Deviant Moon Deck

I've seen hundreds of Tarot decks over the years, and I can honestly say there is nothing on the market that rivals the sumptuous textures, masterful artistry and utter originality of the Deviant Moon Tarot.

For months now, several images of the Deviant Moon Tarot were posted to the web, capturing the imagination of Tarot enthusiasts worldwide. Many were clamoring for news, more card images and a definitive release date with an almost desperate excitement.

Tarot fans, rejoice! U.S. Games has now unleashed the highly anticipated Deviant Moon Tarot upon the world! And let me tell you, if the exquisite, highly-detailed online images whetted your appetite, the actual deck goes above and beyond expectation.

The Deviant Moon Tarot expands on Rider-Waite imagery with a gloriously twisted perspective, reflecting common associations in dazzling patterns, striking colors, and surprising juxtapositions (e.g. a tree that bleeds red, a Page that has created himself out of spare parts and a sharp-dressed masked armless woman with a wheel for a left “foot"). The 9 of Cups, usually deemed the "Wish Card", aptly depicts a genie who's just emerged from a child's magic lamp.

I’m pleased to report that not only is the Deviant Moon Tarot a solid reading deck, but also unexpectedly insightful.

So despite the unusual characters populating the world of the Deviant Moon, they still speak messages relevant and purposeful to discerning individuals. This would make a great journaling deck, too, as well as one for comparative Tarot studies.

-- Janet Boyer, Tarot Channel

Artistically, the cards are incredibly strong and equally consistent from the Fool all the way through to the King of Pentacles. They are dark on the surface and underneath; photographs from cemeteries and tombstones have been morphed and twisted into other elements of the cards: clothing trim, headgear and shoes. The backgrounds are urban and industrial, scenes are often set outdoors but there is little natural environment; the moon rises over smokestacks, dull and dirty skies, fortified buildings -- all created from photographs of a mental asylum. The figures in the cards are non-human, with layered faces and moon-like masks, wide staring eyes, bird-like feet and often elongated bodies. Despite the lack of regular human facial expressions and body language, the figures are remarkably expressive. It’s a deck of the subconscious, of bad dreams, of visions from a bad trip come to life. Patrick’s symbolism comes from childhood dreams and imagination, a visual dedication to his interest in the ‘more melancholy side of life’. It’s reminiscent of its Rider-Waite heritage but really has a feeling all of its own. It’s a nice change to see imagery with such polish and dedication that also has an obvious familiarity with the tarot’s symbolism; it stays true to tarot but brings to it a new and disturbing approach.

The cards depart from traditional elements of symbolism in many ways but the card’s tarot meaning is still clear. As in the Nine of Cups, the well-dressed character releases a genie from the bottle and looks on with surprise; a very appropriate image for what is traditionally known as the ‘Wish’ card. The King of Wand isn’t seated on a throne, and instead holds woodland creatures by the hand and strides through the scene, but still comes across as the confident, charismatic leader.

The Moon card is literally the puppet-master of the figures below, holding the strings that connect them and controlling their movements. Ugly but strangely elegant, Death has a red scarf wrapped around her skeletal horse head and a pregnant belly, signaling both the end and the beginning inherent in transformation of Death. The cards do have an uncomfortable edge, even in traditionally positive and usually pretty cards like the Star.

The companion booklet is entirely in English and for each card shares a description of the imagery and a few keywords for the upright and reversed aspect of each card. Reading the booklet really not necessary to use the cards -- all of the depth is in the imagery itself, there is little further background or explanation needed. There’s an original ten-card spread as well, based on cards arranged simply in a circle.

A little tarot knowledge is always useful, but it’s not mandatory to use the Deviant Moon. The dark and strange beauty of its imagery takes a new approach but is true enough to the tarot archetypes to be useable by readers from novice level to the well experienced -- as long as you’re prepared for a little excursion into the dark side of your subconscious.

-- Solandia, Aeclectic Tarot

I received The Deviant Moon Tarot on a Monday and spent four days doing nothing but pursuing the cards.

The images themselves are absorbing surrealistic humanoid figures in abstract settings, that are at once attractive and haunting. Many of the faces are 'split' between a light and dark half, some faces appear to be masked, and on others the masks are faces, some appendages have multiplied beyond the two that we’d see in a humanoid ... we expect to see some things, and we see what we expect ... and then are left unsettled as the images unfold.

Patrick Valenza accomplished something quite unexpected, facilitated because he used a surrealistic approach to the Tarot. He has his static humanoids performing the dynamic actions that pertain to the card’s meaning. For most cards, it is a simple matter of 'what is this character obviously doing now' (or just completed, or about to do). Because of the organic and narrative approach to the subjects, we are also able to understand how each of the characters feels.

The Tower is a tower, and the Devil is a devil (great feet), Temperance pours from one container to another, there are stars on The Star.

However the images keep unfolding.

There were little details that popped out during the readings, and I had to go to the source for some answers.

"Uh Patrick, I notice there are a few oddly placed clocks with unexpected times displayed, for example in the Eight of Pentacles the clock displays eleven fifty-eight.""Thanks for noticing" answered Patrick, with a wry smile, "Yup, two minutes to midnight ... all the work you do in a day, and there is always more to do the next. Day in and day out. Hoping for something to show after all of this work ... maybe you won't see it today, but maybe tomorrow.""How about the Four of Pentacles, the clock there displays nine forty."Patrick pauses and leans back. "There’s a background story here. My father-in-law was a greedy, materialistic man. Everything in his life was based on what he owned, and always put himself over his children. Well, the day came when he finally died. We heard the news at about 9:40 one morning. Nobody was particularly heart broken. I always wondered what he thought, lying there waiting to be cremated ... does he say to himself, 'I wish I spent more time with my children as they grew up', or was it, 'DAMN, I didn't make enough money!' So in this card, the death angel leads the miser to the fires of the furnace, with the symbol of time dangling from her mouth. The miser looks back on his possessions in fear that he will never see them again, while clutching a few golden pentacles in a last attempt to "take it with him".I ask "How about the Hanged Man. His clock says five eleven.""I used to work at the most mundane job years ago ... a real nine to five. Many times, I would work a bit past the whistle. I found it a total waste of time, but back then I had little choice. I felt I was in limbo, and had to make a real effort to break free of my suspended life. This clock represents my lost time there and the times I worked past 5:00."One last question Patrick, tell me about the borders ... ""The mixed colors come from the cards I created when I was 15. Truthfully, the colors on the majors just looked good with the color compositions of the individual cards at the time, so I just carried that over when I re-began the deck in 2004. However, the minors were different ... these colors relate to the citizens of each realm. The borders on the suit of Swords are Red for their strife and pain of the heart. Cups have Blue for the calm purity of the sea. In Wands I used Green for the earth and the natural world. And with Pentacles, Black for the materialistic void they have in their souls."

So now that we have more information, we’ve also left the antiquated suit meanings in the past where they belong, in the latter half of the Victorian era. Even Majors refuse to pay homage to this era by using the Continental numbering system.

This is a great deck for the reader who does not want to read a book and be told what meaning is.

But I have to provide a strong caveat ... if you are a reader who prefers sunny bunny over truth -- don’t visit this deck. The Deviant Moon strikes to the heart of issues, with the same ease that it pushes aside six hundred years of Tarot myth-takes; it dives directly towards the truth. That will unsettle many.

It’s often difficult to remember, that the voices that whisper in the darkness from the peeling walls, often speak the truth.

-- Dan Pelletier, The Tarot Garden