Deck Review: Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot

The final entry in my trio of Beloved Indie Unicorns Now Going Mass Market (see also: Lubanko Tarot, Blood Moon Tarot), is my Number One All-Time Deck: The Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot!

My God, did I want this deck BAD when I started collecting Tarot decks. I had searches set up all over the shop. But – my God again – were secondhand copies of the Bonestone pricey! Seeing as I couldn’t quite justify selling a kidney for a Tarot deck, I learned to yearn from afar.

Then – hooray! – I found a copy in the Netherlands that wasn’t quite so kick-me-in-the-crotch, spit-in-my-eye-and-rob-me-blind expensive (probably on account of it only being available for postage within the NL), and, as luck would have it, my little sister lives just outside Amsterdam.

It was a very happy day indeed when she came to visit with the deck in tow :-).

And now? Another happy day – the Bonestone & Earthflesh has gone mass market :-).

The Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot is the joint creation of illustrator Ana Tourian and creator Avalon Cameron; a collaboration that pairs Tourian’s unmistakable visual language with Cameron’s sprawling, myth-heavy vision. Tourian describes herself as having been “drawing for as long as [she] can remember,” the kind of child who inhaled fairy tales and immediately tried to draw her way into them. That sense of wonder still sits right at the heart of her work: the fine linework, the myth-soaked atmospheres, the figures who look as though they’ve stepped out of a story you half-remember from childhood. It’s art that feels both intimate and archetypal, familiar and strange, all at once.

She’s also a seasoned art director, which shows in the sheer discipline of her decks which are all incredibly thoughtful and beautifully composed. You don’t accidentally produce Tarot of the Abyss, Tarot of Echoes, Oracle of Echoes, Hidden Waters, Clair de Lune, Le Tarot Athurien, and this deck unless you’ve got both talent and graft in equal measure! For me, Tourian’s illustrations for Bonestone & Earthflesh feel like the best of her signature style, lush and emotive, with that quiet magic that comes from someone who still sees the world with a child’s sense of possibility, thanks (as she says) to her own kids.

Avalon Cameron, the deck’s creator, has decades of experience as a reader, writer, blogger, and collector. The Bonestone was very much her vision: a large, myth-heavy deck developed slowly and publicly, built card by card with Ana Tourian live on YouTube, back when that kind of process felt genuinely novel rather than performative.

Her background draws on folk magic and spirit work shaped by her Brazilian heritage. She now lives off-grid in Tasmania with her children, a setting that clearly feeds the deck’s wild, bone-and-moss aesthetic.

Anybody who reads this blog knows I’m completely fruit-loopy for Ana Tourian’s art, and this deck really showcases it at its best. There’s a dreamy, wistful softness to the palette, paired with elegant ink outlines that keep everything anchored and intentional: a dream to read with.

The diffuse, glowing skies and moody expanses of water we see throughout the deck put me in mind of Pui-Mun Law’s Shadowscapes era: that same marriage of watercolour haze and careful, deliberate ink detailing. It’s not a pastiche, and it’s not trying to be the same thing, but it feels spiritually adjacent. There’s also a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite mood to some of the figures: that quiet melancholy, the suspended moment, very Millais-by-way-of-Tarot.

I’ve written before about how much I love Tourian’s vision for skies, and Bonestone & Earthflesh leans hard into that strength. The way the sky bleeds into unexpected colours – blush pink into violet into silver – feels almost like a Symbolist dreamscape. It has that soft “nothing is quite real but everything is meaningful” quality. There’s also Redon-esque quality to it: colourful and fantastical, like inner life made visible.

While this is my Favourite Deck of All-Time, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the controversy and significant delays surrounding the original indie run. These are well-documented within the Tarot community, and I’ll speak to them more fully at the end of this review. However, it should also be noted that the mass-market edition is a bit of a different beast: readily available (at last!), and with several of the more controversial artistic and design choices softened or reworked.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The original indie Bonestone & Earthflesh is a 79-card deck in an absolute beast of a box, with a big, chonky guidebook. The cardstock is high-quality but quite stiff and the gilded edges… well. I know people love gilding. I am not one of those people. Matte edges? Yes. Mirror-shiny metallics? They always look a bit cheap and a bit casino-ish to me. Personal taste, of course, but still.

As I said, the box is also huge: a two-bay layout with the cards stacked in separate compartments, where they inevitably slide around and end up a bit jumbled. Visually, the indie edition has one design choice I’m not so keen on: those green title boxes with the ornate black script. For a deck whose artwork is genuinely breathtaking, the typography and framing feels oddly clumsy and dated. I’m pleased to say this has changed in the mass market version :-).

The mass-market reboot, Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot: The Reawakening, sticks to the 79-card structure and comes in at 4.94 x 6.69 x 2.56 inches – essentially still a chonky, oversized deck, but in a much more practical single-box format with a reduced size guidebook. And no gilding!

Several cards have been redrawn for The Reawakening release. In some cases, this is simply because Cameron and Tourian used celebrity reference models in the original indie edition (yes, the Magician really was McKellen’s Gandalf 😉). In others, the changes feel more deliberate: reworking some of the more controversial choices from the indie run, and often pulling the focus back so we get more of Tourian’s beautiful landscapes, rather than such a tight fixation on the central figure. And: those title boxes have been hugely improved!

Overall, The Reawakening feels like a careful translation of the indie deck, preserving its spirit while smoothing out some of the legal and design wrinkles.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot

And now some of my absolute faves from the Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot.

I love this pregante Empress, who seems to be pregnant not just with a child, but with the world itself. As her veins turn into the branches of the tree she leans against, she extends the Empress archetype beyond fertility and nurture into something more explicitly ecological. She doesn’t just mother people; she mothers the land. It’s a visual metaphor that foregrounds “environmental care and the nurturing of the planet”, folding human creation back into the wider rhythms of nature rather than setting it apart.

The Bonestone’s Wheel of Fortune is anchored in Norse mythology through the presence of the Norns, three powerful female figures who weave fate itself. Urd (the past, that which has become), Verdandi (the present, that which is becoming), and Skuld (the future, that which shall be, with all its weight of necessity and debt) sit at the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, inscribing destiny into its trunk and tending the well of fate below. The Norns can be thought of as the loom-keepers of human destiny. To encounter them on the Wheel in this deck is to be reminded that the twists of fortune aren’t random chaos so much as movement within a larger, living design.

Temperance, long associated with alchemy, is here reframed as time itself as an alchemical process. The card represents balance through duration rather than stasis, symbolised by the hourglass – life and death held in suspension, continually transforming one another. As creator Avalon Cameron puts it: “It’s life, it’s death, it’s above and below, it’s within and without. It’s all and nothing, and a combination of each. A timeless tug-of-war that eventually, organically, creates an authentic fusion of ideals and attributes, powers and emotion.”

The theme of humans becoming one with trees reappears powerfully in Death. Here, the fallen warrior’s body is not simply destroyed but absorbed: roots stretch down from his form into the earth as ravens burst from his core. It’s a striking image of the cycle of life, grief, loss, and rebirth; not death as annihilation, but death as completion.

I really like the use of ravens, as they have long been associated with death. Not because they are cruel or ominous, but because they arrive after it. Historically present on battlefields and at sites of execution, they witness (and feed on) what remains. In Bonestone, they perform that same role: marking inevitability, the aftermath of violence, and the body’s return to the earth. Not gore, but closure. Not horror, but what comes next. The fact that the ravens collectively form the shape of a skull is a wonderful little visual detail, a reminder that Death here is not an enemy, but a threshold. What ends feeds what follows. What falls becomes fertile.

The Sun is one of my standout cards. Tourian and Cameron reimagine the sun’s rays as the ribbons of a maypole, each strand grasped by a solar dancer as they weave their shared pattern of joy. It’s an inspired translation of the Sun’s energy – exuberant, embodied, generous, communal – capturing not just happiness, but the pleasure of moving together in light.

While many of the cards are undeniably beautiful, one of the things I most admire about Bonestone & Earthflesh is that it doesn’t shy away from violence. Some of the imagery is genuinely brutal. The Five of Swords, in particular, looks like one of those slow-motion knockout shots from a film: blood caught mid-arc, more blood already slicking the soldier’s mailed fist, the falling man’s eyes fixed in that precise moment where consciousness slips away. It’s not stylised violence, and it’s not heroic, it’s intimate and unflinching, just like the Five of Swords. Bonestone strips the card back to that raw core: conflict without glory, power without honour, and the kind of violence that leaves everyone diminished.

This same unflinching approach shows up in the (indie) Tower, which replaces the usual lightning-struck tower with a chained, badly injured eagle. A regal bird, brought low. Cameron points out that “when we bind something – whether for good or ill – we limit its potential, stifle its natural growth, and prevent it from reaching unfathomable heights”. Here, the eagle’s “life of freedom has been stolen, its wing broken, its feathers singed”. It’s a confronting image of damage and despair.

And yet, crucially, it isn’t the end. Bonestone’s Tower still holds to the core truth of the card: as Cameron writes “no chain can bind a spirit that is truly free”. This is destruction not as punishment, but as revelation, the moment where what has been constrained, denied, or falsely contained finally demands to be reckoned with.

The Ten of Swords is also pretty full-on. I find it really interesting that the ravens are picking out the fallen figure’s eyes even as his sword remains clenched in his fist. Swords are the suit of vision and clarity, yet the Ten warns what happens when we become too lodged in our own heads, severed from other ways of knowing and seeing: emotional, passionate, embodied – the domains of the other suits. The severed heads mounted on sticks only drive the metaphor home. Don’t lose your head. Don’t mistake intellect alone for wisdom.

Cameron also links her Knight of Wands back to the Magician, writing, “A blacksmith was a type of magician. The metal was a living god in its own right, and it took the skill of a true blacksmith to mould it into something fit for a king.” Again we get the link between the Wands suit and creation, but here creation def isn’t abstract or intellectual – instead it’s embodied and sweaty! Bonestone’s Knight takes the form of Vulcan, god of fire and forge, and he’s shown fashioning wings for a god. For me, this really captures the card’s sense of restless energy and fiery forward motion. It is the ‘fire of fire’ card after all!

The Ten of Wands shows a figure dragging and carrying wounded from the battlefield; an image that speaks less to simple exhaustion and more to the dangerous blur between bravery and foolhardiness. This is the moment where responsibility tips into overload, where carrying on becomes an act of will rather than wisdom. The phrase that keeps coming to mind when I look at this card is carry that weight – not just effort, but obligation and duty.

It reminds me of the song ‘The Weight’ by The Band, with its looping chorus about burdens that are never quite yours alone, and yet somehow become yours to shoulder. The song captures that uneasy tension between compassion and depletion: the desire to help, to be useful… and the slow realisation that taking on everyone else’s troubles can become overwhelming. As the culmination of the suit, this card asks an uncomfortable question: just because you can carry it, should you? The Ten of Wands doesn’t condemn effort or care, but it does warn that unchecked responsibility can crush the very person trying to hold everything together.

I love this Three of Cups, with its big, witchy “when will we three meet again?” energy. It’s coven-core rather than cocktail-hour, communion instead of clinking glasses. #HotWitchSummer

An exquisite Four of Cups: a bored youth stretched out in a boat as fish offer themselves up to him, their tender silver underbellies rolling at his feet. It’s all dreamy, waterlogged melancholy; a soft, luminous sky, almost mythic linework, the heavy sweetness of indolence and languor. Nothing is wrong here, exactly. There’s abundance. There’s ease. And yet… dissatisfaction hums beneath the surface.

Cameron notes that this card can mark “a point in your life where you feel you have enough, yet long for something more or different.” Bonestone captures that feeling perfectly: the strange restlessness that creeps in when desire has no particular horizon to sail towards, when comfort dulls into ennui, and wanting becomes abstract rather than urgent.

The Five of Cups depicts an elephant graveyard, with all its associations with memory and mourning. In my review of the Green Glyphs Tarot, I write a bit about how I like the association between elephants and the suit of Cups. James R. Eads explains that “elephants carry water” much like cups, adding that “if you look closely, a bowl of water holds the history of the entire universe, and then a single drop changes it all”. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the way emotions and memories shape us, fluid, and ever-shifting.

Cameron writes of this card: “The elephant comes to remember, it comes to understand, it comes to seek out peace, and to shift a heavy heart.” Like the Five of Cups, the elephant graveyard isn’t about sudden loss so much as dwelling with it. This is mourning that has weight and memory, the slow accumulation of what’s been lost, rather than the shock of its disappearance. In the RWS card, the focus is on what has spilled, what cannot be recovered. In the graveyard, the bones themselves become monuments to what once was.

And yet, the story doesn’t end there. Elephant graveyards are also places of return to the earth: bone becoming soil, endings feeding continuance. The Five of Cups asks us to acknowledge grief honestly, to sit with it rather than rush past it, but it also quietly reminds us that not everything is gone. Something remains. Something still stands behind us, waiting to be seen when we’re ready to turn.

This Eight of Cups reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s line: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” It’s a card of quiet questing – not the dramatic storming-off we sometimes see, but a deliberate turning inward. This is the moment where you realise that staying, however meaningful, is costing you something essential. In my readings it often it shows up when someone has lost themselves inside a relationship or emotional entanglement. We can have a relationship that we value and love, but still recognise that the price has become the erosion of the self.

Cameron writes that the figure in Bonestone’s Eight of Cups is Morgana, setting out on her pilgrimage to the Sacred Isles to begin her training as a priestess of the old ways. As she begins her journey, “a great deal of doubt creeps in.” That doubt feels crucial. This isn’t escape fuelled by certainty, but departure shaped by unease, by the uncomfortable knowledge that something must change even if the destination isn’t yet clear. And yet Cameron is unequivocal that it will be worth it “when she emerges again… all will know her name.” Bonestone’s Eight of Cups understands that walking away is not rejection, but devotion: to truth, to becoming, to the slow and often lonely work of finding yourself again.

The Page of Cups is depicted here as the ‘Daughter of Compassion’, and the card is crowded with lotuses. The lotus is the ultimate symbol of rebirth: blooming from the mud, beauty rising directly out of decay. Interestingly, lotuses also appear in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, patterned across the Page of Cups’ doublet (Is it doublet? IDK. Medieval hoodie). The Page has always been a gentle, dreamy archetype, the antithesis of cynicism. Curious, emotionally open, and willing to be surprised by whatever strange fish might leap from the cup. The lotus motif suggests that this softness isn’t naïve. It’s earned. Like the flower itself, the Page has emerged from emotional depths and still chooses openness, still stretches upward toward light and beauty. Bonestone leans fully into that reading: compassion not as fragility, but as something grown slowly, patiently, through the mud.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

From ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot

For me, Eliot is writing about the terror of spiritual emptiness (disclaimer: not an English prof ;-)) – not just death, but erasure. The fear that nothing meaningful grows from our efforts; that in the end we are reduced to a clutch of dumb matter: dust. Stripped of shape, memory, and significance. It’s not death that horrifies so much as being forgotten.

And this is where Bonestone’s Three of Swords quietly pushes back. That new sprig matters. It doesn’t deny the devastation – the heart is still ash, the pain still real – but it insists that meaning can regrow from even the most sterile ground. Wounds don’t just scar; they seed. Out of the very place where everything seemed finished, something living begins again.

The Four of Swords carries a gloriously baptismal energy: ritual cleansing after battle, the body returned to water so the nervous system can finally unclench. This is rest not as collapse, but as consecration: washing away blood and dirt before whatever comes next. And yes, I will freely admit that hot naked men in lakes is a recurring personal weakness of mine 😜.

I love this slightly sinister Seven of Swords, with its hooded central figure. The scroll suggests a diplomatic, Swordsy solution: words first, negotiation. But there’s a blade concealed, ready to be drawn if the situation turns. It’s strategy with a shadow side: charm edged with threat, intellect that knows exactly when to stop chatting and start cutting. Bonestone really understands this card as cunning rather than outright villainy, the quiet calculation of someone who plans three moves ahead, and never comes unarmed.

The Four of Pentacles, with its richly attired skeleton standing at the window, gives big Midas vibes. It serves as a reminder: you can’t take it with you. Cameron describes this figure as the Lady of Jewels: “for the love of all her things she gave up her life.” It’s a beautifully blunt distillation of the card’s warning, of security calcified into stasis.

The King of Pentacles appears here as the ultimate Earth Father, a clear echo of the Green Man of European folklore. This is sovereignty rooted in stewardship rather than dominance: authority earned through patience, care, hard work, and an intimate knowledge of the land and its cycles. He rules not by extraction, but by tending: seed to soil, growth to decay, decay back to nourishment (just like the suit of Pents!)

Cameron writes that this King “will remind you of your wild heart.” Beneath the stability, and material security traditionally associated with the card is something older and greener: a call back to embodied belonging, to rhythms that can’t be rushed or owned. This is prosperity that lasts because it remembers where it comes from.

And then there’s the detail I absolutely adore: the rose of her skirts echoes the whorl of the snail’s shell from the Rider-Waite-Smith original. The snail is my favourite of Pamela Colman Smith’s little visual Easter eggs in the RWS. Smith was a set designer, and apparently the snail detail was based on Rosalind from Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, where she says she’d rather be wooed by a snail than Orlando, because, though the snail moves slowly, he comes with his house on his back, “a better jointure, I think, than you make a woman… he comes armed with his fortune”.

In other words: the Nine of Pentacles doesn’t want no scrubs. She moves at her own pace, carries her worth with her, and answers to no one but herself.

The Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot remains a deck I return to again and again – rich, beautiful, moving, and endlessly rewarding to sit with. It’s mythic without being dusty, beautiful without being bland, and unafraid to look directly at violence, grief, desire, and hope in all their tangled complexity. The mass-market Reawakening edition makes this formerly unicorn-rare deck finally accessible, and at around £24 from most major retailers it’s no longer something you have to pine after from afar (you can find it here, for example). Whether you’re drawn to its art, its symbolism, or its willingness to sit with the darker edges of the human experience, Bonestone & Earthflesh is, for me, still utterly, unmistakably special.

.

.

A Brief Note on Ethics, Culture, and the Bonestone Controversies

This deck has been around for a long time. I wasn’t collecting decks at its inception, but I subsequently spent a long time googling it in my lengthy search for a secondhand copy. As such, I am very aware that it comes with baggage: some of it aesthetic, some ethical, some cultural. And ignoring that would feel disingenuous, especially given how deeply people engaged with the indie release struggled with these issues at the time.

Much of the critique centres around cultural mixing without clarity. Several cards in the original indie deck paired names, stories, and visuals that didn’t quite align, e.g.:

• a Japanese name (Junko) given to a figure who reads visually as European,
• a Hindu name paired with a pale redheaded woman,
• Indigenous-coded characters marked with Scandinavian runes,
• orishas and mythic figures appearing in ways that don’t fully match their cultural context or the keywords assigned to them.

For many readers, that created a sense of “hmm… this doesn’t sit right.” Not because cross-cultural imagery is automatically wrong, but because it often felt imprecise, like myth, story, etymology, and visual design were stitched together after the fact. In some cases, the imagery even brushed against painful historical stereotypes (for instance, Yemọja was depicted holding watermelon in the indie Queen of Cups card – a valid offering, but also a symbol with heavy racist baggage in the US).

Another recurring critique was the fictional Bonestone tribe: the deck implied Indigenous spirituality at moments, but the guidebook never clarified what was real, what was pulled from specific cultures, and what was entirely imagined. A simple “this is fictional” would have solved a lot; so would referencing sources or inspirations. People wanted transparency. They didn’t really get it.

I hear all of this. I see the problems. The critiques are valid.

And here’s where I speak for myself, defo not as an arbiter of purity or ethics, but as someone who works professionally in the messy, delicate crossroads of gender, sexuality, violence, race, and class. My daily work as a criminologist means navigating fraught terrain with no easy answers. And I am also fully aware that my position (as a white, middle class Brit) gives me a kind of privilege that others simply do not have. It would be very easy for me to be blasé and say, “It’s fine, I love the art.” But that ease is part of the privilege.

So I want to say this clearly: If someone draws a firm ethical line with this deck, I fully respect that. They have good reasons. Their boundaries matter. For me personally, though? As I’ve got older – and spent more time doing work that constantly scrapes against the raw edges of culture, identity, and harm – I’ve found that I no longer live at “battle stations.” I don’t leap to outrage. I prefer, where possible, to extend grace. Not indulgence. Not dismissal. Just… perspective. Complexity. I can hold the discomfort and the beauty at the same time.

Because the truth is: I capital L love Ana’s art, and the Bonestone was my gateway drug. I own several of her decks. I find her visual language profoundly moving. And even within its missteps, Avalon’s deck contains imagery that feels tender, strange, mythic, and unforgettable.

So my position is this: this deck is ethically imperfect and aesthetically extraordinary. If those two things cannot coexist for you, I understand. But I love reading with this deck. So I’m holding all of it: the validity of people’s pain, the limits of my own understanding, the exhausting tenor of online discourse, and the genuine beauty I find in this deck. It’s not a simple equation, but then… people rarely are.

.

.

.

.

.

.