The Bohemian Gothic Tarot

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Let me start out by saying that I am not the type of girl that likes "dark" stuff. I can't watch horror movies or read scary books; in fact, even after watching those "Haunting" shows on television I end up sleeping with the light on. "Ghost Rider", with Nicholas Cage, kept me up one night. Seriously. This is how much of a coward I am. My imagination is too visual and too active to feed it those types of things. After watching Stephen King's "Rose Red" I slept with the lights on for a MONTH. Ask my husband. He'll roll his eyes. :D

So, we've established I'm a wussy. More than that, I tend to find those types of things distasteful. It's not just that they scare me, they also tend to disgust me. I appreciate greatly when the dead are shown a measure of respect, and I am very disturbed when they are not, even in fiction.

Taking those things into consideration, it is an absolute wonder that I ever even purchased The Bohemian Gothic Tarot. It's a horror movie lover's fantasy deck, after all. Very dark, and very chilling. Everyone I know who sees the deck gets the creeps from it. (And the waitress at Ihop gave us MUCH better service after I pulled it out. :D ) What is even more astonishing is how much I adore it.

Let's take a step back. Magic Realist Press is responsible for several amazing decks, including the Victorian Romantic Tarot, Baroque Bohemian Cats Tarot, and Fairytale Tarot. Their decks are extraordinarily beautiful, and an absolute pleasure to touch and use. They use high quality products to create their decks and put an amazing amount of thought and care into them, even after the product is complete and on the shelves-and the product that ends up on the shelves is in an entirely different class than any other deck that I've ever seen.

Don't get me wrong. There are publishers out there that create amazing, gorgeous, high quality decks. However, there is only one publisher that I would buy a deck from, sight unseen- and that's Magic Realist Press. If they produce it, I want it. (They also create a wide range of other products, including laptop bags, tarot bags, and purses- and they are also amazingly well made. You can check out their products at http://baba-store.com .)

Initially, my desire to have the Bohemian Gothic was fuelled simply by the fact that it was a Magic Realist Press deck, and therefore worth having. Then, I got a look at the three of pentacles:



And had a good giggle over it. Remember, the three of pents is about teamwork and mastering your craft. What a wonderful choice to depict those two qualities! It made me consider the card in an entirely new way. I started to wonder if perhaps this deck could provide me with a new outlook, teach me to see the cards in ways I hadn't before. It became more attractive to me on it's own merits and not simply because of it's creators.

Unfortunately, this deck is not easy to find, and if you do find it, it's not cheap. I started hunting. I kept my eyes open, nearly bought one from a kind member of AT, and waited... and one night, on a whim, checked Amazon: Voila! A Bohemian Gothic that was downright affordable, from a marketplace seller. I didn't even stop to think about it. I just clicked "buy"... waited four days.... received it....

And was horrendously disappointed.

Yup. I did NOT like the deck. It was too dark, too creepy, the cards were too stiff (when compared to my darling Victorian Romantic, which is well broken in and delightful!), I was never going to be able to read with it... It was crushing, really. Still, I had the deck, and if I sold it, I was never going to be able to replace it, so I used it.

And I used it some more. And the more I used it, the more I realized how very wonderful this deck actually is. It is an extremely readable deck, as a matter of fact; it lends itself well to intuitive reading, and the cards flow together to create stories better than any other deck I've seen. It's a dark deck, yes, but it's not morbid; it has a delicious sense of humor, and is also very good at conveying the full range of human emotion. This deck remembers that there is very rarely such a thing as pure joy. Always, there is a balance in our lives of joy and pain, of light and dark.


The book is a delight, too. The Justice card doesn't fit the Rider Waite Smith imagery at all; but after reading the description in the book, I was nearly in tears.

Each entry contains the original image that was altered to create the deck, which is not only interesting, but can also be enlightening. The original three of swords actually showed a man and a woman in an embrace, not seeing the woman in the foreground. Even though that's not what the cards show, I remember it when I draw that card, and it does make the card deeper and more meaningful for me.

My favorite card in the deck is the Queen of Pentacles:



The look on her face just breaks me into giggles every time I see it. That's a "WTF?!" face if I've ever seen one.

That is not to say that the deck isn't creepy. On a lot of the cards, there is just something off about the people in the card; when I described it to Wakingspirit, she called it "the uncanny valley". Heads are turned just that much too far, skin is just this much the wrong color, the cards are extremely well executed to be chill inducing. After working with it for awhile, though, that stops being a distraction, and becomes more of an asset- another small thing to draw from.



The cards are still too stiff, (I like thin, floppy cardstock) but I suspect that will resolve with time. The backs are stunning, showing a spiderweb-like arrangement of bones and skulls in white ink, shadowed by shiny silver ink.

The cards are borderless. I am not a huge fan of the bar of color at the bottom of the card, where the card is labelled; I would have much preferred the text directly on the image without that. However, that is my only complaint about this deck- all in all, it's glorious- and I am not selling it.

You can check out the entire deck at http://www.bohemiangothic.com.

Images used with permission, Copyright Karen Mahony and Alex Ukolov, Magic-Realist Press 2007. All rights reserved.