable by readers from novice level to the well experienced – as long as you’re prepared for a little excursion into the dark side of your subconscious.


Review by Dan Pelletier

Dan Pelletier Test Drives the Deviant Moon

I received The Deviant Moon Tarot on a Monday and spent four days doing nothing but pursuing the cards.

Back in 1909, Pamela Colman Smith’s artwork set the stage for Tarot in the twentieth century. Her work resonated for ninety-nine years for a good reason. In 2004 Robin Ator, in a brilliant stroke, removed the anachronisms and gender bias leaving color and form from her work with the International Icon Tarot.

Four years later, Patrick Valenza has gone even further; he has dispensed with the humans, the symbology, and everything else recognizable; his work wrests the Tarot from the Egyptians who never had it, the Golden Dawn who bastardized it, and the New Agers who sanitized it.

On his website and in interviews, the artist describes how he created texture maps from photographs of graveyards and an abandoned insane asylum, and then manipulated the images to create the artwork.

The images themselves are absorbing surrealistic humanoid figures in abstract settings, that are at once attractive and haunting. Many of the faces are ‘split’ between a light and dark half, some faces appear to be masked, and on others the masks are faces, some appendages have multiplied beyond the two that we’d see in a humanoid... we expect to see some things, and we see what we expect... and then are left unsettled as the images unfold.

I’m not marginalizing the how the Deviant Moon art was created; but what I care about is how it handles on the road. What I care about is the result of the manipulations of imagery. I want to see how it corners, what kind of mileage would it get? So after four days of pursuing the images, I had an internet-radio spot to do consisting of two hours of reading for strangers I couldn’t see.

And once I began, any expectations I had proved to have fallen short, the images in the deck performed with an uncommon accuracy. The occupants of the Deviant Moon world did the gossip and gavotte adeptly.

But how? Why does it work?

The Deviant Moon is character driven. And as opposed to Asian ‘character driven’ decks that lack any symbolism and use innocent poses, the Deviant Moon takes a rather unique approach.

Patrick Valenza accomplished something quite unexpected, facilitated because he used a surrealistic approach to the Tarot. He has his static humanoids performing the dynamic actions that pertain to the card’s meaning. For most cards, it is a simple matter of ‘what is this character obviously doing now’ (or just completed, or about to do). Because of the organic and narrative approach to the subjects, we are also able to understand how each of the characters feels.

The Tower is a tower, and the Devil is a devil (great feet), Temperance pours from one container to another, there are stars on The Star.

However the images keep unfolding.

There were little details that popped out during the readings, and I had to go to the source for some answers.

“Uh Patrick, I notice there are a few oddly placed clocks with unexpected times displayed, for example in the Eight of Pentacles the clock displays eleven fifty-eight.”

“Thanks for noticing” answered Patrick, with a wry smile, “Yup, two minutes to midnight...all the work you do in a day, and there is always more to do the next. Day in and day out. Hoping for something to show after all of this work...maybe you won't see it today, but maybe tomorrow.”

“How about the Four of Pentacles, the clock there displays nine forty.”

Patrick pauses and leans back. “There’s a background story here. My father-in-law was a greedy, materialistic man. Everything in his life was based on what he owned, and always put himself over his children. Well, the day came when he finally died. We heard the news at about 9:40 one morning. Nobody was particularly heart broken. I always wondered what he thought, lying there waiting to be cremated....does he say to himself, ‘I wish I spent more time with my children as they grew up’, or was it, ‘DAMN, I didn't make enough money!’ So in this card, the death angel leads the miser to the fires of the furnace, with the symbol of time dangling from her mouth. The miser looks back on his possessions in fear that he will never see them again, while clutching a few golden pentacles in a last attempt to "take it with him".

I ask “How about the Hanged Man. His clock says five eleven.”

“I used to work at the most mundane job years ago...a real nine to five. Many times, I would work a bit past the whistle. I found it a total waste of time, but back then I had little choice. I felt I was in limbo, and had to make a real effort to break free of my suspended life. This clock represents my lost time there and the times I worked past 5:00.”

“One last question Patrick, tell me about the borders...”

“The mixed colors come from the cards I created when I was 15. Truthfully, the colors on the majors just looked good with the color compositions of the individual cards at the time, so I just carried that over when I re-began the deck in 2004. However, the minors were different... these colors relate to the citizens of each realm. The borders on the suit of Swords are Red for their strife and pain of the heart. Cups have Blue for the calm purity of the sea. In Wands I used Green for the earth and the natural world. And with Pentacles, Black for the materialistic void they have in their souls.”

So now that we have more information, we’ve also left the antiquated suit meanings in the past where they belong, in the latter half of the Victorian era. Even Majors refuse to pay homage to this era by using the Continental numbering system.

This is a great deck for the reader who does not want to read a book and be told what meaning is.

But I have to provide a strong caveat…if you are a reader who prefers sunny bunny over truth – don’t visit this deck. The Deviant Moon strikes to the heart of issues, with the same ease that it pushes aside six hundred years of Tarot myth-takes; it dives directly towards the truth. That will unsettle many.

It’s often difficult to remember, that the voices that whisper in the darkness from the peeling walls, often speak the truth.

Dan Pelletier is a co-owner of The Tarot Garden, a most highly respected resource for tarot decks and related information on the Internet.