Lacuna Tarot

Overview

The Lacuna Tarot is a unique, symbolically rich, surrealist, gender-neutral deck of Tarot cards designed, painted, and developed by visual artist Aleks Samoylov (yours truly). While it is standard in structure (with 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana cards) the imagery is not based on any existing systems (such as the Marseilles, Rider Waite Smith, and Thoth decks) and was instead developed out of whole cloth, so to speak. The illustrations are largely based in my personal and intuitive interpretation of the Tarot, with special attention paid to the Kabbalistic and Hermetic understanding of the cards, trumps, and suits (which is key to how I personally prefer to read).

Features

The Lacuna is a fully illustrated deck (as opposed to "pipish" decks, like the Marseilles, which are characterized by simplified and abstracted numbered Minor Arcana designs), which is to say that each card, including every one of the Minors, is a complete painting onto itself. It sports a completely borderless design and comes with rounded corners out of the box. This edition is standard in size and printed on UV-coated, standard gaming cardstock.

All of the textual elements (the names of the cards, the numbers, glyphs, and Kabbalah associations) are hand-written (hand-painted, really) and incorporated into the composition of the cards, lending the imagery (which depicts various layers of perception and plays with concepts of illusion and dimensionality) an intentionally ad-hoc, slightly chaotic, hand-made feeling. This approach is somewhat characteristic of my largely body of work, as a painter, but was also, in some small part, intended to stand in stark contrast to the glut of sleek yet soulless AI generated images flooding the market these days. Every profoundly imperfect image was labored over by a real human hand across hours, and hours ... and hours of hard work.

This deck does not come with a traditional "little white book" containing an interpretation of each individual card, partly because I focused on the artwork in my process and partly because that's just not how I read or understand the Tarot. Instead, it DOES come with a simple, 20 page primer/booklet that presents my own approach to learning the symbology of any deck based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. While it doesn't detail every single Sephiroth, I do believe that it's enough to get anyone started, with a modicum of additional online research, in using the described/implied reading methodology. Of course, these cards can also be read in any way that makes sense to the reader.

Experience Level

The Lacuna will likely be seen by some as an "advanced" deck. I can't really argue too much against this. While it is fully illustrated, much like the RWS, it is largely non-figurative, which is to say that the imagery intentionally mostly avoids presenting the viewer with confined and recognized human or anthropomorphic "characters" - even the court cards reduce the presence of their respective "entities" to floating faces, made up of eyes and mouths suspended in or merged with the constructed space of the painting. It is also very likely to feel different and read differently to many modern standards, especially in intuitive readings. Some of the card names have also changed, either due to the artist's own preferences or to aid in the goal of removing cisnormative gender binaries from the deck as much as is possible. For example, The Magician and Judgment cards were changed to The Magus and The Aeon respectively, simply because I prefer the sound and implication of the Thoth names, while the Emperor and Empress were changed to The Alchemist and The Architect, with the aim of preserving much of their implications (they both portray two complementary but divergent forms of power and authority) while removing both the traditional gender roles and the medieval feudal hierarchy.

Now, that having been said, I personally don't buy into that specific mindset when it comes to "starter decks" versus "advanced decks." My own first deck, from back when I was maybe 17 or so, was quite abstract and minimalistic, and I still have it and tend to prefer it to the more figurative approach of the RWS. It is important to acknowledge, however, that I am not an unbiased source here. It doesn't exactly serve me well, from a business perspective, to discourage beginners from buying my deck, after all. So I am ... just not going to do that. I am a working and completely independent artist so I tend to be poor as heck 90% of the time - there's no need to work any harder at maintaining that particular status quo.

Personally and quite honestly, I do believe that the popular notion that figurative decks, like the RWS, are more beginner friendly than the more abstract decks, like the Thoth and Marseilles, fail to account for a lot of factors, including individual neurotype, but do likely hold some truth for a lot of people. So, at the end of the day, I can't really issue a prescriptive or conclusive statement on this either way. I say, if you're a beginner and you can only buy one deck to use for the next year or five or ten, go with the one that calls to you.