Deck Review: Camena Tarot

A recent Kickstarter treat is this absolutely stunning Majors-only* (*a little heartbreaking, obvs!) deck from Lou Benesch and Laetitia Barbier: the Camena Tarot. Barbier is a French-born Tarot historian and author of Tarot and Divination Cards: A Visual Archive, while Benesch is a French-American illustrator known for her dreamy, folkloric watercolours. As Barbier explains, creating the deck was “an entrancing pas de deux, an intricate dance between Lou’s visionary world and my knowledge of the cards.” The Camena Tarot consists of 26 cards (the OG 22 Major Arcana, plus four original additions), and follows the Marseille tradition, meaning it will also feel reassuringly familiar to readers accustomed to the RWS deck.

The deck takes its name from the Camenae, ancient Roman water nymphs associated with springs, wells, prophecy, poetry, and healing. They predate Rome’s later adoption of the Greek Muses and represent a more indigenous, earthy mode of inspiration. Most famously, the nymph Egeria was said to advise Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king, whispering laws and rituals to him beside a sacred spring. Calling the deck Camena rather than Muse or Oracle signals a particular philosophy of knowledge: truth is whispered, not proclaimed. The Camenae do not shout answers; they murmur them at thresholds. Wisdom here is situational, emerging from where you stand, what you’ve lived, and what you’re willing to listen to. Inspiration is embodied. It flows through water, blood, breath, and voice, rather than abstract intellect alone. As Barbier explains, “these deities did not speak as oracles do, in sharp proclamations, but as water speaks: in streams of sound, in the hush between syllables, in the melody that shapes silence itself.”

“Rooted in history yet fluid and surreal, The Camena Tarot is both tool and talisman – a vessel for those bold enough to drift into its waters.”

Barbier’s background helps explain just how dense this deck is. Trained in art history at the Sorbonne, she has worked across cultural and educational spaces on both sides of the Atlantic, teaching, lecturing, and reading cards for institutions ranging from museums to libraries. And you can tell! This is an unapologetically academic Tarot deck: rich, complex, and absolutely swimming in symbolism. It’s a wet dream for an avid little deep-diver like me ;-). The art is steeped in visual literacy, with constant throwbacks, homages, and sly easter eggs drawn from art history: famous paintings, classical sculpture, and those half-remembered cultural “memes” that lodge themselves in the collective imagination.

Benesch’s art feels like a natural match for a Tarot deck. Her watercolours are thick with plants, beasts, bones, and myth, and she writes that images come to her “almost as visions… through an instinctual process” – a description that neatly echoes the intuitive ‘magic’ of Tarot reading itself. Each card was hand-painted, and real care has gone into a quietly luxe final production. As the Kickstarter page puts it, “we’ve embraced slowness, because that’s how the magic shows up.” Amen to that.

“Tarot is not meant to be a mirror for the known, but rather a threshold to the unknown… Do not seek to find all your answers [in this deck]… [instead] be bold enough to lose yourself in [it]. Drown in the deep waters; let yourself drift beyond the familiar. Dare to dive into the uncanny. The currents are dark, shifting, and endless, but the pearls you retireve from these seemingly unpromising riverbeds are worth the plunge.”

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

This is a beautifully produced deck, and it feels expensive. The cards are satisfyingly thick and edged in gold, which I’m not always the biggest fan of, but it works here. It comes with a guide booklet and a sturdy slipcase-style box that feels considered rather than flashy. Very much one for the art collectors (again, you can tell Barbier knows her art history!)

One thing I’m less keen on is the card back design. The design style and palette feel a little… wishy-washy, and slightly out of step with the rest of the deck. That said, the artwork on the card faces themselves is glorious: alive and vibrant, yet softened beautifully by the rose-petal matte finish.

The guidebook is plain but thorough. Each card gets around a page and a half to two pages of text, covering an esoteric overview, detailed discussion of the card’s symbolism, and a final interpretative section. It’s clear, thoughtful, and designed to support slow, reflective reading rather than quick keyword work.

If you study the cards closely, you’ll also spot that ribbons recur throughout the deck, which feel like a really appropriate visual motif. On one level, they echo the deck’s watery logic: ribbons move like eddying currents, looping, drifting, pulling us along rather than propelling us forward. But they also read as a literalisation of the Fool’s journey itself, a thread winding through the Major Arcana, sometimes visible, sometimes submerged, never quite linear. Unlike a straight flow, a ribbon tangles, knots, loosens, and doubles back on itself. This feels truer to how transformation actually works. The Fool doesn’t progress cleanly from ignorance to enlightenment; they are often snagged and redirected. The ribbon reminds us that the journey, all our journeys, is continuous, fluid, and alive – something you follow and can’t always control.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Camena Tarot

First off, we have the High Priestess, and, surprise surprise, I have written a whole motherlovin’ essay just on this one card. This is what happens when an academic deck meets an academic reviewer. Heaven help us all, lol.

I am completely obsessed with the pomegranates-that-look-like-eyes lining the High Priestess’s robes. Pomegranates have a long and intimate association with this card, via Persephone, whom the High Priestess is often said to echo. In Greek myth, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, goddess of harvest and fertility, and Zeus, king of the gods. Hades, ruler of the Underworld, falls in love with her (as much as one can “fall in love” with a teenage girl you’ve never actually spoken to – FFS, Hades, gross), and, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, is granted permission by Zeus to abduct her.

When Persephone vanishes, Demeter is consumed by grief and fury. She abandons her role as nurturer of the Earth, roaming in search of her daughter instead, and the ecosystem begins to fail: crops die, fruit withers, the land turns barren. Faced with the devastation, Zeus eventually orders Persephone’s return. Hades complies, but not before tricking his bride into eating a handful of pomegranate seeds. By consuming the food of the Underworld, Persephone binds herself to it, and so she is condemned to spend part of each year in its depths. For four months of every twelve, she must return to reign beside Hades; during her absence, Demeter mourns, and the world falls into winter.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the High Priestess is so closely associated with the liminal figure of Persephone, and that so many High Priestess cards feature the lush, almost vulvic folds of the pomegranate fruit. The High Priestess doesn’t simply represent hidden knowledge, but something more specific and unsettling: knowledge that we are afraid to know. The pomegranates are Persephone’s burden, the consequence of Hades’ deceit and trickery, and they function as a warning. They remind us that we rarely have the full picture of what’s unfolding, and that others may be operating with motives – sometimes hidden, sometimes actively nefarious – that remain deliberately obscured, keeping us in the dark.

And what I bloody love about this particular nod to the Persephone myth in the Camena Tarot is that the pomegranates also resemble eyes, especially cat’s eyes. It’s an inspired and unsettling choice. The pomegranate is no longer just a symbol of hidden knowledge or seasonal descent; it becomes watchful. These aren’t passive seeds but eyes in the dark, reminding us that nothing is ever truly unseen, even when it goes unspoken. Like Persephone herself, the High Priestess inhabits two worlds at once: she knows what is happening above ground, in our conscious minds, and she knows what stirs beneath it, in the depths of intuition.

Also, cat’s eyes are adapted for low light. They don’t require full illumination to see; they function best in shadow. That feels perfectly aligned with the High Priestess’s role as guardian of knowledge that resists daylight clarity. The secrets she keeps aren’t hidden for the sake of mystique, but because they are dangerous, or too radically transformative, when encountered too directly. As Barbier explains, “some of the secrets [the High Priestess] keeps, while essential, might be disorientating in their intensity.” Like Persephone’s handful of seeds, some truths, once swallowed, alter you permanently.

We get myth layered upon myth with this card, because there’s also that cheeky little antler peeking out from the High Priestess’s robes. The guidebook links it to the story of Actaeon and Diana, and it’s a potent choice. In the myth, Actaeon is a hunter who stumbles upon (the famously prim and proper) Diana bathing naked at a spring. Enraged, she splashes him with the water, transforming him into a stag, whereupon he is hunted down and ripped apart by the very hounds he commanded moments earlier. Actaeon’s crime is not malice but unmediated seeing: he stumbles into sacred privacy, looks where he is not meant to look, and is transformed (metaphorically as well as literally – into a deer!) by the encounter. In the Actaeon myth, the ‘antler’ serves a cautionary role, a marker of what it costs to cross a threshold without permission. The Camena High Priestess doesn’t withhold truth out of cruelty; she guards the conditions under which truth can actually be survived.

Beyond the guidebook’s explanation, I also think antlers simply belong with the High Priestess. Shed and regrown each year, they speak to lunar cycles and seasonal wisdom – knowledge that renews through rhythm rather than revelation. Visually, they are also coded very much as receptive structures: branched, open, listening. They suggest attunement (very High Priestess!) rather than projection or force.

There’s a softer echo of this imagery in moth antennae, too. A moth’s feathery “antlers” are exquisitely sensitive, designed to register pheromones, vibrations, changes in the air. They are organs of listening and navigation, of knowing before knowing. Where a stag’s antlers signal ancient, embodied wisdom grown through seasons, a moth’s antennae signal nocturnal perception: the ability to move by moonlight and barely-there cues. Barbier describes her High Priestess as “lunar, holographic, translucent, but undeniably present.” Hers is knowledge that must be approached obliquely, by moonlight rather than glare.

Pomegranates crop up again in the septuple-breasted Empress who is crowned in them, holding her beautiful corn sceptre. Barbier explains how her septo-boobs place her very deliberately in the lineage of Artemis of Ephesus, rather than the softer Greco-Roman Venus/Aphrodite default. This Empress’s fertility is structural, not seductive or romantic. The multitude of breasts reframes nourishment as distributed rather than intimate. This isn’t one child at the breast: it’s a city, a people, an ecosystem being fed simultaneously.

I also LOVE the addition of the pelican pecking her own breast to feed her chicks with her blood, a concept from medieval Christian symbolism known as the Pelican in Her Piety. It adds a darker, more truthful layer to the card, reminding us that motherhood, both literal or metaphorical, is inseparable from sacrifice and pain. While this Empress is still coded for pleasure and growth, the pelican reminds us that she is also the violence required to sustain life: pregnancy, birth, lactation, emotional labour, generational sacrifice. The myth makes visible what is so often romanticised or erased: the body opened on purpose so others do not starve. Feeding the young with blood is grotesque, yes, but also a powerful metaphor for how the self is carried forward into the next generation. The young live because she is in them. The Camena’s Empress teaches us that some love costs blood, that life continues because someone pays for it. And it’s this refusal of softness that saves the Empress from sentimentality, transforming her into something genuinely sacred.

I also love that, for the Hierophant, it’s his words, flowing in streams from his mouth, that offer the keys to knowledge. As Barbier puts it, he “uses language as a sophisticated instrument, sculpting meaning one word at a time… his voice unfolds like a ribbon.” That emphasis on direct communication is echoed in his simplicity: a plain shepherd’s crook rather than a grand papal sceptre, and shaggy sheep’s wool lining his robes. This is a Hierophant of the people, not above them.

The embroidered birds on his vestments resemble Noah’s dove, olive branch in beak – a symbol often flattened into “peace,” but which in its Biblical context signals something more exacting: survival after catastrophe, meaning rebuilt rather than restored. The flood has already happened. The old world is gone. The Hierophant’s role here is not revelation but interpretation – to take the sign and tell the people how to live now. This Hierophant doesn’t promise salvation. He promises instructions.

I also love the choice to depict the Lovers as conjoined twins. In a single body, we see the male figure, the female figure, and the angelic presence familiar from the RWS – not separated, but fused. Tellingly, Barbier refers to this card as “the Lover”, singular rather than plural. Love here isn’t a neat pairing of two distinct selves, but an interior state: desire, fear, instinct, conscience, and choice tangled together in one living form.

The beast that appears in this card is especially important. Barbier frames it as a threshold moment in the Major Arcana, the first point at which we are “invited… to learn from a deep inner experience and not from a tutelary figure.” Up until now, guidance has come from outside: parents (Emperor and Empress), teachers (Hierophant), mystics (High Priestess). With the Lover, that scaffolding falls away. Meaning must be generated from within.

But this transition is anything but painless. The beast represents what once kept us safe: habits, dependencies, inherited beliefs, even old loves. As Barbier warns, “it isn’t easy to kill the beast… that once provided safety.” And yet the work of this card demands exactly that, she writes, “the courage to draw the sword, cut the cord, and love forward”. The Lovers, here, are not about romance or harmony, but about the terrifying, necessary act of choosing growth over protection.

The lion in the Strength card reminded me of the infamous Body Worlds exhibition – the way you can almost see a cross-section through its face. I love this for a card that asks us to reconcile the inner beast with the calm, composed self we present to the world. Strength here isn’t about suppression, but integration: knowing what you’re made of, inside and out. And the lion’s tail looping into the traditional lemniscate we so often see on this card is just chef’s kiss.

The Wheel of Fortune contains much of the traditional imagery we expect: the sphinx (intellect may solve the riddle, but it will never save you from the turn of fate), Fortuna’s blindfold (fortune is blind not to be fair, but to remind us that what happens is not about what we deserve), and the snake (descent is not failure, but part of the cycle – decay, shedding, and transformation are built into the Wheel). What I really love about this card, though, is the unique inclusion of the four stages of the dandelion. As Barbier puts it, this “clockwork of seasons” traces the plant’s life-and-death cycle, carrying its “seeds of hope” forward. Long associated “in the popular imagination… [with] resilience, courage, and the slow process of healing”, the dandelion feels like a apt yet radical symbol here: even as the Wheel turns, something fragile persists, disperses, and begins again.

I love that Justice bears a heart and feather on her shoulder armour as a direct homage to Ma’at, the ancient Egyptian principle of truth and cosmic balance. Many Justice cards draw on this mythic framework, often alongside Anubis (also beloved of many Judgement cards!), the jackal-headed psychopomp who guided souls through the afterlife and oversaw their reckoning. In the Hall of Judgement, Anubis would weigh the heart of the deceased against Ma’at’s feather: only a heart in balance, unburdened by wrongdoing, could pass on to the afterlife. A heart that proved heavier than the feather met a far grimmer fate, devoured by Ammit, the monstrous embodiment of divine consequence. Justice here isn’t about human law or moral tidiness, but about alignment – the quiet, terrifying question of whether a life has been lived in balance with the order of the world.

There are smaller symbolic details here that deepen the card beautifully. Justice’s butterfly earrings evoke the butterfly effect: the idea that tiny actions can have vast, unforeseen consequences. This speaks to a form of natural justice: not punishment imposed from above, but cause and effect unfolding through the fabric of our lives. What we do ripples outward. What we sow, we eventually reap. As Barbier puts it, “Justice starts when we consider the long-term effects of our actions: tiny details can accidentally shape our future as well as others.” This Justice isn’t about courtroom verdicts, but ethical awareness: living with an understanding that nothing we do exists in isolation.

Then there’s the broken mask. Justice is often depicted as blind, but never artificial. Here, she meets us face to face, unmasked. There’s no performance, no hiding behind symbols or roles. This is Justice without obfuscation – asking to be encountered directly and honestly. She doesn’t look away, and she doesn’t let us either.

A beautiful Death card. I’ve always had a soft spot for a smiling Death – and a dancing one, too! As Barbier writes, “Death invites us to dance out our life,” a line that immediately evokes the Danse Macabre: the medieval motif in which skeletons lead kings, clergy, and commoners alike in a slow, unavoidable dance toward the grave. It’s a reminder that death is the great equaliser, inescapable and communal.

As with the deck as a whole, all Benesch’s little details deepen this reading. Mushrooms creep up one leg, symbols of decay and renewal, thriving precisely where things break down. Carved into his other femur is a flute – “the divine breath plays the melody of our passage” – turning the body itself into an instrument of transition. In his hand Death holds a vulture feather: creatures that feed on carrion, transforming death back into life, returning what has ended to the wider ecosystem. Even the roses participate in this logic. Flowers of mystery, Barbier writes that they “reveal their heart only after the last few petals wither,” offering their truth at the moment of collapse.

This dancing Death card doesn’t threaten annihilation, but it does insist on movement towards the end. Barbier writes of it as a Memento Mori: “remember you will die, everything does. Death is fertile ground; without these ends, no new beginning.” And so Death dances, smiling, playing us onward – not to nothingness, but to whatever comes next.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
    Not to be born is the best for man;
    The second-best is a formal order,
    The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.

    Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

From ‘Death’s Echo’ by W.H. Auden

I’m also a bit obsessed with this Star card. Lactating Star ftw! Barbier describes her as a “Celestial Nurse… breastfeed[ing] the collective soul of humanity from the source of Imagination,” and it’s a striking, unapologetically bodily image for a card so often sanitised into gentle hopefulness. This Star doesn’t just reassure. She nourishes. She sustains. She gives of herself.

Barbier also links the artwork choice to a beautiful and slightly feral myth: the Hera story in which the Milky Way is formed when divine breast milk sprays across the heavens, accidentally creating a ribbon of stars. Cosmic creation here isn’t orderly or planned; it’s excessive, physical, and profoundly maternal. Milk becomes starlight. The body becomes the sky. In this sense, this Star feels less like a distant beacon and more like a living system of care.

The Camena’s Star also showcases the traditional ibis front and centre. Associated with the Egyptian god Thoth (of Tarot fame!) – patron of learning, science, magic, and the moon – the ibis is seen as a healer and a peace-maker. The ibis is also a bird that is known for its tenacity and will to survive, even in (seemingly) hopeless situations. It is said that it is the last bird to seek shelter before a hurricane, and the first to emerge afterwards: the embodiment of optimism after a storm.

Finally, the huge compass the figure leans on here feels like a perfect fit. It underlines something I’m always keen to stress about this card: the Star’s promise is not that everything is immediately going to be OK. Yes, it speaks to healing and peace (the calm after the Tower‘s storm!) but its hope is oriented toward tomorrow, not instant resolution. It suggests guidance rather than rescue, orientation rather than arrival. The Star tells us that support exists, that renewal is possible, and that our dreams are not lost, but it also asks for patience, endurance, and faith in the long arc of healing. You still have to walk. You still have to choose your heading. The light doesn’t move closer; you move towards it. In that sense, the Star isn’t about certainty so much as trust and, of course, hope: don’t lose sight of where you’re going, even when the journey remains slow and incomplete.

I love how the figures in the Judgement card are being called not just to rise, but to blossom, emerging like bulbs breaking through soil after a long dormancy. It’s resurrection reframed as germination. Barbier calls this moment “the Spring of the soul” (gorgeous!), adding that “we return, not merely to live, but to bloom.” Judgement here isn’t about reckoning or punishment, but renewal: a reminder that awakening isn’t a sudden shock so much as a long-prepared unfurling, the moment when what’s been quietly growing underground is finally ready for the light.

And here’s my favourite card in the Camena Tarot: the Hermit, crowned in a stunning owl headdress. Owls have long been associated with knowledge and wisdom, from Athena’s owl in Greek myth to the well-worn phrase ‘wise as an owl‘. Like the Hermit, they are silent, watchful, and often solitary: creatures of the edge, not quite domestic, not quite wild.

The parallel runs deeper. The Hermit carries a lantern to see what others can’t; owls, too, possess extraordinary night vision, “lean owls hunkering with their lamp-eyes,” as Mary Oliver beautifully put it. They thrive in darkness, hunting by sound and intuition rather than sight alone. Symbolically, the owl becomes the Hermit’s perfect emblem: a guide through unseen terrain, attuned to what stirs beneath the surface rather than what announces itself in daylight.

The Hermit’s staff is topped with a snail shell, a lovely symbol of the slow, inward pace of self-discovery, as well as a nod to Chronos, god of time itself. In the earliest Tarot decks, such as the Visconti-Sforza Tarot and the Minchiate, this card wasn’t called the Hermit at all, but Il Vecchio (“the Old Man”) or Il Tempo (“Time”). Rather than a lantern, he often carried an hourglass or clock, and instead of a sturdy staff, leaned on crutches – a symbol of age, mortality, and inevitable decay. Originally, then, this card wasn’t a mystic but Father Time himself: a walking memento mori, reminding us that life is fleeting but that ageing brings wisdom and perspective (if not always serenity!) The snail shell brings this history full circle. The Hermit’s journey isn’t rushed or outward-facing; it spirals inward, slowly, deliberately, and on its own time.

More specifically, it resides in his navigation tool: the lantern itself. Its light allows him to see clearly enough to make discerning choices about which direction to take next; not rushing ahead, not blindly clinging to the past, but moving forward with perspective and intent.

Overall, the Camena Tarot feels like a deck made for slow readers and symbol nerds (i.e. me, lol). It’s intellectually rich without being dry, sensuous without being soft, and unapologetically dense in a way that rewards time, attention, and rereading. At $49 (around £36) for the deck and guidebook it’s certainly not cheap (though still WAY more affordable than the original Kickstarter edition, I was surprised at the price drop) but given it’s the work of such a thoughtful, talented pairing, I genuinely think it’s worth the investment if you’re a deep diver like me. This is a deck that wants to be lived with, studied, and returned to. You can buy the deck here.

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