Review – Page 3 – Tarot Elements

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Beyond the Celtic Cross – Behind the Scenes

It’s not every day that you get to write a book, not one that gets published. And it’s not every day that you become friends with an eminent and highly respected Tarot reader and author. But that’s exactly what happened to me.

I met Paul Hughes-Barlow online through his Supertarot website and we wrote a book together – Beyond the Celtic Cross: Secret Techniques for Taking Tarot to an Exciting New Level.

Not wanting this to be your standard promo – I thought it would be a great idea to take you behind the scenes to the creation of our book. So instead of beyond it, I’m going to take you behind it, and back to February 14th – Valentines Day, 2008.

Deck Review: the Illuminated Tarot

Review by Valerie Sylvester
The first deck most beginning tarot readers encounter when starting out on their tarot journey is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, (which I’ll refer to as “RWS” after this initial mention). It’s often the “default deck”, the one that people learn the basic meanings of the cards from. It also serves to illustrate many tarot books and websites, and most experienced tarot readers have some familiarity with it, even if they don’t use the deck regularly. Many new Tarot decks are published each year; quite of few of these decks are based in some way upon the RWS deck.

Tarot Deck Review: The Gaian Tarot

Like many others, I have been watching the progress of the creation of the wonderful Gaian Tarot from Joanna Powell Colbert. Nine years is a long time to work on a single project, but the cards themselves are so visually stunning they have definitely been worth the effort and definitely worth the wait.

The Gaian Tarot – An Interview With Joanna Powell Colbert

I recently began writing a review of the wonderful Gaian Tarot, created by Joanna Powell Colbert. Communication with Joanna regarding permission to use the artwork on my Tarot blog quickly became chatty and as luck would have it, she kindly agreed to a short interview based on the Gaian Tarot. This post is that interview, the review will follow in a couple of days. Enjoy.

Where did the Gaian Tarot begin for you?

I had the desire to create a deck of my own back in the mid-80’s when I was deep into Goddess and Tarot studies, especially of the Motherpeace and RWS decks. But the thought of painting 78 cards was daunting. (Little did I know . . .) Later on, in the late 90’s, I went through a period of time where I let go of all my esoteric interests like tarot, astrology and ritual. I moved to a small, rural island, built a straw bale house with my husband and started a wilderness awareness course of studies — learning about the native plants and animals, going deep into the Spirit of Place.