I just bought myself the most delightfully gothic tarot deck! I’ve been dabbling in tarot for several years now, and you may remember my 2016 review of the Raven’s Prophecy Tarot by Maggie Stiefvater, the deck that first made things click for me. Since then, I’ve continued working with the Raven’s Prophecy deck, as well as with the Ghosts and Spirits Tarot by Lisa Hunt. But I’m always on the lookout for new decks that call to me and can help me connect deeper with tarot. Recently, in a moment of self-indulgent quarantine shopping, I found myself scrolling through the impressive selection of tarot decks available on Bookshop.org. I came across the Dark Wood Tarot, which had just come out in June. It takes the structure of a classic Rider-Waite-Tarot deck but places it in a fantasy woodland setting as a metaphor for shadow work. As soon as I saw the artwork on the cards, I knew that I needed the Dark Wood Tarot in my hands immediately.
I was drawn to the Dark Wood Tarot primarily because of the gorgeous artwork by Abigail Larson. Larson is a talented illustrator with a dark and enchanting style, whose work I have noticed coming across my Twitter feed in recent years. She tends to work on projects that align with my gothic interests: she has designed covers for an Edward Scissorhands comic book and for the comic series that spun off from the TV show Penny Dreadful; she also designed the cover for the newest issue of Weird Tales magazine; and she is now working on creating a Nightmare Before Christmas themed tarot deck. I had been less familiar with Sasha Graham, author of the Dark Wood Tarot guidebook, though she appears to be a fairly authoritative voice in the tarot community. Graham has written a number of books on tarot including Llewellyn’s Complete Book of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and 365 Tarot Spreads. She has also worked on a Tarot of the Haunted House deck, which I may need to check out next….
The design of the Dark Wood Tarot is absolutely breathtaking. The cards and booklet are beautifully packaged in a box with a magnetic closure. The back of each card depicts an elegant symmetrical design with the Dark Wood “DW” logo in the center, surrounded by gothic scrollwork. Bats, goat heads, and little dangling spiders give you a sneak peek of what’s in store within the cards. The world of this tarot deck, which can be glimpsed in the background of each card is a gloomy forest filled with crooked trees, craggy rocks, and twisting rivers. The cards are populated by enchantingly beautiful men and women, but also by vampires, fairies, demons, and other fantasy creatures. They also feature a few favorite gothic animals, including bats, snakes, crows, cats, and wolves. I appreciate that—apart from knights and kings—the majority of the figures depicted in the cards are women, including traditionally male figures like the Fool, the Magician, and the Hierophant. The deck has also dispensed with most of the Christian imagery found in many Rider-Waite-Smith decks and instead uses symbols from Celtic and astrological traditions and borrows imagery from myth and folklore.
While familiarizing myself with the deck, I noticed fun patterns in the suits of the Minor Arcana. For example, all of the Pentacles cards emphasize trees and branches, with the occasional appearance of produce such as grapes and pumpkins—particularly apt symbols for the suit representing the material world and the fruits of our labor. The Cups cards, on the other hand, all depict animals (except for the court cards), which was an interesting choice for the suit of emotions and relationships. The Wands cards emphasize the relationship between Wands and the element of fire, often depicting the wands as torches lighting the way for the figures in the card. I found the Swords cards to be the closest to the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith artwork. One of my favorite cards in the deck is one that’s usually most distressing to see in readings—The Tower. While this card can presage disruption and destruction, the crumbling Gothic spire lit from within by flames puts me in mind of the Burning Houses trope in Gothic fiction and the cleansing role that these often play. Already just flipping through these cards has given me new insight into tarot, and I’m excited to see where the rest of my exploration leads.
While the cards had plenty to teach me all on their own, I also read through the explanatory booklet written by Sasha Graham that came with them. The booklet explains the philosophy and premise behind this deck. Borrowing the idea of the “shadow aspect” from analytical psychology, this book encourages the reader to use the Dark Wood Tarot to explore the repressed and hidden parts of their psyche. The book explains the narrative of the Major Arcana through the journey of the Shadow Witch, who essentially takes the place of the Fool. Perhaps most interestingly, this book replaces the traditional reversal meanings (for when a card appears upside-down in a reading) with shadow meanings that are meant to bring you in touch with your shadow self. Instead of being the opposite of the card’s usual meaning, these shadow meanings are the card’s dark side, examining how the qualities represented by the card might hurt yourself or others, especially when brought to an extreme. In all honesty, the concept of shadow work does not appeal to me and I don’t generally take reversals into account in my tarot readings anyway, so that entire aspect of the book was not my cup of tea. On top of that, I often found the shadow meanings to be somewhat generic and vague and struggled to see what their connection was to the regular meaning of the card at hand. Shadow work aside, though, I did find that Sasha Graham had some unique insights into the particular cards that led me to think about that card in a new way. Overall, while I didn’t agree with all of Graham’s methods and readings, I find that I’m never fully satisfied with explanation booklets written by other people, which is why I’ve decided to start my own tarot journal.
Do you read tarot? If you’re interest in trying out the Dark Wood Tarot for yourself, you can find it through this Bookshop.org affiliate link. I’ve also created a Tarot shelf on by Bookshop affiliate page where you can see the other decks that I use. I’ll be adding to this self as I continue my exploration of tarot. What tarot decks do you use? Got any particularly Gothic ones to recommend? Let me know in the comments!
Shadow work is absolutely imperative.