Deck Review: Divine Channels

The Divine Channels deck launched on Kickstarter when I was deep in the vortex of term time (those months when this blog lies fallow, like pretty much all of my hobbies!), so I would have totally missed it if I hadn’t spotted it on Bel Jones’ Insta page – and thank Bowie I did! I reached out to the artist and creator, Harley Hefford, and he had *one deck left* – so it seems like fate. I’m really hoping there’s a second print run at some point, so more of you can get your hands on this little beauty, because it’s an absolute cracker. (NB While I immeasurably grateful I got hold of a deck, I’m still bummed I wasn’t there from the beginning, as I would have def ordered at least one of the associated original art pieces if I’d seen the KS campaign!)

The creator Harley Hefford is a designer and artist, and has also studied arts psychotherapy.  I’ve got a few decks by artists who are also trained in counselling/therapy and/or education, and I really think it’s winning combo in designing visually beautiful yet deeply intuitive decks. Hefford’s aim as an artist is to take art “beyond the static walls of galleries and into spaces in which folks can engage actively with its compositions and suggestions, in which their interpretations come alive.” Given this it’s no surprise that “tarot kept tapping [his] shoulder in 2021 & eventually [he] decided to investigate.” The result of his investigation is this beautiful deck 😊.

Hefford writes that the ideas behind the deck are “amassed from a myriad of sources as varied as the Tao Te Ching and Banksy, as varied as Britney Spears and Rumi, as varied as the ancient Emerald tablet and Yoko Ono”. Drawing on this eclectic range of inspo, the deck takes the key concepts behind each Tarot card and re-interprets them in a more modern (and very relatable) context.

“What excites me about the Tarot is that it’s a well-crafted compendium of human experience. Its 78 cards address the most fascinating and significant trials people face, and have faced for centuries. An Ancient Egyptian Queen may not have had Instagram, but still wrestled with procrastination. A French Revolutionary struggled to meet both his individual needs and those of the collective. A medieval knight felt fear around ageing. These cultures all had occult cards to consult, interrogating the situations which arise during a wondrous, varied, and challenging journey through a life well lived.”

Harley Hefford

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

I am absolutely obsessed with the art style. One of my Favourite Artists of All Time (she snared me at a formative age and very much appealed to teenaged Lucy’s sense of emotional angst and thwarted yearning) is Tracey Emin, and some of the exact same things I love about her art – the fusion of drawing and poetry, the use of phrase fragments, the sense of something raw and half-finished yet more articulate precisely because of its unfinishedness, the naive yet knowing (and honest, so honest) feel to the line drawings – I see in Hefford’s deck. I just really really LOVE it y’all! I JUST LOVE IT!

 To create the deck Hefford painted his design for each card onto treated pieces of cardboard (about the size of a vinyl record), explaining that he “liked the idea of taking these found, imperfect, ripped pieces and spending hours meticulously crafting them into precious objects.” This makes the final cards look very organic and wonderfully everyday – you can still see the cardboard ridges and bumps etc. As Hefford points out, “it’s apparent that the flow they promote has been used in the making of the art… [which is] much different to the digital graphics of many decks”. Each card has a phrase fragment that acts as kind of ‘title’ for the card, and Hefford explains that each title can function as a line from a haiku (meaning that there are 456,456 haikus available to be constructed from this deck. More than 10 a day for the rest of your life!)

The deck comes in a fairly lightweight lidded box, containing the cards and a weird and whimsical little guidebook, which is super quirky and acts as a wonderful companion. As well as Hefford’s thoughts on each card, we also have some words of advice from Mr Sloth, a super cute cuddly toy he owns that “reminds [him] of the pleasure of slowness”. Be warned though, as the guidebook is a short but fat little chonk (I feel ya, guidebook), it can be a bit hard to crack (and hold) open when reading.

The cards are fairly lightweight, but not too flimsy, and printed on metallic gloss, which means they’re wonderfully sparkly and shimmery. However, there’s no way round the fact that the sharp, square corners are VERY stabby, and they do make the deck quite hard to handle. I’d def recommend rounding off the corners if you have the kit/skills (and also would suggest that any second edition softens those points!)

The deck consists of the standard 78 Tarot cards in the RWS tradition, with some variations. For example, Milk Crates replace Pents (the physical realm), Books replace Swords (the intellectual realm), Eyes replace Wands (the spiritual realm), and Flowers replace Cups (the emotional realm).

“Tarot-like cards allow us to understand our story as a dynamically human one. To feel less alone in our experiences and discover that in fact they are profound aspects of being alive. I tapped into my own esoteric style and my intuition, letting these rework each card into a modernised, whimsical new version. An alternative to screen time, this deck is a tool to guide towards a meaningful engagement with wholesome activities like journalling, creative practice, connecting with a friend, meditation. To aid one in paying attention to the world, providing new experiences.”

Harley Hefford

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from Divine Channels

The Fool in the Divine Channels gives us a real sense of the immediacy of the card; ‘the intoxication of now’ as the title reads. The ‘0’ has been transformed into a ‘no entry’ sign – but we all know how the Fool feels about no entry signs! I also love how the figure of the Fool has his hands to his mouth like he’s shouting, which brings to mind lines from Walt Whitman: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world“. I also spied the four suits gathered in the corner of the image – normally we see the four symbols of the Minor Arcana in the subsequent Magician card, but I like the idea of them being ‘out there’, ready for the Fool to discover as he goes off on his journey.

The High Priestess is gorgeously watery, ‘the feminine ocean’, the seas of our intuition. The guidebook tells us “in this quiet, finally, you’re able to hear what the voices inside you have been trying to say”.

I love the Empress as ‘time alone in nature’. A little fragment of collaged print in the top right of the card reminds us that ‘ritual is to the internal experience what experiment is to the external sciences’, and as someone who sometimes struggles with how to fuse my day job as a social scientist with the sort of spiritual practice I find in Tarot, I love this! Just as experiments are the systematic methods used to generate knowledge about the external world, so rituals are systematic methods used to explore and make sense of our interior worlds – our emotions, our psyche, our spirit. To me experiments (and quant analysis) sit within the realm of the Emperor, and ritual (as well as qual analysis) sit within the realm of the Empress. Both are valid ways of generating meaning (warning: danger of me lapsing into my ‘trying to explain epistemology to the students’ mode here 😂). Both can produce insight leading to change. And both involve a lot of repetition that, though worthwhile, my magpie brain often struggles with!

Which leads me nicely on to my next favourite. As someone who has to make lists (and lists and lists and lists) in order to remember or achieve anything (thanks ADHD!), I really love Hefford’s interpretation of the Chariot as the ‘Maker of Lists’. As Hefford explains, the Chariot is the energy that takes us down “the path from to-do to ta da”. He adds that “it’s tempting to abandon your intended schedule and follow a totally different track. But, this time, you decide you made today’s to-do list for sound reasons, so you shall stick to it”. The Chariot thus embodies “the wisdom of our past self’s choices [and] the freedom of our present self’s agency”.

For me this Wheel of Fortune has that nostalgic air that takes me right back to the magic of childhood – when it felt like luck was always just round the corner, before life knocks the stuffing out of you a few times! I think it’s the echoes of ET’s bicycle, and the snowman from the Raymond Briggs’ book. The Wheel of Fortune reminds us that while we cannot control the hand we’re dealt, we can control how we respond to it. As the card itself urges us, we can ‘reinvent the wheel’ and, thus, ‘we invent the real’.

I love the way the Death card encourages us to engage with the sense of an ending in a slightly different way than the conventional interpretation of the card, by thinking of it as ‘stick[ing] the landing’. It suggests that endings aren’t just about loss – they’re also about grace, intention, and the possibility of transformation mid-fall.

Any card featuring Bowie (in full Ziggy mode no less), is always going to be a winner in my eyes, and the incorporation of a line from Space Oddity (‘your circuit’s dead / there’s something wrong‘) works brilliantly for the Tower – I can’t even comprehend the grinding horror of being stuck alone, waiting to die in space! But as rest of the text on the card reminds us, it’s always ‘darkest before dawn’. The guidebook points out that “chaos and flow, [are just] different names for momentum”. It’s a Tower that doesn’t just mark collapse, but insists on the movement through it – a disaster that becomes a turning point.

The Star as an ‘unexpected text compliment’ is so lovely (and I also adore the game of ‘hope scotch’ marked out on the street above).

The Ace of Cups here is re-imagined as the Ace of Meet Cute (awww), and more great song fragments, with lines from Fleetwood Mac’s ‘You Make Loving Fun’ (‘sweet, wonderful you / you make me happy with the things you do‘).

An equally happy, upbeat song title fragment for the Three of Cups’ (Flowers). ‘I got all my sisters with me‘ really captures the joy and delight found in the celebration of true kinship. The guidebook tells us “there are rare moments when everything clicks into place and it feels like you’ve got it all. You hold the glass up, then drain it. The wine is sweet and fruity. Cheers to that.”

And then I also love the Five of Cups as the ‘rabbithole of regret’ with a backwards looking Alice and a slightly demonic looking White Rabbit. Man, the amount of times I’ve been pulled into the self indulgence of that painful vortex, where you keep pressing on those missed opportunities like fingers on a bruise. The guidebook tells us “wishing to turn back the clock you’re trapped here in this garden of old”, with Mr Sloth warning that “a spotlight on the negatives can steal the limelight.” It’s a potent reminder that while grief deserves its space, we risk losing the present if we keep staring into the past.

The Eight of Cups has become ‘the rolling stone’ (he who gathers none of the wet moss of regret we see in the Five!), and the card reminds us that ‘a journey towards takes you away’. I like the way this card urges us to think upon the progress of time, and the visual link to the moon and its association with uncertainty.

And, haha, I think I’m too mean to the Knight of Cups, always thinking of him in my head as the fuck boy of the Tarot, so it amuses me when others imbue him with a similar sort of energy. Here he is the ‘Knight of Swipe Right’, which is part of his problem – he’s wonderful and romantic, but not only does this make him very desirable, he also finds it hard to say no to anyone else’s held out cup!

Thanks to having Australian cousins, I get the pop culture reference here in the Two of Swords. Sadly in life you can’t always have a combined soft and hard shell taco, you have to make a choice!

The Three of Swords reminds us ‘in the face of pain there are no heroes’. I love the copy of ‘The Art of War’ with its spine cracked open like a broken heart. Mr Sloth tells us that this card illustrates “aches acting as signposts”.

The Eight of Swords deals with the idea of being in a prison of our own making, re-titled here by Hefford as ‘uhh you locked yourself in there!?’ – with the intriguing arrow that feels like it’s saying ‘PTO for more info on why’. I like this little nudge to explore why it is that we ended up feeling so trapped, and extend ourselves some grace over it. Rarely do we choose this for ourselves, sometimes the trauma and pain we’re dealing with is just too great, and we need that cage for protection.

The Nine of Swords is, obvs, ‘the (over) thinker’, and the card presents us with a dramatic ‘what if’ floating over the central figure, surrounded by her books of ‘missed opportunities’ and ‘oops’. The guidebook explains, “out of nowhere the phrase ‘everything is about to fall apart’ begins repeating in your consciousness. Neither true nor useful, you are concerned it will act like a magnet and attract the calamity it supposes”. It’s the spiral of anxiety in a nutshell – a reminder that our thoughts can conjure monsters, but that doesn’t make them real.

The Ten of Swords here is re-titled ‘spoiler alert: You die’ – lol lol lol, I CAN’T! I love the fact there’s so much wry humour in what’s traditionally one of the bleakest cards in the deck. And wise words from Mr Sloth: “the omelette of one’s life ft. broken eggs”.

The Page of Swords is pictured hard at work searching for books in her library. I love that she’s depicted as a ‘question mark’, as being someone alive with ‘sharp [aka Swordsy] observation’.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork was my mnemonic for the Three of Pents when learning the Tarot, so obvs this card had to make it into my favourites. As Mr Sloth notes, “I love a good ‘greater than the sum of its’ party”.

The Seven of Pents really works as the ‘five year plan’, tapping into the card’s theme of waiting to see if an investment (of time, money, emotion etc.) will pay off in the longterm. Mr Sloth notes, “behind every great person is a great spreadsheet”.

And then a beautiful Ten of Pents which urges us to ‘enjoy the fruits’ of our labours, now the hard toil is done and we’ve reached the end of the suit.

Is this a little Outkast reference sneaking into the Queen of Pents? I assumed Hefford was a bit younger than me, but I feel like we had the exact same musical upbringing, lol – raised on a steady diet of Bowie and Fleetwood Mac; with a few cheesy favourites like Ms. Jackson thrown in from our nightclubbing pomp in the noughties! It’s a lovely card, with the Queen tending to her flowers and reading Dr. Seuss (‘oh the places you’ll go‘). It feels like she’s reading this to the Fool himself – his distinctive feathered cap just visible in the left-hand corner, peeking into frame. And with the ‘Mum thx’ scrawled at the top, the whole card feels like a personal thank-you from the Fool on his journey to the mother who raised him, and who still grounds him. Even as he travels further and further from her physical presence (oh, the places he has gone!), he never travels outside her love. Because how could anyone ever stray beyond the reach of the Queen of Pentacles’ love, when she’s the queen not just of hearth, but of heart?

Then the Queen of Wands is fab as ‘what would your best self do?’ Love this for her!

While I initially thought I’d hesitate to recommend this deck to a beginner, it is very intuitive, so if you’re looking to read from the gut as opposed to study the RWS system, I’d defo recommend it. But I think you’d struggle to ‘learn’ the Tarot from it. For more experienced readers, I would recommend you don’t walk BUT RUN to buy this deck. It’s so smart and joyful and tender and fun, I would challenge anyone not to have their practice added to by engaging with it. AND it’s also just a really beautiful little collection of 78 stunning works of art. It’s still available to order from the artist’s page here, for $49 (AUS) (about £24), but I think it might be OOP right now. Here’s hoping Hefford does another run ASAP!

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