The Tapestry Tarot, or "Tah-roh" as Ms. Jensen prefers to spell it, is a large deck containing pictures of the 80 "tapestries" which Ms. Jensen crafted herself in order to express artistically her thoughts and feelings regarding the goddess Hathor and the "tah-roh" itself.
These are not tapestries as I have been raised to call them, but rather they appear to be soft-sculpture renderings of an artistic theme. The author/artist used a collection of oil paints, textile fragments, metal objects, ropes, and so on in her work. Some of them are totally off course from traditional symbolism for a card's meaning. Others seem to be fabric versions of traditional cards.
I didn't find them to be as pretty as the Enchanted Tarot, another one which uses fabric art to portray the cards. However, there is a lot more symbolism expressed in these, and there are a number of correspondences listed in the borders around the cards as well.
The suits are the traditional Cups, Swords, Wands and Pentacles. There are no pentacles shown in the pentacles suit, rather shiny gold fabric circles which are probably meant to be coins. The court cards are Page, Knight, Woman and Man. Additionally, it appears that the Major Arcana have been divided into two categories; the first twelve seem to have additional astrological and qabbalistic correspondences attached to them.
The Lovers card has been renamed the Path of Life, and the Chariot has been titled The Cart of Heaven. The size of the cards themselves is daunting and shuffling is nearly impossible. Also the corners on the deck were kind of sharp. I got a paper cut handling them.
There is definitely a
rich kind of look to these cards, although it isn't a pretty or gentle
look. I didn't see a whole lot presented which reminded me of the
Egyptian goddess Hathor, and I'm not a total slouch when it comes to Egyptian
mythology, which means the symbolism is fairly obscure.
I'm not real sure if
it's there at all. It might have been inspiring the artist, but it
doesn't come across
very strongly in the
work.
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Review Copyright 1998 by Gina M. Pace