There are two decks with “Witches” in the title, so I want to make sure everyone understands which deck I’m posting on. One, called The Tarot of the Witches, by Fergus Hall, is the one used on the James Bond film Live And Let Die. The reviewer at Wicce’s Tarot Collection called it the ugliest deck he’s seen. This luckily isn’t the deck I’m reviewing. My deck is The Witches Tarot. The designer of the deck, Ellen Cannon Reed, according to the book that goes with the deck, is High Priestess of the Isian tradition. The artist is Martin Cannon. I assume they are related, but the book doesn’t say if he’s her son, brother, father, whatever. It comes in a little mustard yellow box with the Seeker (Hermit) card on the front.
This deck seems to follow most of the imagery of the standard Rider Waite decks, but with a Pagan slant. Not devil worshipper slant, just tree-hugging pagan slant. Some of the cards are in different order than usual to match up better with the order of the spheres of the Qabbalah. I know, I know, the Qabbalah isn’t pagan. Sometimes I think people use the word pagan to describe anything that isn’t Christian. Also, some of the majors are renamed to give it a more Pagan flavour. One of the biggest differences is the Devil card, which is transformed into the Horned One card. This card has a different meaning than the Devil card in other decks, but I’ll get to that when we get there.
This deck has the usual 78 cards, no bonus extra cards or cards left out. The backs of the cards are black with a big grey pentacle (5-pointed star surrounded by a circle) in the upper section. The pictures are really nice looking in my opinion. None of the cards have borders.
Each of the Majors shows a different path between the spheres of the Tree of Life. I’m no expert on the Qabbalah or the Tree of Life, but I’ll give a short description of what I understand. There are 10 spheres arranged in 3 columns. The outer two columns have three spheres and the centre one has 4. There are paths connecting some of the spheres, but I don’t understand why some are connected and some aren’t. Each path is matched to a Major card. Each Major card shows the edge of the two spheres it connects. For instance, the Empress card has part of a black circle on the left side and part of a grey circle on the right side. The Minor cards, except the court cards, match with the corresponding numbered sphere. All the 3s show different qualities of the 3rd sphere, etc.
The Minor cards correspond to different elements than usual. Cups and Pentacles are Water and Earth, like in most decks, but Wands are Air and Swords are Fire. It took me a while to get comfortable with that order, but now I have to remember the difference when I use one of my other decks.
The court cards are what confuse things, as far as I see it. The order of the court cards is King, Queen, Prince, Princess. If you deal a court card, you put the next card with it and use the meaning of the court card to modify the meaning of the next card. For instance, if you deal a King and then the Justice card, that would change the meaning of the Justice card slightly, depending on which suit the king was from. That wouldn’t be too bad, but once I ended up with about 5 or 6 court cards in a row. Talk about confusing!
I just cut the deck to see what it wants to say and came up with 8 of Wands, 4 of cups and the Hanged Man. According to the LWB 8 of Wands means science, books, learning, truthfulness and communication. 4 of Cups means devotion, perfect love, expansion of emotion, emotion in the right place, growth in a circle of loved ones, a desire to serve the gods, and forgiveness. The Hanged Man means a need for direction, for understanding, reaching for those things. Querent may be knowledgeable, but not able to put that knowledge to use. The numbers 40 and 600. Sounds good to me!
