Currently On Kickstarter: Le Tarot de la Grande Ourse

You know when you see a card from a Tarot deck, and you think, “Wow! That’s smart. And I don’t really think I’ve seen it done like that before. That’s so cool. Something to think about. Huh. Huh.” And then you find your mind keeps coming back to it, turning it over and over and inspecting it, and every time it gives you a little jolt of pleasure and interest, and you know it’s just a really special card.

If I feel that way about a card, that’s enough to make me buy the whole deck, even if I’m kinda ambivalent about the others. In a good deck, there’ll be two or three cards that make me feel that way; in my favourite decks, there’s normally a decent fistful.

La Tarot de la Grande Ourse looked inside my soul, saw that feeling, and was like: hold my beer.

Every one’s a winner baby, that’s no lie! It never fails to satisfy!

So about… maybe a year ago? I noticed I kept pinning these incredible cards on Pinterest that all looked far too similar not to be by the same artist, from the same deck. But there was never any accompanying info! It was so frustrating. Then, in one image, I noticed a faint watermark. I was able to track down the artist, Lise Abbadie, and discovered from her website that the deck, Le Tarot de la Grande Ourse, was a work in progress she’d been slowly chipping away at for many years.

Then I just had to wait – something I’m NOT good at, lol – hoping that she didn’t run out of steam and was able to finish the project because MY GOD DO I WANT THIS TAROT DECK! It’s just card after card after card after card of sheer brilliance. I just really, really fucking love it. I cannot articulate how much I love it, lol.

AND NOW IT’S HERE ON KICKSTARTER! It could well be in my hands by April next year! OH JOY! OH JUBILATION! OH JOY IN ABUNDANCE!

Anyway, here’s a bit of info about the deck, adapted from Abbadie’s website: the deck combines scenes rooted in everyday life with more metaphorical, dreamlike imagery, with the aim of making the cards intuitive and opening up possibilities for action. Abbadie also wanted to restore a sense of preciousness to small, ordinary things – to make them, as she puts it, “Extra-Ordinary” – and each card therefore has key details picked out in gold foil. And the gold looks gorgeous, like, I would’ve backed the deck if it had been drawn with a bit of dirty beige crayon on a diposable tablecloth, but the gold is very verrrry nice!

Representation was also central to Abbadie’s approach. The deck features a diversity of bodies and identities without making that diversity the point of the cards (something I always appreciate), and she’s renamed some of the traditional cards to move away from the gender stereotypes baked into older tarot systems. She cites the Slow Holler Tarot and Collective Tarot as inspirations here, which, yes, two of my favourite decks, winner!

And, I mean, just loooook at these cards! The joy on the face of the team member we can see is just so authentic, and it infuses the whole card – which I know from Molly’s Boner & Mirror pod some can find a bit earnest or dry – with so much joie de vivre. This is how teamwork feels. Why there’s no victory quite like a shared one. And the Pents are the medals! I love it!

And then the Nine of Pents makes me feel a bit tearful tbh, it’s that wonderful feeling of complete and utter contentment you sometimes feel when you’re purposefully alone (well, just you and your dog/falcon, lol). Just that quiet pleasure in a life you’ve worked hard for that’s now going well. The sense that, right here and right now, you have everything you need. I have built a good life, I am safe, I can enjoy it. AND NOW THE PENTACLES ARE THE FIREWORKS!

And then the Knight of Swords spitting blades, SO COOL! All that speed, sharpness and potential aggression translated into words made literally weapon-like: once they’re out of your mouth, good luck getting them back in!

The Queen of Wands giving us The Fire Fuck You Fingers! 🔥😍

The Five of Pents just gives me Edgar Allan Poe, and – YES IT’S PERFECTION, this is now the canon Five of Pents for me. The end.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

From ‘A Dream Within A Dream’ by Edgar Allan Poe

BACK THIS DECK. If you only back one deck this year – hell, if you only back one deck this decade – back this deck! You can back it here. Pledges start at £65 for the deck + guidebook, which is a lot, but I’d have sold a kidney or the first-born TarotCupCake for this one tbh, so the price is sort of irrelevant to me 😂.