Deck Review: Discovering Beauty Tarot

A recent acquisition is the bright, beautiful Discovering Beauty Tarot, created by artist Sophia Litwak. This is a proper old-school hippie Love-and-Light deck (it has real 70s ‘peace out, man’ vibes) – but one that manages to be genuinely uplifting and affirming without tipping over into cliché or trite sentimentality. It really is such a joy to work with: warm, friendly, and deeply accepting. If it had a smell, it would be freshly baked bread. The good kind, with a crackly crust and real butter nearby (the deck approves of butter, the deck is super body positive :-)). When you work with it you discover it’s also, kinda secretly, behind the brightness and the warmth, a really political, really FEMINIST deck, and, of course, I bloody love that for it!

Litwak is an artist, illustrator, Tarot reader, teacher, and witch from the US, currently living in Paris. We share a strikingly similar Tarot philosophy (also: yes, another person who obsessively capitalises the T, solidarity ✊). As she puts it in the guidebook, “I believe in the power of Tarot to help us help ourselves, to seek connection and conversation, using the wisdom of the cards to bring to light truths we already hold.” The deck as a whole is rooted in the act of (re)discovering beauty: in the world, in nature, and in human connection – with a gentle but unmistakable ethical pull. “Tucked within the Tarot,” Litwak writes, “are magic messages that can inspire us toward new dreams of justice for our Earth, and commitments to our own healing.”

It also feels like Litwak and I got into Tarot for very similar reasons. She speaks candidly about a long period of disconnection and quiet exhaustion: “Despite the raw courage taught to me by my mom, despite the interconnectedness I grew up believing in, for much of my life I have been ‘sucking on stones,’ and pretending to be satisfied… The world ceased to be the secret garden of magic that welcomed me as a child. I was afraid all of the time, constantly working to earn a place.” That sense of burnout, of having lost access to wonder and ease, feels v. familiar.

I’ve written on this blog about noticing that many agnostics and atheists devote almost no time to their spiritual health, while my religious friends spend time each week in worship / praying. I see praying as a form of quiet reflection – taking stock of what you need, naming it, and putting that request out into the universe. Nourishing the part of us that needs stillness and connection; connection with something bigger, something that both fully encompasses and yet also transcends our individual human lives. I decided I needed to do the same. Organised religion was never for me (no shade), I’m too impatient/ADHD for meditation, and I hate jogging – so I made a conscious decision to let Tarot become my daily practice instead. And, like Litwak, I came to it at a point when I was feeling burnt out and adrift, weirdly sad and disconnected from my own life and choices. Tarot has given me a ritual that feels a little like praying: a moment of honesty with myself, a soft admission of need, held together by hope, vulnerability, and connection. It helps me feel more tethered, less sad and drained, and more at home in the world again.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The Discovering Beauty Tarot is illustrated in ink and watercolour, and that softness really carries through into the physical feel of the deck. The cards sit in a sturdy two-part box with a full-colour interior, and loooookkkk, the inside of the box is so pretty 👀! Litwak clearly cared about the unboxing experience rather than just ticking a packaging ‘box’ [unable to resist pun].

Each of the 78 cards is set against a clean white background, with the original raw ink edges left visible. I love this choice: it keeps the images feeling hand-made and alive, rather than over-polished or digitally slick. The cards are slightly shorter than a traditional Tarot deck, which makes them easy and comfortable to shuffle, and they’re printed on a satisfyingly weighty stock with a matte finish and elegant black matte edges. They feel good in the hands: soft, slightly chalky, grounded, and made to be used. Also, the camera LOVES this deck! Look how those colours pop!

The deck comes with a slim 50-page guidebook that offers brief meanings for each card. It’s not a doorstopper of a tome, but that feels very intentional: this is a deck that invites conversation and intuition, rather than telling you what to think. Structurally, the deck follows the Rider-Waite-Smith system closely enough to feel familiar, but with plenty of Litwak’s own ideas and riffs. The Court cards are renamed Root, Voice, Heart, and Spirit, loosening Tarot from gendered roles and rigid hierarchies and opening those archetypes up in a much more spacious way.

Text on the cards is kept deliberately minimal, and often forms part of the artwork itself rather than sitting on top of it. The images are very clearly the point here, which makes the deck wonderfully freeing to read with. It’s intuitive, associative, and responsive; very much a free-association Tarot rather than one that wants you to memorise keywords or cling to fixed meanings. You meet the cards where you are, and they answer back in kind.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Discovering Beauty Tarot

The Magician here feels primal, all breath and fire. There’s something in him of the first spark, the first inhalation that becomes flame: creator-energy in its rawest form. I’m strongly reminded of those foundational creation myths, obvs from the Bible, but also much older than that – where life begins with breath, sound, heat. The cave-painting aesthetic, with art depicting figures and animals seeming to spill out of his head and onto the walls around him, beautifully reinforces that sense of creativity as something urgent and uncontrollable, something that has to be made manifest.

This Magician understands inspiration as a movement: the transformation of fleeting, ephemeral ideas into something real and tangible. He’s the energy we’re in when we take what flickers through the mind – images, plans, half-formed dreams – and turn it into a creation that can be shared with others. A legacy, even. He’s both dreamer and doer, holding that classic as above, so below tension with real ease.

There’s also something here that reminds me of Judgement: the way he seems almost to lift the flames to his mouth like a trumpet, sounding a call. This Magician isn’t just about skill or cleverness; he’s about the initial calling to create, to make, to believe in yourself enough to begin. Judgement may be where that calling is fully answered, but this is where it starts.

The High Priestess is like mist and stars, melting into night (‘she is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness‘). Her eyes hold distant galaxies, vast and ungraspable, and there’s something beautifully unknowable about her gaze. Even the title lettering leans into that energy: extra fruit-loopy, fluid, and resistant to being pinned down. She’s a feeling, a vibe, a hunch; intuition in its purest, slipperiest form, and she stands in deliberate contrast to the Magician’s grounded, elemental earthiness. Where he makes, she knows. Where he acts, she waits. There’s something almost cosmic about her presence too; she kinda reminds me of the ‘Eye of God’ Helix Nebula: beautiful, eerie, and quietly watching from unfathomable distance.

Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best…

We saw to the edge of all there is—

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

From ‘My God, It’s Full of Stars’ by Tracy K. Smith

A really comforting Empress: lush, generous, and completely at ease in her own skin. Aesthetically, I really love her whirlygig nipples, lol. Those spirals drawing the eye inward, back into the body, back into sensation. She’s a reminder to be here, to inhabit your physical self fully, and to take pleasure in texture, warmth, softness, and abundance. And the detail of the roots growing out of the card’s title lettering and down into the nourishing earth is just perfection. It reinforces what this Empress knows instinctively: that care, creativity, and pleasure all begin with being properly rooted.

The Hierophant is reimagined here as ‘Tradition’, and I love that reframing. She’s lit by softly glowing candles, wisdom rendered not as authority but as light, something that guides rather than commands. As Charlie Claire Burgess explains, “tradition isn’t a static thing. It’s a living body of practice and knowledge that grows and changes over time.” When the Hierophant gets dismissed as stuffy or old-fashioned, we forget that “this is how it’s always been done” can sometimes be a source of comfort and continuity. Tradition, in this sense, is the beliefs, skills, and stories we inherit and adapt: grandma’s recipes, regional folk tales, the ways we mark birthdays and milestones. As Meg Jones Wall reminds us, there is real power in observing the old ways: “the turning of weathered pages, the aromas of incense and beeswax, the intersection of deep knowledge and rich insight: questions and answers, seeking and finding, expanding wisdom, and unpacking ideas.”

And then we have what can be seen as the Chariot’s foil, the Wheel of Fortune (here renamed the Spiral of Fortune). Instead of a wheel as such, we’re given a vast, swirling spiral: part galaxy, part current, part gravitational pull. A golden human figure is caught mid-turn within it, not crushed or flung aside, but held, participating in the motion rather than resisting it.

This feels like the Wheel at its most cosmic. Not fate as punishment or reward, but change as an immutable force: time, gravity, becoming. Our galaxy keeps spinning, whether we like it or not. What this card suggests, gently, beautifully, is that awareness changes the experience. We may not be able to stop the spiral, but we can learn its rhythm. We can soften into the movement, align ourselves with it, and discover that there’s a strange kind of grace in being carried along. The work isn’t to control the turn of events, but to learn how to dance inside it.

Oooooh. So. I bang on a lot on this blog about the links between Persephone and the High Priestess, Demeter and the Empress, and how beautifully Tarot maps onto the pomegranate myth (Tarot looooves a pomegranate). But one figure is almost always missing from that mythic triad in Tarot terms: Hades. Which is why having him (kinda?) appear as the Devil here is SO smart and made me smile to myself.

The Devil as Hades makes perfect sense: after her inital abduction, he does not keep Persephone with him in the Underworld through brute force, but tempts her instead. Knowing that anyone who eats the food of the Underworld will be bound to it, he offers the fruit that will be her undoing, inviting her into his land of moonlit half-light where nothing is quite what it seems. Choice is present… but so is manipulation and trickery. This Devil is seductive, subtle, offering sweetness rather than threat. Read this way, the Devil isn’t about evil so much as entanglement. The pomegranate becomes the symbol of pleasure that comes with a hidden cost. What seeds have we already swallowed? What bargains have we half-made? What sweetness keeps us tethered to situations that dim the light? The Devil doesn’t just warn us here – he asks us to look honestly at what binds us, and whether we’re ready to name it.

There’s terror in that process, of course, but also a fierce kind of agency. As Bakara Wintner points out, sometimes when our lives are ablaze, the only thing left to do is “offer ourselves to the fire.” And sometimes, as Jennifer Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt note, we actively welcome the Tower’s destruction and are like: BURN IT! BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND! “Sometimes you are done – finished, fin! – with something. Sometimes destruction can be positive… The Tower… can represent a moment of phenomenal courage and conviction, the act of seeking out the truth of something, and the relief that you feel when you find it, when you are able to be honest with yourself and the world”.

“All corners of the false self – every pretence, disguise, and empty ideal, every foundation built on illusion – must be incinerated, brought to rubble before spiritual renovation can begin… The Tower card depicts the lightning-flash moment when the roof blows off our illusions and lets the light in”

Paul Quinn, ‘Tarot for Life’

Then the Sun card – a nice, simple, happy image for a nice, simple, happy card. Love the cheeky little wink 😉

The card traditionally known as Judgement is renamed Awakening here – and instead of angels, trumpets, and obedient bodies rising on cue, we’re given Medusa. Which is… inspired. And, buckle up bitchlings, you’re about to get some ‘capital F’ Feminism.

In Greek myth, Medusa is raped by Poseidon, punished for being raped (thanks, Athena 🙃 #girlssupportgirls) by being turned into the snake-headed monster of legend whose gaze turns men to stone, and finally slain by Perseus – who carries her severed head as proof of his own Big Manly Power: a trophy. So, yeah… the traditional mythology isn’t very kind to Medusa. She’s either a monster, a victim, a warning, or a weapon. Initally one would be forgiven for thinking: wtf is she doing here on a Judgement card then? And yet, in some interpretations, Medusa’s name means Queen. She is sometimes understood as part of a Divine Feminine triad: Athena as Maiden, Metis as Mother (Zeus’s first wife, swallowed whole while pregnant, yay 🙃), and Medusa as Crone. Read this way, Medusa is not a monster at all, but a goddess: ancient, chthonic, linked to nature… and in our modern world, as in ancient times, speaking a kind of truth that is often profoundly inconvenient. That sometimes you’ve got to be a monster, not a ‘good girl’. That you need to be alive, awake, to your own desires and your own destiny, not live the sort of quiet, contained little life others might want for you, the kind of life where you’d be ‘safe’.

As Joan Marler writes in the preface to Re-Visioning Medusa: From Monster to Divine Wisdom by Glenys Livingstone:

“The Gorgon Medusa… requir[es] us to be fully present, to listen deeply-past the noise of accumulated judgments – to the Ancient Wisdom that is our true inheritance. She reminds us of our mortality as the Great Awakener, and encourages us to reclaim whatever has been silenced or diminished within us. We are admonished to have the courage to speak what is true, to trust ourselves to hold her gaze and know we will not be turned to stone.”

And that phrase, turned to stone, is key. Because what does it really mean? It means death. It means returning to bone, to earth, to the Mother. In a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with death (and especially uncomfortable with women’s relationship to death) Medusa becomes intolerable. We prefer our feminine archetypes safely confined to life-giving, nurturing roles (like the good old Empress). But the Gorgon, like the Crone, insists otherwise. She reminds us that women have always had intimate knowledge of both birth and decay, and that whatever a culture represses will eventually return. Sometimes violently. Sometimes catastrophically. Nuclear waste is a fairly on-the-nose example that scholar and general feminist icon Jane Caputi gives in this incredible interview (that I’ve drawn from heavily here). You can bury that shit as deep as you like, but one day it’s going to come back to bite you on the ass.

Caputi pushes this metaphor even further, arguing that we live in a culture of psychic fragmentation – one that survives by not letting reality in. We numb ourselves to atrocity, to environmental devastation, to slow violence, until desensitisation becomes almost automatic. It’s an insidious process, she suggests, “like radiation… you don’t see it, sense it, taste it, or smell it. It just kind of creeps up on you.” What looks like protection is actually a kind of deadening: a widespread psychic numbing that leaves us disconnected from our own bodies, instincts, and capacities to respond.

Medusa, as Awakening, stands in direct opposition to that numbness. She demands presence. She insists on psychic sensitivity: on listening to the body, trusting sensation, allowing ourselves to feel what has been denied or pushed underground. These, Caputi reminds us, are not mystical extras but “the basic powers of our bodies” – powers this culture has worked very hard to discredit.

Seen through this lens, Awakening becomes a far truer Judgement card than most. This isn’t about external verdicts handed down from on high. It’s about reckoning. About consciousness coming back online. About facing what has been disowned – personally, culturally, mythically – and refusing to look away. The call here isn’t to be saved, but to wake up. To “reclaim Medusa in wholeness and solidarity”, as the activist and scholar Ann Scales once urged us. To accept that truth-telling is not gentle work – but it is necessary. The real danger was never turning to stone, but staying numb.

There are lots of great Medusa poems (Plath! Duffy!) but Litwak’s Medusa-Judgement reminded me most of this beautiful poem by Ursula Le Guin on Lot’s wife (she who famously got turned into a pillar of Biblical salt):

Remember me before I was a heap of salt
The laughing child who seldom did what she was told
Or came when she was called
The merry girl who became Lot’s bride
The happy woman who loved her wicked city.

Do not remember me with pity.
I saw you plodding on ahead into the desert of your pitiless faith.
Those springs are dry; that earth is dead.
So I looked back, not forward into death.
Forgiving rains dissolve me,
And I come, still disobedient, still happy,
Home.

‘Looking Back’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Ace of Wands (Fire) holds up a flaming target, and that’s such a perfect distillation of the card’s energy. This isn’t a vague spark or a gentle nudge, it’s hot, ambitious, forward-thrusting, and impatient. The fire here wants something. It’s drive with intent, desire that’s locked on and already moving. Very much a heat-seeking missile of inspiration: once it’s launched, there’s no un-wanting it, no un-seeing the thing you suddenly need to make, do, or chase.

Much like the Chariot, the Heart (Queen) of Wands here has literally become the volcano, she’s spilling out of it like lava, as if the mountain has become her dancing dress. Although volcanoes can be v. dangerous (understatement!), the imagery feels joyful rather than destructive: charisma, creativity, heat you can’t help but be drawn to. This is confidence that doesn’t ask permission, passion that moves the body before the mind catches up. And crucially it shows us that when we become the nuturer of our passions, we learn how to live inside the fire without being consumed by it.

The traditional RWS Eight of Swords (Air) shows a bound and blindfolded figure surrounded by swords, often thought to be trapped in a (mental) prison of their own making. In Litwak’s version, that enclosure becomes something far subtler: a fine, gossamer mesh the figure is caught within. Though it feels less like a fly trapped in a spider’s web, and more like a butterfly ensnared by its own wings.

This is Swordsy Air energy turned back on itself: our thoughts, our ideas, our plans – the very things that allow us to soar if we let them – becoming the source of entanglement instead. Nothing here is violently restraining; the trap is delicate, almost beautiful, and that’s precisely the danger. The Eight of Swords reminds us that the mind can be both liberator and jailer, and that sometimes what holds us fast isn’t an external force at all, but the way our own thinking has folded in on itself.

In the Ten of Swords (Air), instead of blades lodged brutally in the body, the figure is surrounded by sinister, shadowy forms. What’s so unsettling is that they don’t feel external or attacking – they almost seem to be growing out of her. These aren’t enemies in the usual sense so much as manifestations of inner torment: a very literal image of being haunted by your own demons. It works beautifully for the Swords suit, which is so often concerned with the mind and its distortions. Sometimes the Ten of Swords isn’t about actual betrayal at all, but paranoia: catastrophic thinking, spirals of self-blame, the sense that everything and everyone is against you. And sometimes the real betrayal isn’t inflicted by others, but by our own minds turning on us.

In the Root of Air (the Page of Swords), it’s genuinely hard to tell whether she’s riding the wind or being swept up by it, and I like that uncertainty. Sometimes this card speaks to the exhilaration of a mind waking up: feeling light, buoyant, quick, delighted by new ideas and the growing mastery of logic and language. There’s joy here, a sense of mental lift-off. But there’s a sharper edge too. The same currents that carry you can just as easily carry you away. This Root of Air can also warn against trying to run before you can walk, of being swept up by your own cleverness and tumbling into conceit, overconfidence, or arguments you don’t yet have the grounding to win. It’s a beautiful depiction of Air/Swords in its earliest form: curious and agile…but not yet fully under control.

This Eight of Cups (Water) is positively jubilant :-). Instead of trudging away in sorrow, our figure is practically skipping into the dark, arm lifted, alive to the thrill of what comes next. Yes, she’s leaving the safety and comfort of the lighthouse behind, but its beam is still there, steady and reliable, guiding her even as she steps beyond it. The darkness ahead isn’t framed as punishment or loss; it’s mystery. Possibility. Even a little danger, embraced rather than feared. This feels like the Eight of Cups as emotional courage: choosing growth over familiarity, curiosity over comfort, and delighting in the shadows not because they’re safe, but because they’re alive.

The Spirit of Earth (King of Pentacles) feels like the grounded counterweight to the Queen of Wands’ volcanic exuberance. Where she erupts, he endures. He seems to grow directly out of the mountain itself, steady, patient, and unchanging, less a ruler of the land than an expression of it. There’s a deep calm to him, a sense of time measured in geological rather than human scales.

(In a weird bit of coincidence, when I first saw him he reminded me of Mount Rushmore, and then when I was reading the Ann Scales paper on the Medusa myth for my deep dive into the Awakening card, she talks about Mount Rushmore as a “scar on the sacred”, a form of “ecological pornography” – a vision of nature “enhanced” by being mutilated into the image of what white men think it ought to be and do. Obvs that’s NOT what’s happening here, Litwak’s Spirit of Earth isn’t a face imposed on the landscape, he’s the mountain’s own consciousness, its rich, organic soul. This isn’t domination or conquest masquerading as permanence; it’s belonging. Where Rushmore speaks of power carved into the land, this card speaks of power that arises from it: grounded and reciprocal).

The things we lose are often beautiful things. Meaningful ones. Letting them go can hurt like hell. But this card reminds us that the bones of us are stronger and more resilient than we think. What truly sustains us isn’t as fragile as it feels. Something vital survives the transformation – and from that, something new can grow.

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”

Frida Kahlo

Taken as a whole, the Discovering Beauty Tarot feels like a deck that trusts its reader. It doesn’t rush to explain itself, moralise, or soften its edges – instead, it invites you into a relationship that’s warm and generous, but also quietly demanding. Yes, it’s gentle. Yes, it’s affirming. But it’s also politically awake, mythically literate, and unafraid of difficult truths about power, grief, embodiment, and change. It’s a deck that holds your hand – and then asks you to wake up.

The deck will be available from Litwak’s online store, however, she’s taking a break right now. You can still get it from a variety of indie online retailers though (e.g. in the UK you can buy it from Tarot Grove for £50; in the US it’s stocked by A Riffle In Time for $55).

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