Next Gen Tarot full 78 card deck in tuck box with gold ink

A full 78-card deck, with a queer view, challenging gender roles. The backs and tuck box have gold ink (not gold foiling) on them.

Please note that this deck does not come with a leaflet/tarot reading book, this is sold separately in A6 size, and the A4 sketchbook accompanies the set wonderfully with explanations of design choices (also sold separately)

THE NEXT GEN TAROT
I created the Next Gen Tarot to translate the Tarot and hold it to today’s standards. For me, that meant challenging gender roles, norms of sexuality and gender alignment. The Major Arcana comprises of a mixture of genders, including non-binary, as well as different sexual orientations. I have also placed some females in traditionally male roles and challenged what it is to be masculine and feminine.

An example of putting a female in a traditionally male role is that of the Heirophant:
The Hierophant is a paragon of spirituality. The name comes from high priests from Greek Orthodox. He is seen to mean tradition, convention, orthodoxy. I have decided to cut against the grain on this one. Instead of conformity, I would like this card to focus more on the spiritual side of the meanings from this card. That one can be grounded and yet in touch with nature and feel the flow of life from the environment. I contacted my friend Myriam about drawing her for this role. As a human, Mia is very feminine in energy. This card is challenging the gender roles we are usually presented with.
The composition includes a tree that grows from her head, with blooming Clematis to display her mental beauty. The triangle upon her forehead shows her spiritual intuition, as well as her insight into the soul, the “third eye”. The water flows from her, expressing her sensitivity and emotional maturity. Her pose is one of balance and centredness. The Irises turn toward her to hear her wise counsel.

Another example is The Empress:
A force of nurture and nature, The Empress is the queen of life. I began by sketching mothers and children. I wanted to express the messiness, the exhaustion yet absolute love and the joy that having a child brings. Combining the idea that hair is seen as a sign of fertility in some cultures, with the “emotional labour” that many women are burdened with, despite our progress with feminism. Emotional labour is indicative of the organisation and having to remember so much to manage a household, a complex weave of tasks that often fall to women to resolve and juggle on a daily basis.

And another is The Emperor:
The Emperor is the father figure. He’s supposed to be strong, controlling, and proud. I decided to express the modern father. Men should not be held to the same values as they have been traditionally. Third-wave feminism has fought for men to have the same rights as women. Men should be able to be sensitive, kind and compassionate, not afraid to be able to display their feminine energy, as well as their masculine energy. This depiction of The Emperor is designed to challenge gender roles.
My final image shows the father looking upward, his role as a leader hasn’t changed, though the way in which he leads has, he is no longer a dictator. He keeps everything safe in his beard, he embraces his role. The flowers show his fiminity and sensitivity. The soft toys show his role as a father without showing a child and signify his tenderness, gentleness and carefullness.

For “Death”, I have drawn a drag queen. Death is often misunderstood. The card itself doesn’t speak of mortality, but more about the death of one way and the beginning of a new one. I spoke to my friend, Mark, whose drag psuedonym is Death Ditto. We spoke about how his drag persona is about his rebirth, dating back to when he was seven. A fabulous force of nature, Mark embraces and celebrates who he is through drag, as a transformative art.

I also took The Devil in a new direction: away from the usual entrapment and bondage, I thought about how negative thoughts can cloud our judgement, that inside of us all is a darkness, a self-saboteur. Often our saboteurs keep us from developing new habits, leading us away from the destruction we find comforting. I chose to describe this with an internal dark force manipulating the eyes and the mouth of the person, using them as a puppet to spew awful things from within. This is perhaps more conceptual than the other pieces I’ve created for this project, but I feel that it is still vastly relatable.

Judgement: Typically, Judgement depicts revelations from the Bible, specifically an angel heralding the good news that the dead are to rise or ascend to heaven. The image is usually comprised of an angel with a trumpet, graves and people climbing out of them, with heaven visible in the background. I originally thought about a locust as the hearld of the apocalypse as a nod to the appearance of the locust in Revelations, to taunt those on Earth, after emerging from the pit.
However, I wanted to challenge any typical depiction so I decided to make mine about Judgement in a different way, just as “revelations” means to draw back the veil, to reveal what was previously unseen, I found this to correspond to how we discuss judgement in the mind. Using mindfulness to better understand our thought patterns, we can learn how to interact with our thoughts and allow ourselves to have negative thoughts and emotions. Spiralling, depressive, negative thoughts are is depicted as black spirals and liberation from these is shown as free-flowing water, with many routes to flow down. The patterns upon the brain as well as in front of it, showing that one needs to back up their actions and thoughts.

I created a deck of 78 cards, 22 of which are the Major Arcana, the others sit in four suits: cups, swords, wands and coins. I have translated cups to glasses/cups, swords to pens, wands to technology and pentacles to money. Each have their own colour palette that relates to the elements they describe. These colour palettes also feed into one another and the Major Arcana.