Review by Lalia Wilson
The 78 Tarot Elemental (2019) is the sixth of a series of 78 tarot projects featuring multiple artists. Elemental was created by eighty-one artists, written by Trish Sullivan, published by Kayti Welch, and is now available at 78tarot.cards. The 2020 project, focused on the environment, will be initiated on Kickstarter in April of 2020. This will be your best opportunity to get the new 2020 deck with all the bling that will be available. Depending upon your funding level, you will have many attractive add-ons to the deck itself.
The 78 Tarot Elemental deck actually has 81 cards, the three extra cards are Meditation, Chakra Healer, and Spirit. These extra cards can be used in readings, or as a focus of meditation. Each of the 81 cards has a different creator, thus the 81 artists. Each card is labeled with the name of the card and the name of the individual artist for that card. The cards are large, 3 ¼ X 5 ½ inches, making them too large for many to be able to riffle-shuffle them. The card edges are gilded, and the backs are almost entirely gold foil. The remaining 78 cards are the traditional 21 trumps, unnumbered, so there is no need to parse out their order, and the elemental equivalents of the traditional four suits: Fire for Wands, Water for Cups, Air for Swords, and Earth for Pentacles.
The 78 Tarot Elemental comes in a sturdy cigar-style box with a magnetic closure that will be a good permanent home for this luxe deck. The accompanying little white book, is a perfect bound, black and gilt covered book of over 170 pages with full-color illustrations of each card.
The eighty-one artists mean that the artistic vision of the deck is not consistent. Each person will find cards that they really like—either the artistic style or the card’s intent—and cards that they don’t like. Some will find that the cards they like will change from day to day. For that reason this deck is not especially good as a deck to use when you read for others. The best uses of this deck, other than artistic appreciation, are for your own meditation, and for personal readings. This is a deck that lends itself to personal readings with the cards face up as you pick your card or cards. Should you do that, you will find that you don’t always pick the same cards.
You will find six cards shown on the Tarot Scopes page. Here are three more.
The Nine of Earth is attractive and closely hits the meaning of this card in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition of tarot (as does the rest of the deck). Our heroine, the sole human depicted, is shown in a garden at leisure. She is communing with a songbird. The bird house is behind her. She is surrounded by lush greenery, the nine pentacles, her smartphone, and a path leading back to a mansion.
The Knight of Fire is enveloped in fire. His steed rears. The horse’s mane and tail are on fire. The knight holds a staff/wand that is on fire. How clearly this card shows the man of action. This card in any deck is the “take charge of my destiny” card; it is particularly appropriate for this version of the Knight of (Fire) Wands.
The Three of Air, usually depicted as a heart with three swords thrust through it, is unusual yet clearly depicts the sense of loneliness and broken-heartedness that is the meaning of this card. We see a mountain sheep or goat. The animal is facing us and its horns form almost a complete heart from our perspective. Through the horns we see three streams of lights, perhaps the northern lights, which pierce the heart-shaped space from end to end.
Altogether you can see many subtleties of tarot interpretation by the 81 artists who created 78 Tarot Elemental. The deck is one you will enjoy.