Deck Review: Solara Occulto Meliora Tarot

The out-of-print Solara Occulto Tarot has been on my wishlist for aaaaaaages. I occasionally spot a secondhand one on one of the Tarot trading forums, but they’re £££. So it was with great excitement that I saw the artist and creator Amanda Spicer was funding a second edition on Kickstarter! The second edition is largely faithful to the first, with some changes here and there (the borders are gone – hooray, I’m a big fan of borderless images – and the cards are a bit bigger). You can now pick up a copy of the Solara Occulto Meliora deck on the artist and creator’s website for $97 (Canadian; about £56) (Oof! Still less than a secondhand 1st edition though).

The deck consists of a standard 78 card Tarot deck, plus 27 bespoke oracle cards (so a total of a whopping 105 cards!) The guidebook is tiny and pretty brief (there’s also a pdf version on the creator’s website), but the deck is very faithful to the RWS in its imagery and symbolism (though obvs very unique in its art style), so you don’t really need a complex or in-depth LWB tbf. Having said that, the artist has done some really cool things with some of their artwork, and I wish they’d commented a bit more specifically about their personal design choices.

All 105 cards come in a sturdy two part box, which is quite ornate and VERY shiny! A bit too shiny for my tastes, but it’s certainly eye-catching. Likewise, the gold foil on the cardbacks is SO SHINY! I think it looks a little bit tacky (comes out very nice in my photos though), but that’s down to personal taste. The deck is printed on good quality card stock with matte black edging.

The deck is really lovely, witchy and striking. Unlike the VERY SHINY box and backs, which I think is overkill, the illustrations are super classy. I don’t know how else to describe it except the artwork looks *expensive*, like it belongs in a tasteful hipster art gallery or a Very Expensive Eatery (that I can only stare at hungrily from the outside, like the poor old Five of Pents, lol). All the illustrations are painted using a palette of only four colours (black, white, gold, bronze). The artist calls the palette “subdued” but the cards are actually super vibrant. A very Art Deco, Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby kind vibe.

“Let these cards re-ignite your divinely gifted sacred intuition, waking it from its long slumber. Like a great dragon has this intuition taken path through the light and the darkness, and, harnessing the powers of time, [it] has… been waiting for the arrival of your deep seated memory to bring it forward again”

Amanda Spicer

A very powerful and evocative image of Death here, and I love her robe parting to show she’s made of a pile of skulls. When I first saw the artwork, I thought she was removing her sinister skull-face to reveal a more benign flesh-and-blood face underneath, which I thought was really clever. Death/ending/transformation often feels painful and terrifying at face value, but, given time, the veneer of fear falls away, and we can see the loss we experienced was, perhaps, a form of kindness. However, her face underneath looks kinda evil? IDK. The guidebook suggests a fairly standard interpretation of Death (“endings are always signalling new beginnings“), so I’m not sure why she has such a demonic expression! I still think the art is stunning though.

A fairly traditional representation of The Empress, but beautifully rendered. I love her gentle cupping of her pregnant belly, emphasising her warm and caring energy. I know pregnancy in Tarot can be a hot topic, and I understand why, but I personally love a preggo Empress, and this one is no exception.

The combination of all three of the traditional symbols of ‘Strength’ (the maiden, the lion, the snake) into one chimera for the Strength card is so clever, as well as visually appealing. The traditional RWS version of this card depicts the lion and the maiden, and brings to mind many traditional and folk stories of taming the ‘beast’ by way of inner fortitude and gentleness: the lions coming lovingly to Daniel like pet cats after he was thrown into the lion’s den, Beauty taming the Beast with her kind but courageous heart, the sun’s warmth (as opposed to the wind’s coldness) persuading the man to take off his coat in Aesop’s fable. The maiden represents the inner riches we can enjoy if we bring our wild passions to heel.

It’s easy to see the fierce, roaring – even dangerous – passion and fury of the lion as a symbol of brute power and strength. The snake, however, represents a very different kind of strength than the lion, and shows us that different kinds of strength are required for different situations. The Hebrew letter assigned to the Strength card is ‘Teth’ meaning serpent, and the serpent’s strength is of the mind. Genesis describes the infamous serpent as being more “crafty” or “cunning” than other animals, and Jesus urges his disciples to be “as wise as serpents, as innocent as doves”. Snakes are animals of flux and change, shedding their skin at regular intervals and regenerating. Thus this card urges us to shed our “psychic skins” and let wisdom prevail when we have been allowing animal passions to get the better of us.

To combine all of this symbolism in one card is genius!

Much like the Strength card, I’m flying by the seat of my pants with my interpretation of the King of Swords here, as the LWB only offers a generic explanation. But I personally love the inclusion of what appears to be an angel, holding his head steady with his gaze fixed firmly forward towards his raised sword. For me, this really conveys the message of the King’s fair-but-inflexible energy. The angel keeps him sighted towards justice. But not everything can be just, because some ethical and moral situations are not black and white. Sometimes a rigid dedication towards firm, logical, ethical principles can mean we miss out on seeing the nuance and complexity in a situation – particularly when strong emotions are involved.

The Three of Cups is one of the cards that this deck is ‘famous’ for, and I totally see why. It really captures the fun, joyous vibe of the card, and I love the slightly witchy, Bad Boss Bitch energy (‘when will we three meet again?’ – hot crone summer version).

A really beautiful Queen of Pents, gently plucking the ripened Pentacle fruit from her well-tended garden. The guidebook notes “she loves organised luxury – she creates comfort out of her resources“.

This is a pricey deck that works very well as a jobbing deck, but was clearly also designed to be a collector’s piece. It’s like owning 105 little pieces of art, and, for this reason, I was pleased to back it on Kickstarter. BUT if you’re just going to buy one deck I’d probably get something a bit more affordable and less fancy. For a collector, though, it’s a fab addition.

As an added bonus, my KS version came with this gorgeous pencil sketch by the artist, which now hangs proudly on my office wall :-). Spicer really is super talented.

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