When I first heard of this deck, it was from a couple of very "tarotically correct" friends who didn't think much of it.  "It's the cartomancy equivalent of the Magic 8-Ball," they told me, "pretty, but no depth or subtlety."  Having used it for awhile now, I have only one thing to say to them: they're out of their minds. <g>
This beautiful deck by Liverpool illustrator Maggie Kneen is full of riches.

Its structure is unusual.  It includes four cards for direct answers to questions--Yes, No, Now (a harvest in progress) and Never (a raven cawing over the skeleton of an animal)-and this seems to be the main thing that disturbs my friends.  Too simple and direct, I suppose.  But I've known them both to agonize for days over what answer a tarot reading has given them, and personally, I like the directness here just fine (though I would have liked a "Wait" card as well.)  Most of us do use Tarot for yes/no answers; why not admit it and make the
message clear?

There is also an "Inquirer" card, sort of a permanent significator: a Celtic-knotlike maze seen from above.  I don't use a significator in Tarot readings; if you do, you may like the convenience and symbolism of this or you may want to put the Inquirer aside and choose another significator as you would for Tarot.

The remainder of the deck is in groups of seven:

Seven Archetypes: Father, Mother, Birth (a dewy young shoot sprouting from a wonderfully vulvic-looking earth), Death (a tomb in a dark but flowering hill like a pregnant belly, its mysterious door also vulvic), Libido (a lush garden with waterfalls and peacocks and an almost jewelled-looking snake), Destruction (a crowd killing and burning in a medieval town as an inoffensive-looking woman about to be burned at the stake looks on), and Peace (an empty, altarless side chapel of a Gothic cathedral, sun streaming in through stained glass and laying patterns on the floor.)

Seven Symbols: Sun (a lovely card like something from an illuminated manuscript), Moon, Stars (mathematical lines drawn between them), the Scales (hung from a fruit tree to weigh apples, some of which have escaped), the Tree (lush roots like heraldic trees--you could just as well turn this upside down), the Tower (not destroyed here, but powerful and rigid, with no doors in it and no path up to it), and the Wheel (a pretty water-wheel in a reedy stream, the works
hidden away behind a stone wall).

Seven Characters: Warrior (obviously strong, but a complex face full of intelligence and humor...and a bit like Eric Idle, come to think of it), Liar (a jester with a cruel face behind a pleasant mask), Stranger (standing at the door, face and body language equivocal--is he threatening, or merely cold and hungry?), Sage (yer standard sage-y looking type drawing the lines from the Star card in a book--except he's not looking at what he's drawing, he's staring
into the middle distance, clearly focused within), Fool (a goofy- looking young flutist--he has avoided a manmade peril and is about to walk smack into a tree with his unkempt hair over his eyes), Beauty (a lovely but rather self-absorbed Elizabethan woman in a pretty, imaginary-looking garden looks at her reflection in colorful diamond-paned glass, which both enhances and distorts it) and Beast
(a huge lizard, simultaneously gorgeous and horrible, emerges from what appears to be a purely mental/imaginative space, in that the angles somehow aren't quite of this world).

Seven Fundamentals, kept very basic and the least interesting part of the deck conceptually: the Body (a vigorous figure dancing without his skin), Home (very cozy, with cat), Work (gears and wheels), Skills (a cocked crossbow and arrows on the grass), Money (coins half-buried in a field as if growing in the furrows, and a man plowing), Friendship (the Father and Mother figures, more attractive here than in their own cards and clearly in love, and a friend laughing together in a tavern), and Fortune (someone climbing a long, curving, unsupported-
looking stairway through the dark, toward a treasure chest in a loft).

Seven Happenings:  the Message (a fishing-net full of beautifully drawn fish, shells and seaweed, and a corked bottle with bits of a message visible), the Voyage (a sailing ship on an ancient map), the Puzzle (dazzling!--a passive, almost stonelike woman with a key sits unable to choose between two vaults make of interwoven trees echoed in gorgeous inlaid stone flooring, each leading to a door; a mysterious sign suggests meaning but explains nothing), Prison (the prisoner sits in what sunlight there is, but still mourns), Liberation (a jailbreak in progress), the Cave (a naked human figure in agony crouches in a cave, facing away from the light outside the door), and Union (two mountain streams join, and a jeweled chalice sits beside them on a rock.)

If you can't get a reading or meditation out of all that, you aren't trying. <g> And as a bonus, it's at least as good for meditation or spellwork as for readings.

Only two cards jar me.  The Father teaching his son to shoot a bow needs a different jawline in order not to look kind of Cro-Magnon in his machismo, and the children in the Mother card look too repressed and unhappy for my taste.  There's method even there; Kneen says she wanted the parental cards to reflect negative as well as positive parenting, patriarchy and smother-love as well as good fathering and mothering. But for my taste, she's failed to catch both at once (I'm not sure that's possible anyway) and has settled for making Dad kind of
a caveman and Mom kind of a bitch.

But numerous cards here are so lovely and interesting they will just make you stare.

The deck is $14 from US Games, and I enthusiastically recommend it if you can unhook from Tarot long enough and aren't scared of by the fact that Kneen identifies this as a Jungian venture (it isn't heavy-handedly so, I'm happy to say; most Jungian writing puts me straight to sleep.<g>)
 
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Guest Review Copyright 1999 by Rain Redknife
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