The dog, a ratty, sharp-muzzled little mutt only he would have taken up with, isn't chasing or biting him; they're dancing together on the cliff. Nearby, growing out of the ground, is a nest of quartz crystals; at the cliff's edge is a lily whose flower and grassy nest form a pentagram.  Behind the fool and framing him are interlinked haloes or glories, merging at the top with the sun's halo; four birds flank the light around him.  This is clearly a holy figure.  Past him and the cliff are a green valley, a road and some sharp, cold-looking peaks.

My impression: this is not the innocence of inexperience, it's the innocence of absolute crazy singleheartedness that says, "Let the world, safety, good sense and social appropriateness all be damned, dancing at cliff's edge is holy bliss."

The Magician
This is one of the more striking cards in the deck. It is a face (top 2/3 of card) above an altar (bottom third).  The face, in shades of deep slate blue except for the whites of its eyes, is beautiful and androgynous in the Egyptian Pharaonic manner, and the hair, mustache, beard and eyebrows seem Egyptian or Asian, thought the features are Caucasian. The eyes are huge, black and beautiful, and the mouth sensuous. From the part in the long midnight-blue hair rise the stars.

Around the broad forehead is a primrose-yellow band; on it is a primrose medallion of a lemniscate (infinity symbol).  A triangle of light of the same yellow, its upper point touching the center of the lemniscate and its lower points the pupils, shines on the forehead; broad rays of yellow light stream down from the eyes, continuing the lines of the triangle.  On the yellow-draped altar are a chalice, wand, sword and pentacle; a lily and perhaps a peony rise around
its base.

The High Priestess
Stunningly lovely.  A beautiful, strong, sensuous face, pale slate blue, fills the top 2/3 the card; draped across her face in sheer veils, looping down from the sun, are the sea and sky.  Stars sprinkle her long midnight-blue hair, and a yin/yang sits on her forehead. The thin yellow crescent moon lies across her throat like a torc, one tip twined in her hair, and a book bearing Alpha and Omega rests on her heart. Her deep green collar curves away like a hill, curling down into a starlit ocean wave.

The Empress
Remember the Empress in Rider-Waite?  Softly maternal and endlessly patient in her simple gown?  Sweet to the point of insipidity in face?  Well, if there's a direct opposite, this is it. :)  This is female power and authority at its most worldly, confident and knowing, dressed up to the nines, wearing all its jewelry and calmly letting you figure out you'd have to be pretty damn crazy to mess with it.

She's a redhead.  Her torso rises up out of grass scattered with berries and, as if tossed there like a child's ball, the earth.  A bird offers her a berry that looks like a planet.  Her crown is a cap of stars and her makeup, like her face, sultry and a little hard.  The eyes are full of dry amusement and long, not always comfortable self-knowledge.  A diamond like a star glitters as it dangles from one ear, and her neck and wrists are heavy with elaborate silver.  She wears her ermine jacket, whose fur looks almost cheetah-ish, with casually rumpled ease.  Behind her is a
Kublai-Khan-like mountain landscape.

This is Woman the Tigress with her full power reclaimed and no fear left.  It's not one of the more immediately likable faces in the deck, but I can almost guarantee you you won't be able to get it out of your head.

The Emperor
A humanized, remarkably detailed version of the famous gold portrait bust of Charlemagne, throned and crowned in a walled garden and gazing out over an orb and scepter.  The original is arguably the most glorious and benign portrait traditional male power ever drew of itself, and it's a clever choice for this card.

The Hierophant
In profile, framed by a lozenge-shaped halo, a dove & the arches of a Romanesque tower, sits an almost cornily handsome and strong-jawed man in his 40s, looking like something out of one of those great old 1940s "priest as regular guy, only holier" movies. He wears a huge beehive crown, something like the Pope's triple tiara only with Middle Eastern or Asian overtones.  His robes are of lavish brocade. A ray of primrose-yellow light shoots out from his eye.

The right hand is raised in the two-fingered blessing of a bishop; the other hand is in the same pose but holds a tarot card at which he apparently sneaks a look every now and again like a cheat sheet. Two men and two women stand nearby: a cleric, a young noble, a Sunday-veiled church woman and a gypsy in a scarf of stars.  Their expressions are ambiguous: are they looking to his brand of light
or their own?  None looks especially awestruck.

The Lovers
A beautiful young couple in modern dress, ringed by a golden halo and standing in a lush garden, begin a kiss; below them, two turtle- doves are billing affectionately.  Above them, a Yin and Yang in a Magen David pours down a thin trail of golden and red energy between them.

The Chariot
An Eastern potentate with a full beard and streaming hair drives a chariot out hell-bent-for-leather from a mountain castle.  The chariot's canopy is scattered with stars of David and ringed with stylized flames; the driver's helmet/crown carries the same flames.  The driver and his two fierce Barb horses are splendidly caparisoned in red and gold.

Justice
A gorgeous and complex card, and not easy to describe.  A beautiful dark-haired woman looks at the viewer. From her knowing eyes stream rays of yellow light; an eagle perches on her shoulder. Above her head is a round stone tower, and she wears an elegant crown.  What's hard to describe is how tower and crown merge into each other, the tower becoming diaphanous, its arched windows ringing her head like a second and higher crown and pouring down yellow rays on and around her head. To one side of the rays, tower and head the sun is shining; on the other, it's night and there's a crescent moon.
 
Below her chin like a breastplate, her hair trailing over it, is a scale with a large yin-yang as its lunette. The scale's pillar rises out of a rose and culminates in fire (Eliot's "...and the fire and the rose are one"?)  In one pan of the scale is a right-side-up triangle with an upside-down one inside it; in the other, the outer
one's reversed and the inner is right-side-up.  The rays from the woman's eyes frame the scale and the star field which is her body.

The face is neither critical nor compassionate, it's just full of a vast, disconcerting clarity.  The mouth is neither smiling nor stern, though it clearly knows how to be both; the eyes are not exactly either sad or amused, but clearly know how to be both at once.
 
This lady just knows.  And... yikes!... she knows *you*.

The Hermit
Another card I love. A night scene, nearly all in deep slate blues.  We see a bearded, longhaired man, a jeaned and sandaled hippie sage with a beautiful but not pretty face, serene, worn and very strong, that's known a lot of pain.  As he settles down to meditate, he is doing the knee/hand move necessary to get into lotus when you're no longer 19.  His eyes are closed with the effort, but seemingly also with relief at settling into contemplation.

Over one shoulder a cherry tree in delicate pink flower glows, cradling the moon in its branches.  A star shines over the other shoulder (another six-pointer-- I wonder if Lösche is Jewish or CM- influenced?), and a light rises from the breast-like peaks beneath the star as if from the Mother's heart.

At the meditator's foot, cradled protectively by the curve of his sandaled arch, is the bright lantern he has brought, six-pointed stars swarming from it like fireflies.  A bird approaches him with fearless curiosity, and a lotuslike crocus blooms by his calf.

This isn't the hermit who goes off to live alone and think/pray for a living, or the major inner tuneup period of therapy or a retreat. It's daily spiritual maintenance: going within as both regular discipline and a loved end to the day.  You can tell he comes here most nights, and that this is where he finds his gods,
including (or especially) the one within.

Wheel of Fortune
A handsome but in no way unusual celestial-mechanics graphic with zodiacal symbols and Hebrew letters and a large six-rayed pink flower at its center.  Why are Wheels of Fortune the weakest cards artistically in so many decks? It seems kind of a shame.  Oh well, moving from the banal to the sublime:

Strength
My favorite card in the entire deck, simple and brilliant.

The setting: a jungle landscape.  A volcano smolders in the background.  The figure: a woman with lush hair, a strong face and the gaze of a hunter.  Across her otherwise naked body she holds a veil with the image of a lion on it.  The lion, a kingly headdress on his forehead, looks at the viewer.  On the woman's forehead is a similar headdress, and the lines in her face (ceremonial scars, or did they just appear over time?) echo the lines of the lion's.

This woman, otherwise naked, has worn the lion till she *became* the lion.  I love that.  In the recovery and psychotherapy communities we say it's easier to act your way into changed thinking than to think your way into changed acting.  This woman has done it: lived some borrowed or copied strength till she grew into it.  Now she is confident even while naked in a jungle, and the sun, rising
behind her, is her crown.

The Hanged Man
A teenage boy hangs upside down from a tree limb.  He isn't tied; he has his foot hooked over the branch: surrender as a deliberate practice, not a forced choice.  His legs are in the classic crossed (upside-down Four) position and his hands are joined in prayer; his long hair hangs down loose.  (Sunrise/set?) on the horizon haloes his head.

Turn the card upside down, though: is he hanging from a tree with his head down toward water, or is he underwater floating up, foot hooked on a submerged branch, the sun and hills and birds a reflection, his hair billowing up instead of falling down?  I'm not sure what that means, but I like it. :)

Death
Very stark.  A skeleton in a tattered robe, scythe over shoulder and a crow perched on his hand, stands in a square halo of rayed light from a rather dim and sickly sun; the halo itself is cracked and broken in places, as if even the light is crumbling with time. Around it are night and the stars.

The skeleton stands on a stark stone pavement, with broken things around him, lying on or partially submerged in the stones: swords, clocks, wrought iron gates, something nearly destroyed that might be a crown, a German WWII helmet with a skull in it, tombstones, chimneys, columns, dead branches, jewelry, the claw of some large animal, the tip of a buried pyramid.

Temperance
A sunny, pleasant landscape, and a stream with yellow irises.  A crowned woman, naked to the hips and wearing a draping yellow skirt from there, stands in jeweled sandals at the edge of the stream. The sun is exactly half in and half out of cloud. The woman pours from two cups into the stream; her head is turned
away from the cups, and her eyes are closed.

I had trouble with this one until I recognized that the expression on her face isn't rejection, it's trance.  The real work of the Great Work on the self isn't primarily or only done in the stream; a lot of it must be done directly in the heart and mind.  A charmingly goofy little long-billed waterbird, possibly a young heron, watches as if guarding her; when you really tackle inner work, it promises,
you'll find friends and help in the oddest places.

The Devil
Another very complex and interesting card, this time in dismal shades of grayish mauve and grayed rose and orange. The devil, clawed hands hooked in his lapels, complacently surveys his domain.  His face, with goat horns, pointed ears, one long pigtail that trails over his shoulder, a huge nose ring and an ugly gash in the forehead, is the personification of slick, clever but not really intelligent greed.
At first you think you see humor there, but after looking at this face for a few years now, I mostly find it chillingly singleminded.

Huge, tattered leathery wings rise behind him on a sail-like frame-work held together with makeshift riggings.  He wears a business suit, but on it, besides the inverted pentagram on a chain around his neck, are also the various insignias of a lawyer, a military officer and a clergyman.  Looking closely, you see that his body is made of stone, and is crumbling a bit here and there with age.

His body merges into the walls of a prison camp, its walls and guard tower rickety and much patched.  Chained to him and various posts and bars are five prisoners. Two things about them are striking: first is the rather pathetic bravado on all but one of the faces. We may be in hell, they say, but we're better than you... and we'll keep telling you that till we believe it.

Second is that the woman with the worst case of the flaunts is standing on another prisoner, the only one not looking defiant; he lies face down under her feet in... semi-voluntary sexual submission? Hopelessness?  Complicity given out of hopelessness?  We don't know, but people are used to oppress other people here, just as in life... and, just as in life, people may disguise (even to themselves) oppression or submission to oppression as something else.

The ricketiness of the place itself and of the devil's wing display and even his body suggest the lack of real creative energy in evil. Anything it owns, it borrows from good and then wears thin, wears out/down.  And the devil's nose ring: wear it as decoration though he may, does it mean he's not ultimately in charge?

The Tower and The Star
The Tower, though handsomer than usual, is traditional in all respects.  The Star is gorgeous, but also quite traditional except for one thing: the lady is watering a waterlily, and pours from two cups, not one or two jugs, and this feels like a deliberate echo of Temperance.  We do the work to achieve balance; through grace, a higher power helps us keep it and grow it.

The Moon
In the background, three symmetrical silver-blue hills; above them, a huge full moon.  There's a sparkling halo around it, and on its face, two fish, holding a ribbon of... light? energy?... beween them form a yin-yang pattern.  Down from the moon run the yod-shaped golden energy lines of the moon's pull.  In the lake or bay below, sedges or dune grasses around its edges, a lobster or huge crawdad climbs up the rocks, reaching for the fish in the moon.

The tidal pull and the huge golden fish are a lobster's compulsion and her dream of the Good (crustaceans eat fish); the energies tug at her and the fishes' succulent selves arrange themselves in her mind into a sacred glyph.  The lobster climbs up out of her usual element, reaching for the Moon she can't ever catch and eat, and you know she will do it again at the next full moon, and the next.

This can be seen as being about deception and illusion if your readings follow that tradition, but mine usually don't.  The Moon for me is normally about riding out our individual cycles of personal lunacy, positive or negative, without becoming frightened or ashamed of them or depressed by them.  A lobster can do this because she has only the most rudimentary brain.  We have to learn.. but unlike the lobster, we can. :)

The Sun
Simple and traditional.  The Sun: A smiling child in a garden plays chest-deep in flowers; a brilliant but gentle rayed Sun shines above.

Judgment
A fascinating take on the traditional design. A huge, brilliant sun rises over a plain, pushing back the night in bands of color.  Three trumpets curve down from the sky; three attractive young people in modern dress are breaking out of the crumbling soil.  So far, so average.

Then you notice that chains are falling off the wrist of the woman in the foreground, and you look more closely at the faces, which are full of varying degrees of relief and surprise: these are three of the prisoners from the Devil card!  This Judgment either isn't a moral one at all, or it is a profoundly compassionate one.

The World
In the background, the planet and the night sky and stars around it.  Midground, the traditional four creatures, more lifelike and larger than in most World cards.  Foreground: in a spiral swirl of red roses, and with her bejeweled foot resting on one, a triumphant woman dances. A silky veil blows and swirls across one hip and hides her genitals and one leg, but she is naked, and this is a far more realistically and humanly drawn female body than appears anywhere in older decks.

And she is having a vivid, sexy, positively sassy good time, grinning, swinging her hips and twirling a song-and-dance vaudevillian's cane overhead.  A bellydancer's headdress is on her forehead and stars or energy sparkles rise up from her hands.  This card would make a polite Victorian go pale, but I love it; here, the earthly paradise or the accomplishment of enlightenment or whatever isn't too damn noble and serious to be any *fun*.