Deck Review: The Hayworth Tarot

It’s time for another throwback review, with one of my all-time, old-time favourites: Jessica Hayworth‘s Hayworth Tarot. I’ve had this deck for years and years, and it shows up in my deep dives a LOT. Because I LOVE it.

It is dark and creepy and fabulously unsettling. There’s a lot of inky black blood, a lot of viscera, and a general sense that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. I’m actually not the biggest fan of gore – doing a PhD in Forensic Psychology which involved poring over lots of crime scene and post-mortem photographs means I find body horror a bit of a busman’s holiday (and, frankly, it makes me sad). But in the Hayworth Tarot it absolutely works. The imagery is so highly stylised that it never really feels gory, per se; it’s more just deeply, deliciously uncomfortable to look at.

But in a good way, you know.

The Hayworth Tarot is based on the cult-hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, but it was designed as an in-universe object – something you might actually find within the strange little desert town of Night Vale, rather than something about the Night Vale world. As such, it’s completely usable for those who know absolutely nothing about the show, although knowing a little about Night Vale can definitely help you understand the overall vibe.

If you’ve never encountered Welcome to Night Vale, The Guardian rather wonderfully described it as “the podcast that’s like a local news Twin Peaks”, which is a pretty accurate summary! The podcast takes the form of a community radio show broadcast from Night Vale, a fictional little desert town somewhere in the American Southwest where the paranormal, supernatural, and just completely fucking horrifying are simply part of everyday life. Conspiracy theories are true, mysterious government agencies are watching you, people disappear with alarming regularity, and the new dog park is absolutely, categorically forbidden to both dogs and humans – as is even acknowledging it exists (in fact, typing ‘dog park’ into an internet search engine is considered a thought crime). But none of this is treated as particularly remarkable. Cecil Gershwin Palmer, Night Vale’s avuncular and soothing radio host (weirdly, he reminds me of Moira Stuart who I used to listen to reading the news to be soothed back to sleep after a nightmare when I was a kid), simply reports on the latest eldritch horror alongside community announcements and local news, while everybody gets on with their lives as best they can.

Co-creator Joseph Fink has described Night Vale itself as terrifying – a place where people die and things frequently make no sense – but points out that, well, real life is like that too. In Night Vale it might be alien abduction rather than cancer, but Cecil models a way of simply carrying on in a world that is frightening, inexplicable, and largely beyond our control. I think y’all can see why it’s found so much resonance among the general public, despite being so odd, lol.

And that combination of the mundane and the monstrous – horror not as an interruption to ordinary life, but something you learn to live alongside while you write a complaint letter to the PTA then make a cup of tea – is very much the world the Hayworth Tarot inhabits.

The deck was created by artist and freelance illustrator Jessica Hayworth, who was already a regular collaborator with Welcome to Night Vale, producing posters and other artwork for the show. But although the Tarot deck is very much an extension of the Night Vale universe, Hayworth was given total creative freedom to make it entirely her own. She spent a little over a year drawing the deck and didn’t have to submit designs for approval or make any requested changes along the way. As Hayworth puts it, that freedom allowed her to go “completely fucking ham on the thing… [So] while it’s still an extension of the Night Vale universe, I also consider it my deck, developed start to finish entirely with my own intuition/decisions.” As a result, the deck never feels like a piece of licensed merchandise with some familiar imagery slapped onto 78 cards (anybody who looks at brand-affiliated decks on Kickstarter will know exactly what I mean…); it feels like one artist being given an established fictional world in which they can then let their imagination run wild.

And as a long, rambling aside [I know, I know, how out of character…] I LOVE this as a premise. I am an absolute sucker for in-universe objects, particularly when creators have gone completely overboard on tiny details that most people will probably never even notice. There’s an awesomely talented theatre company called Punchdrunk who make these huge, elaborate immersive productions where you wander around enormous sets – often repurposed warehouses – following and interacting with actors as the story unfolds around you. The last time I went to one, I got so distracted snooping around one tiny part of the set like the sticky-beaked little magpie I am that I basically failed to watch the play at all (I regret nothing). They’d created a 1960s film set, complete with live-in trailers for the fictional cast and crew, and every caravan had drawers and cupboards stuffed with clothes, letters, diaries, notes, inscribed novels, and all the accumulated ephemera of lives that had never actually existed. The set dressers had essentially constructed entire life histories for these imaginary people, including details that only the nosiest audience members (hello) would ever find.

I spent about two and a half hours in there 😂.

That kind of world-building absolutely delights me: not something that merely tells you about a fictional universe, but something that behaves as though that universe is real. And that’s what I love about the premise of the Hayworth Tarot, that it’s designed as a deck that might actually exist in Night Vale.

Anyway. The deck. 🤪. The Hayworth Tarot is uncanny and sort of grotesque, but it’s also incredibly beautiful. There’s a French term, jolie-laide, literally “pretty-ugly”, for that strange kind of beauty that comes not despite something being unconventional (or even ugly), but somehow because of it. And the Hayworth Tarot is very jolie-laide. Looking through it is a weird little pleasure-pain experience, like getting hot wax on your fingertips and then peeling it off. You know you’re making yourself slightly uncomfortable, but also… ooooooh.

So, unsurprisingly, I think it’s a great deck for shadow work. In their review, the Indie Deck Review talks about confronting your inner darkness only to discover that, rather than being some terrible monster lurking inside you, it’s often much more like a hurt little child: something “neglected, shunned and locked away because it is other and somewhere along the lines we decided that being other was bad.” It continues “this deck gives your shadows a voice and a platform to start working through some of that pain and start healing.” And YES. That’s exactly how I experience this deck. It gives the ugly, uncomfortable, unwanted bits of ourselves somewhere to exist without demanding that we prettify them first. And as we learn from the Strength card, sometimes, when you actually sit down with the beast inside and pet its great shaggy head, you discover that it wasn’t really a beast after all.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The deck itself is pretty basic (I mean, it’s £15, so very reasonably priced!), but good quality. The cards are standard Tarot size (12cm x 7cm), and are flexible but not flimsy, with a kinda mid-gloss finish.

As per the website, the deck comes in a “classy, not-creepy-at-all velvet bag” 😂.

And that’s it. Would I like a proper box instead of the Eye-of-Sauron style velvet pouch? Yes, yes I would. Would I like a guidebook talking us through the fantastic creations of Hayworth’s weirdly wonderful little brain? Also yes. Am I going to make a fuss when the deck costs fifteen quid?

No. No, I am not.

The deck is awash with pinks and purples, giving everything a kind of nuclear-sunrise feel. It’s a bit end-of-days, although the colours themselves are surprisingly gentle: the soft light of a dying sun.

If I had to come up with overall themes I’d say guts and holes. The guts don’t bother me. In fact, I think all those twisting, spilling entrails work rather beautifully for Tarot. They get at that horrible twisty feeling in your own guts when a reading really hits – sometimes because you feel wonderfully connected and seen, known, and sometimes because you feel almost attacked, forced to confront some horrid or difficult truth that you’d much rather have left safely buried in your subconscious.

And then there are the holes. Big pots of absolute blackness that appear throughout the deck, almost anti-art, they suck up parts of Hayworth’s drawings. They’re very powerful – voids, absences, small but heavy. I had Beatles lines in my head: And though the holes were rather small / They had to count them all / Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall…‘

Although the song these holes – and, actually, the deck as a (w)hole – most remind me of is Holes by Mercury Rev. It has that same sense of slightly paranoid reverie: beautiful and terrifying, prosaic and other-worldly all at once. The song drifts dreamily through this landscape of ordinary things made suddenly strange and threatening, where you’re never quite sure whether you’re dreaming, remembering, or being watched. (NB the live versions from their recent tours are STONKING – please listen to one if you can! I watched them play it at the Wedgewood Rooms earlier in the year and it made me cry.)

Time, all the long red lines, that take control
Of all the smoke like streams that flow into your dreams
That big blue open sea, that can’t be crossed
That can’t be climbed, just born between
Oh, the two white lines, distant Gods and faded signs
Of all those blinking lights, you had to pick the one tonight

Holes, dug by little moles, angry jealous spies
Got telephones for eyes, come to you as friends
All those endless ends, that can’t be tied
Oh they make me laugh, and always make me cry
‘Til they drop like flies, and sink like polished stones
Of all the stones I throw, how does that old song go?

How does that old song go?

Bands, those funny little plans, that never work quite right.

Holes by Mercury Rev

That’s the Hayworth Tarot all over. Its world is soft and hazy and strangely beautiful, but there are holes in it. And you don’t know what’s on the other side.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Hayworth Tarot

I really like Magician cards that focus on this theme – that the tools we need to make our dreams into reality are already in our hands, and that it is up to us to make the ‘magic’ happen. And here, it’s ALL about the hands.

The Magician combines the power of the four suits with their corresponding elements: Pentacles/earth, Cups/water, Wands/fire and Swords/air. Everything pours, grows, burns, and drips between two disembodied hands, which also hark back beautifully to the hands traditionally pictured emerging from clouds on the four Aces in the RWS. It’s as though the Magician has gathered together all four of those gifts and is now actively manipulating them – taking potential and turning it into something real.

Ahhh, the Empress, in all her faceless glory. I’ve always loved this card in the Hayworth Tarot, but at the same time, found it very ambiguous. My take is that the card is saying something interesting about creation and self-creation (espec. given the prominence of her little hand mirror). The Empress creates, but here she might literally be creating herself. Applying a face to the blankness! My very 18th-wave-feminist read (and one which prob has nothing to do with Hayworth’s intention!) is that it makes me think about femininity as a social construct (props to Butler) – not simply as something one is, but something one does, something one continuously makes and remakes – adornment, clothes, hair, makeup, presentation. Not necessarily in a negative “beauty standards: BAD” way either: there’s pleasure and agency in constructing yourself, just as there can be pressure in it.

The Hermit is one of the deck’s simplest cards, and one of my favourites. Two hands emerge from the darkness to offer us… a lightbulb. This may be a nod to Josie’s lightbulb in Welcome to Night Vale.

I was changing light bulbs on my porch, and my back and balance were not what they once were, and I fell off my step ladder. These tall, winged friends, all named Erika, lifted me before I hit the ground. A bright black glow illuminated the air around them and me. One of the angels gently twisted out the old bulb and replaced it. They handed the burned bulb to me and said “we can change things.”

I told them “Yes. You are angels. I believe in you. You are angels and you can change things. WE. We can change things.” And then the same angel said “I just meant the light bulb. We can change light bulbs.”

But that combination of the profound and the utterly mundane is perfect for the Hermit IMO. I wrote in my Hermit deep dive about the connection between the Hermit and the Star: both are guiding lights, beacons shining in the darkness. But where the Star is celestial, aspirational, and far away, the Hermit’s light is local, humble, and immediate. One invites us to dream; the other helps us see where to put our foot next. And I like Hayworth’s mundane Hermit – it’s nothing magical or mystical, just a bog-standard lightbulb. Because when you’re standing in absolute darkness, you don’t really need the heavens to blaze, you just need enough light to see.

And I also love that in this card hands reach out of the darkness and offer the lightbulb directly to us. The Hermit turns inward and withdraws from the world, but not simply to escape it: traditionally, the wisdom gained in solitude is something he can bring back and share with others. His light may be small, but it’s focused, practical and – quite literally here – being handed on to you, the reader.

The Wheel of Fortune gives us another particularly Night Vale-ish image: a pocket watch in which time appears to have completely broken. The glass has shattered outwards from the centre and the hands are gone. This isn’t simply a clock that has stopped, time itself has gone wrong. Which, in Night Vale, it frequently has. Early in the podcast, Carlos (a scientist newly arrived in Night Vale) discovers that the town’s clocks literally aren’t real. He dismantles several and finds them hollow, or containing horrible grey gelatinous stuff with hair and teeth instead of mechanisms. He also discovers that time is passing at a different rate inside Night Vale than outside it – people don’t always age as they should, and cause and effect have a somewhat, ahem, casual relationship with one another. Which works well for the WoF, a card that sometimes shows up to tell us that fate likes to mess with us, that not all consequences are predictable, that life can easily twist in an unexpected direction.

The Temperance card’s faceless angel is such a strong image compared to the usually rather chilled-out, blissed-out figures we see in other decks. Here, water pours from the angel’s hands directly into a blazing bin fire – but the water doesn’t extinguish the flames, and the flames don’t evaporate the water. The two opposites somehow coexist.

Which gets beautifully to the active heart of Temperance for me. This might be a card about balance and moderation, but that doesn’t mean it’s wishy-washy or meh. Tempering is a process of transformation: think of tempering steel through carefully controlled heat and cooling. Balance isn’t necessarily a state you achieve and then sit serenely inside; sometimes it is something you have to continually make, adjusting one force against another without allowing either to overwhelm the whole.

But there’s also a very specific Night Vale joke going on here. This appears to be one of Night Vale’s angels – the Erikas – warming itself over a burning barrel of rubbish. And burning trash is pretty symbolic in the podcast:

Come huddle with us. There is a barrel here. It is filled with trash, and we have lit it on fire. It is so warm. The trash. The trash is mostly paper and cardboard, but it is also something greater than that. It is a symbol of progress, of the great tower of industry and need, a ruined tower like Babel which has toppled under the weight of its hubris. And in the language of flame, it tells us things. It tells us so much. Not through words but through visions… Come huddle with us. You, without heat. You, without home. You, without hope. Come huddle with us.

So I just love all this for Temperance. Fire and water, sacred and profane, angel and garbage. The sublime and the ridiculous don’t cancel each other out; Hayworth puts them in the same battered old barrel and somehow makes them work together.

The Devil is thought to depict Night Vale’s Smiling God, a being of immense power, “vast and encroaching” and, crucially, “ceaseless appetite”. Worshipped by the sinister StrexCorp Synernists Incorporated – whose cheery corporate mantra includes “believe in a smiling god” – it manifests as an enormous, destructive light, associated with warmth and happiness but also with consumption, destruction, and the unravelling of all things. Which works incredibly well, because the Devil in the Tarot isn’t about evil, per se. He’s about appetite. Desire, consumption, temptation, compulsion; the things that feel good enough that we keep feeding them even when we know perfectly well that they might be feeding on us too.

And there’s a distinctly capitalist flavour to StrexCorp’s particular brand of devilry. On the Night Vale sub Biobak made this brilliant StrexCorp/Amazon mash-up, pointing out that Amazon’s friendly little smiley logo could well be the smile of the Smiling God, and FUCK ME, it works. We all rail against Amazon and the horrors of gigantic corporations while simultaneously going, ah, but I could really do with getting this new spatula before dinner tomorrow. We know! We know it’s a terrible shitty company that makes its workers piss in drinks bottles, and busts unions, and doesn’t pay taxes, and probably eats babies. We know! And yet we click! As Massive Attack sing, ‘Oh well, the devil makes us sin / but we like it when we’re spinning in his grin‘.

This card gives me a whole deeper understanding of the RWS Devil card. Because this is a Devil that absolutely has me in its grip. I can see myself standing there in my own loose little chain collar, perfectly capable of taking it off but thinking, yes, but then where will I get a spatula by tomorrow? I’d have to leave the house and talk to people oh nooooo 😭😳

Hayworth’s image captures that endless appetite v. effectively. The Smiling God curls in on itself around one of the deck’s great black holes: an absence that can apparently swallow forever and never be filled. As I wrote in my Devil deep dive, Hayworth’s card also has echoes of curling devil’s horns, Dunian sandworms, and even the deep pinkgrey folds of our ancient brains. It feels simultaneously alien and horribly organic – something cosmic that is nevertheless made out of us. That’s partly why it reminds me so strongly of Frank Herbert’s writing about the sandworms of Dune:

The elements of any mythology must grow from something profoundly moving, something which threatens to overwhelm any consciousness which tries to confront the primal mystery. Yet, after the primal confrontation, the roots of this threat must appear as familiar and necessary as your own flesh. For this, I give you the sandworms of Dune … the extension of human lifespan cannot be an unmitigated blessing. Every such acquisition requires a new consciousness. And a new consciousness assumes that you will confront dangerous unknowns – you will go into the deeps.

The thing that might devour you isn’t wholly alien. It’s desire, appetite, pleasure, greed, fear – all those ancient little wants curled deep inside the folds of our own brains.

The Devil isn’t outside the door.

The call is coming from inside the house.

I love the way the figure on the Star card seems to be gathering the stars to their mouth like a comfort blanket and breathing in the smell of home. I also love the reversal of the traditional image. The RWS Star pours her water out into the world; Hayworth’s figure gathers the stars towards themselves and breathes them in. There are times when healing means giving, but there are also times when we need to let ourselves receive. To gather whatever tiny scraps of beauty and hope we can find, pull them close to our faces, and inhale.

A very tender, if slightly meloncholy, World card. The way the figure is drawn immediately makes me think of the ways that time is made visible on the body. The World man has apparently been sitting in the sea for so long that coral has colonised him. He isn’t merely in the world any more; the world is literally growing on him. It works so well for me because the World is about integration: the dissolution of the boundary between self and everything around us. The Fool begins the journey as this singular little individual stepping out into existence; at the other end, here’s a figure who has become an ecosystem.

And coral is just a great metaphor for that. Coral reefs look like one enormous entity, but they’re actually a vast community of tiny organisms, built up over generations. So it gives us wholeness made from multiplicity, which is incredibly World-y. Completion isn’t necessarily one perfect indivisible thing; it’s all these countless experiences – every place we’ve been, every person we’ve loved, every mistake we’ve made, and every version of ourselves we’ve left behind, slowly accreting into the strange old creature we eventually become.

Hayworth’s Wands are these kinda giant stubby matches, they’re very odd, and I love them. And in the Nine of Wands the figure has basically become one of them! The Nine of Wands is the card of I have almost nothing left to give, but I’m still standing [yeah, yeah, yeah], and the Hayworth Tarot pushes it to its logical extreme: the figure is literally running out of person! They’re already fading away from the feet upwards, their head is ablaze, and yet they’re still upright, still facing that final wall of matches. The traditional wounded soldier holds the ninth wand; Hayworth’s battered little soldier is the ninth wand.

There’s a real last-stand, blaze-of-glory quality to it. Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. Except this one is doing both simultaneously. I can’t decide if it’s awful or bittersweet, lol, as it also reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘First Fig’:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

So I can’t decide! Because there’s something magnificent about that final flare of defiance: I’m still here. I’m still burning. You haven’t fucking beaten me yet. But there’s also a warning buried in it. When does resilience become self-destruction? When does admirable perseverance become simply refusing to stop even as we consume the very last of ourselves?

Perhaps that’s exactly where the Nine belongs. The Ten of Wands is waiting immediately around the corner, after all. There’s only so long you can keep telling yourself to push through.

All four Knights in the Hayworth Tarot have their guts out, and I LOVE this. Because Knights are gutsy: brave, bold, action-oriented, prepared to throw themselves bodily into the fray. But they’re also all gut feeling. I tend to think of the Tarot Knights as teenagers, still learning when to engage the brain rather than simply charging after whatever desire, conviction, or emotion is currently overwhelming them.

And they’re wonderfully without guile – the Queens and Kings aren’t dishonest, but they’ve learnt discretion. They know when to hold something back, when to keep their own counsel, when perhaps not to wail that this is the WORST DAY EVER because the person they fancy failed to reply to a text for three hours 😂. The Knights haven’t quite got there yet. They let it all hang out in a ‘here I am, spilling my guts to you’ kinda way. And Hayworth makes that horribly, brilliantly literal.

The Knight of Wands is particularly visceral. He looks like some kind of extreme sword-swallower, except it’s one of Hayworth’s great matchstick Wands disappearing down his throat and through his body. It’s like the only way he knows how to control the fire is to let it rip straight through him.

And this imagery really works for the Knights as teenage-style development. Because, Christ, being a teenager is so painful and raw. It’s also wonderful, because you feel all the good stuff that bright and shocking too, there is no love quite like first love; no sex quite like that first relationship where you seem to catch each other on fire; no friendships quite like those teenage besties who feel forged in the flames alongside you. You haven’t yet grown the protective layers that adulthood gradually builds around all those tender little organs. Your guts are still on the outside. Which is exhilarating. But Jesus does it fucking hurt! Most of us eventually learn how to contain some of that intensity, to protect ourselves, to think before we act. Sadly, not all of us get through it in one piece though.

And then the Knight of Cups offers you his guts in a cup: Here, have all of my feelings! ALL OF THEM! He doesn’t merely have emotions; he needs to express them, share them, hand them bodily over to someone else, even if he only met them twenty minutes ago. There’s something wonderfully open-hearted about that – no games, no pretence, no keeping his cards close to his chest. Here is everything soft and vulnerable inside me. You can have it. Cheers! [This makes me like the KoC much more than my usual: ehhhh, he’s a player type side-eye lol].

And then there’s the Knight of Pentacles, who does something rather different with all those exposed innards. Carrie Mallon points out that something is actually growing from her entrails: “sometimes the gaping black holes in you are not just nihilistic voids, but fertile places making way for beautiful stuff to become real in this world.” I love this, particularly because of all those holes running through the Hayworth Tarot. I talked earlier about them as a kind of anti-art: pools of blackness that swallow parts of Hayworth’s drawings, obliterating rather than creating. But perhaps emptiness isn’t always an ending. Sometimes the hole is the space where something new gets to grow.

And, of course, this is the Knight of Pentacles. Earth, cultivation, steady gains, the slow, unglamorous business of turning potential into something tangible. Here, the Knight quite literally uses herself as the soil. Her body is broken open and from that dark, messy, visceral stuff comes new growth. Which makes this perhaps the gentlest of Hayworth’s gut-spilling Knights. She still has her insides on the outside – but look! They’re blooming.

The King of Wands here is surprisingly gentle. Unlike the Knight and his bonkers sword-swallowing antics, the King has learned how to let the fire pass through his body without being consumed by it. The plume of smoke he breathes out makes him look almost triumphant, in an old and worn kinda way. He owns the fire, as well as the smoke, the orange and the black. I really love the way Hayworth uses colour here – the King hasn’t extinguished his fire as he’s aged; he’s integrated it.

The Hayworth Tarot is quite A Serious Deck, so I enjoy the Four of Cups as it makes me laugh. The traditional figure might be so jaded or fed up that they fail to notice the cup being offered to them; Hayworth’s figure has gone one better and plonked the bloody cup over his head so he literally can’t see anything 😂. He hasn’t merely failed to notice the possibilities around him, he has deliberately blinded himself to them. It’s the emotional equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling I’M NOT LISTENING, I’M NOT LISTENING. And yet those strange blue threads (rivulets?) still seem to tether him to the three cups sitting directly in front of him. The possibilities haven’t gone anywhere, he just can’t see them from inside his self-imposed ceramic isolation chamber.

For me, this Ace of Swords shows the cost of insight, that the truth often cuts us as much as it sets us free. A realisation can liberate you while simultaneously being really blimmin’ painful: Oh. THAT’S what’s happening. Oh no. Once you’ve seen something clearly, you can’t necessarily go back to the comfortable head-in-the-clouds fog you occupied before. (Night Vale fans might also see a nod here to Megan Wallaby, who was born in the form of an adult man’s detached hand – ah Night Vale!)

The Two of Swords is violent. There’s so much of Hayworth’s horrible inky black blood, and yet the figure’s (juxta)pose is almost comically casual. She’s just sitting there, arms loosely crossed, while two swords protrude from the inky pits that were her eyes – and from the blood on her hands it’s clear she did this to herself. This isn’t simply I cannot see. It’s I have made myself unable to see. It really gives a horror move vibe!

But I think it works. For me, the Swords as a suit is often about psychological self-harm – not necessarily literal self-injury, obviously, but the astonishing capacity of the human mind to become both torturer and tortured. The Nine is the obvious culmination of that, but it’s already here in the Two: I cannot cope with this decision / knowledge / conflict, therefore I will arrange things so that I don’t have to see it. Obvs sometimes that genuinely is protective; we can’t process everything immediately. Sometimes the Two says: shut it out, withdraw, give yourself time. But avoidance can calcify into something much more destructive, the loss of our ability to see at all.

And that tiny mountain on the horizon makes me wonder if there’s another Night Vale joke buried here. The residents of Night Vale have a complicated relationship with mountains – including, at various points, simply refusing to acknowledge their existence. So perhaps our figure has taken the logical Night Vale approach to inconvenient evidence: if you can see a mountain that isn’t supposed to exist, destroy the eyes that saw it and the mind that remembers it. Problem solved!

The Five of Swords is very much the cost of victory at all costs card, and Jeez Louise, Hayworth takes that idea somewhere horrible. The basic composition still echoes Pamela Colman Smith: two defeated figures retreat into the distance while our victor remains behind, gathering up the swords. But the price of victory here is incredibly steep; she hasn’t just cut herself with her pile of looted swords, she’s hacked herself to literal ribbons, including almost obliterating her face. She’s lost herself. That’s the dark heart of the Five for me: winning the argument but destroying the relationship; getting your revenge and discovering it hasn’t healed anything; becoming so fixated on coming out on top that you stop noticing what your victory is doing to you.

We also see this across the deck; Hayworth often makes the metaphorical violence in certain cards (the Nine of Wands, the Two and Five of Swords) literal bodily disintegration. In the Two, refusing to see destroys the eyes. Here and in the Nine of Wands, needing to win and needing to hang on destroys the self. The thoughts/behaviours associated with each card aren’t merely represented by swords or fire; the swords and fire do to the body what those patterns do to the psyche.

We see the same in the Seven of Swords, the act of theft/deception has cost the figure his hands. And the blood here is red for once, not the usual pitiless black, so we get the sense that this is somehow fresher, rawer. This has just happened. He is still bleeding. The figure looks back at the severed hands he left behind, but it’s almost like he regrets leaving the two swords, not the loss of his actual body parts! And isn’t that exactly the sort of shit we do to ourselves? Even now he doesn’t see what this has cost him, even now. Wounded and diminished, he’s looking backwards at the thing he didn’t get. There’s something horribly Seven of Swords about being so invested in getting away with it, outsmarting everyone, taking as much as you can, that you fail to notice the pieces of yourself you’re leaving behind.

‘Just’ by Radiohead has always been my go-to song for the more negative Swords cards, and it’s been a total earworm for me while working with Hayworth’s deck! You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts – you do it to yourself. I just love that throughout the deck Hayworth simply takes all that invisible psychological damage and puts it on the outside of the body, where we can’t pretend we don’t see it.

The Eight of Swords might be less explicitly gory than some of Hayworth’s other Swords, but somehow it’s just as unsettling. Look at her blindfold. It sits low enough on her face that we should be able to see her eyes (or at least her brows) peeking out above it – but there aren’t any, it’s like a smooth little doll face. Like the Two, this is wilful blindness, except here it feels as though the blindness has become so habitual that she no longer needs eyes at all. And then the blindfold itself is all done up like a present with a bow! Like it’s a gift to be in the prison. Here you go! Your very own lovely little cage! As the viewer you feel she’s come to like the tight blades of her jail. Perhaps she’s even started to experience it as something the world has given her rather than something she might choose to escape. Urghhh, this deck really hammers home the shadow work of the Swords!

The King, thank god, is more air than blade – I def needed a break from the horror show by this point! I really like the strange separation of his head, too. With another card that might suggest dissociation, but here it feels deliberate and controlled: he’s capable of lifting his mind above the immediate mess and seeing the wider landscape. He feels remote, certainly, and perhaps there’s a shadow here too: spend too long living entirely inside your own head and you risk becoming detached from the grubby realities down on the ground. But I trust those eyes – this man thinks before he acts.

It’s in the Pentacles that we really get the holes. The traditional golden coins become almost anti-pentacles: great circles of gaping blackness instead of the reassuring bulk of material wealth. And I LOVE what that does to the Four. This is traditionally a card about holding on – to money, possessions, security, whatever makes us feel safe – until holding on becomes a kind of trap. Here the inertia of hoarding and clinging to what you have seems to be literally sucking the figure down like a black hole. I need to hold onto this because it makes me safe gradually becomes I can’t move because I need to hold onto this. (Also, ack, look at him, he’s got those horrible freakishly long arms and the legs bending the wrong way, with haunches like a dog or a donkey. Hayworth is incredibly good at making bodies that are nearly human, but wrong in ways that make my skin crawl, urgh).

Night Vale fans, I also wonder whether there’s a little echo here of the Mudwomb, that primordial state from which the first cosmic beings eventually dragged themselves into existence: a place before action, characterised by pure, inert potential.

Things get pretty creepily disgusting again in the Five, where Hayworth’s black anti-Pentacles have migrated from the earth into what looks like heart muscle; pale maggoty things crawling out of pink, striated flesh. The heart, that should be life and love, is instead putrefaction and death. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It’s v. Clive Barker-ish, Gothic architecture becoming meat, the boundary between building and body collapsing. The church window itself is undoubtedly a throwback to the one we see in the RWS card, where the two struggling figures traipse below an illuminated church window. But here the church isn’t just remote or uncaring, it’s putrid – the sanctuary is rotten too.

The Six of Pents does more creepy stuff with Hayworth’s black holes. Our benefactress is certainly bestowing her largesse, pouring water from her jug into the six pits while desperate hands reach up towards her. But… wtf are they in the holes?! There’s something almost grotesque about congratulating her for giving them water when the entire situation is so obviously horrific. It’s like giving a prisoner on death row a slap-up last meal: an act of kindness that does absolutely nothing to challenge the vastly more consequential violence surrounding it.

And of course she’s got the weird inky eye holes, like she too has stabbed her eyes out to ignore the reality of her role – she can see the hands well enough to give them water, but she doesn’t seem able (or willing) to see the situation that put them there. Or it’s a kind of metaphor for that paternalistic sort of charity: I see your need; I don’t necessarily see you. They also remind me of eyes scratched out on a photograph: identity deliberately obliterated. They’re dehumaised: the faceless warden, the nameless prisoner.

I don’t have a huge amount to add to Carrie Mallon’s brilliant reading of the Eight, which turns the traditional card’s celebration of diligent labour on its head. Usually, the Eight tells us that sustained work produces something: skill, mastery, value. But Hayworth’s worker is busy producing the weird little anti-matter holes – the more he works, the less there is. It’s a wonderfully bleak little capitalist nightmare – keep your head down, work hard, be productive! – even when the work itself is digging you, and potentially everyone else, deeper into the shit.

Death leaves us staring into the unknown. Sometimes that unknown is terrifying. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Usually, it is both.

As you might have gathered, I really, really, really love this deck. For all its body horror and existential dread, it never feels grim simply for the sake of it – there’s tenderness, humour, hope, and genuine beauty here too. It’s a deck with a LOT to say, and over five years after I first bought it, I still find new things in it. You can buy the Hayworth Tarot here for $20 (about £15), which, quite frankly, is BONKERS cheap for a deck this good!

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