Review by Lalia Wilson
The Cat Tarot is a new (2019) deck, created by artist Megan Lynn Koit and writer Julie Smillie, and published by Chronicle Books. The 78 cards feel good in the hands and are easy to riffle-shuffle, as they are 2 ¾ X 4 ¾ inches. The backs, like the box, are a lavender color. The deck is reversible friendly. The box is a very sturdy cardboard that will be a good permanent home for this deck. The LWB has black & white images of each card to accompany that card’s text. The Major Arcana has the standard 21 cards, with Strength being VIII and Justice being XI.
The artwork (as you see here and on the Tarot Scopes page) is a realistic style, featuring the internet’s favorite character, the cat. This deck is one of a very few I would recommend to use with children under 13. It is a lovely gift to any cat fancier.
One of the nicest aspects of this deck is that it will not offend those critics of tarot who see it as Satanic, Pagan, or soul-destroying. You would be hard-pressed to declare that this Devil card, a Golden Retriever, is going to harm anyone’s soul or religious affiliation.
The Cat Tarot mostly follows the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition in tarot. A few cards stray from that tradition, and will require some consultation with the accompanying perfect-bound lavender LWB. For this reason, this deck is not especially good as a starter deck for new fans of tarot. The standard RWS deck has much more imagery in each card, a richer connection with archetypes, and more depth of scholarship. The Cat Tarot is something you want to get after you are familiar with the cards’ meanings.
The cards used on the Scopes page were drawn randomly for those readings. Here are three more images. Given the many attractive cards, and a number of visual witticisms, it was hard to limit the images to three with so many to choose from.
The Death card is an upright vacuum cleaner, with a cat lickety-splitting out of there. Anyone who has spent time around house cats will be familiar with this image and how much this shows a cat in a hurry.
The Seven of Cups shows a cat looking wistfully at seven cat food dishes, all full of presumably much desired different flavors of nutritious cat food. This captures the spirit of the Seven of Cups in a distinctively cat mode.
The Hanged Man, a cat peering upside down from a tree branch, is just too cute. That said, the more serious associations with the Hanged Man have to be added by the reader.
Yes, this is a cute deck. Tarot fans who are deadly serious may not be interested. The rest of us appreciate a lighter approach sometimes (or all the time). This deck is a good gift for younger people or any cat lover.