Motherpeace Tarot a guest review by Leah Samul   Motherpeace was one of the first two round decks, the other being Daughters of the Moon, and both were designed by women.  Vicki Noble began work on her Motherpeace Tarot in 1978.   The deck has several strong points.  Noble was conscious of the racial and patriarchal bias of most tarot decks that were on the market in the late 70s.  To correct this, her deck features pictures of  Native Americans, Africans, and other non-white national groups.  Though today it isn't unusual for a deck to do this, in 1978 it was virtually unheard of.  Even now, it is still refreshing to see so many different races represented.   Motherpeace has the advantage of being round, which gets around (no pun intended) the duality problem of reversed cards.  Round cards can come up completely upside down, as rectangular cards can.  But they can also encompass all levels in between the directly upright and the completely reversed.  So that if a card is slanted slightly to the left, the energy is only a little held back.  A card at right angles would indicate a lot of constraint.  Slanted a little to the right can mean a somewhat forced quality to the card, whereas a right angle card tilting right could be mean very aggressive energy.  Completely reversed takes on the opposite of completely upright.  Adding this many gradations to the reading of the cards enriches the possibilities in interpretation.   For women, this deck features a multitude of female images that reflect and support a matrifocal awareness.  If you are a man with a very traditional mind set, the deck might turn you off.  But many women and young girls will be deeply nurtured by the preponderance of female oriented symbolism. There is also a deep sense of community cultivated here that is lacking in most traditional decks.  There are certainly many more pictures of people interacting in group situations than one would find in, for example, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.   There are changes in the court cards, which in traditional tarot originally were King, Queen, Knight and Page.  In Motherpeace, Noble uses Son and Daughter to replace Knight and Page; and Priestess and Shaman in place of Queen and King.  This gives a more gender balanced feel to the court cards because there are an equal number of female and male representations of the court.  Again, though now many decks use gender balanced court cards, when Motherpeace was published, it was a major innovation.   The main complaint I've heard about this deck is that people feel the artwork has a primitive quality to it.  It does to some extent, but for me personally this doesn't get in the way.  I've used the deck especially at times when I need an answer to a very difficult question, or at times when I was very distraught and needed a lot of spiritual comfort, and the artwork didn't in any way detract from the strength of the message.   One example of this:  when a friend of mine had committed suicide, I asked the deck how I should view his death.  I shuffled the deck and drew one card, and it was the Ace of Wands.  The picture on this card is a child being born out of an egg, bursting into life surrounded by flames.  The image is a lovely one and was greatly encouraging.  A week later, I asked the same question.  Amazingly, though I had shuffled very thoroughly, the same wonderful image came up.  I felt that the deck was telling my that though my friend had committed suicide, he had truly been reborn in the spirit and he was on his way to a new life.   The deck now comes out in a book/deck set, but there are two other books that can be purchased to go along with it.  One is a playbook (as opposed to the term workbook), which I don't own.  The one I have is the companion to the deck and it is quite useful for the mythological imagery in the deck.  This is another one of the things that might have been very necessary when the book came out, because not many of us knew very much about Goddess cultures and legends.  Now, however, depending on how involved an individual might be in Goddess spirituality, it might not be absolutely necessary to own the separately sold companion book.   Overall, I'd recommend this deck to anyone who is involved in Goddess spirituality, anyone who wants to get away from the patriarchal bias of traditionally focused decks, and also to anyone who wants a racially mixed deck.  I have found it to be especially useful for answers to painful but important questions.  But I've also had fun with the deck and gotten plenty of happy readings with it.   Review Copyright 1998 by Leah Samul; used with permission