Deck Review: The Hierophanies Tarot

Regular readers of the blog will know that I recently offered readings – and gave a talk on Tarot as Archetype – at the inaugural Brighton Tarot Fayre. Now, I really tried to be good and not immediately spend all the money I made on more Tarot treats, but I… uh… failed. [Narrator: to the surprise of literally no one.] The artist Klaus Pierhotski had a stall there, where he was selling his fab Hierophanies Tarot, and looking through the cards was rather like that scene in The Jungle Book where Kaa’s eyes go all psychedelic-hypnotic, and I JUST HAD TO HAVE THE DECK, OK?!

It’s a real beaut of a deck. I don’t know how I missed it on Kickstarter – maybe because it’s a bit pastelly and that’s not normally the colour palette I’m attracted to at first (brief) glance? But it’s SO smart and intricate, and steeped in little fragments of cultural knowledge. It feels very of the moment, while drawing on the timelessness of Tarot with effortless ease.

It’s also a deck filled with nods towards transformation. Pierhotski designed it while coming to terms with their own gender identity, and came out as trans during the process. And Tarot and transness fit together so beautifully: Tarot’s key themes, IMO, are balance, transformation, and becoming. Plus obvs as a gender and sexualities scholar, I stan a queer deck.

It’s super inclusive, with all sorts of bodies and relationships represented. There are, for example, four alternative Lovers cards depicting straight, gay, lesbian, and polyamorous relationships. You can leave them all in the deck, or remove whichever don’t resonate to create a personalised deck that better reflects you.

Also, argh, Pierhotski says much of his “self initiated work explores gender and diversity. An ongoing theme of my work is drawing beautiful and ornate portraits of men, because I think we don’t see enough positive representation of men and masc nonbinary people exploring femininity.” YESSSSSSS! I couldn’t agree more. My own academic magnum opus explores women’s engagement with sexually explicit m/m media, and I’ve argued that the lack of art showing men as vulnerable, open, receptive to pleasure, lost in bliss, is a huge part of why some people are drawn to these kinds of images and stories. So I am VERY here for this.

“Many queer people find their home in esoteric spaces, so it seems right that more decks and books are created for this audience, especially in these darker times where we need to remember our power, and the strength of our communities when we hold together.”

Klaus Pierhotski

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The deck comes in a sturdy two-part rigid box and the cards are a little chonkier than standard Tarot cards, measuring 85 x 120mm. This gives the intricate artwork plenty of room to shine, including details that might easily be lost at a smaller size. They have gently rounded corners and are printed on 400gsm Calder Satin cardstock with a white core. They’re firm but still elasticy, and slippery enough to shuffle easily – though you will struggle if you have lil paws.

The card backs feature a custom linocut design incorporating motifs from the deck’s Vessels (Cups) suit. It’s all wonderfully nautical, which is a big pull for me now that I’m a Pompey girl through and through, haha.

Now – more on these motifs. As y’all know, I love a little visual callback motif running through a deck, and in the Hierophanies Tarot, it’s a branching, dendritic pattern. Dendritic means tree-like: a central line repeatedly dividing into smaller offshoots, like branches, coral, river systems, veins, or neural pathways. It can even be seen in force chains – the branching networks along which stress travels through granular materials such as sand, soil, glass etc. It’s a wonderfully versatile visual language for Tarot’s own networks of connection, influence, and transformation. This motif means the visual language of the deck can move super cleverly between organic and mechanical forms while still feeling continuous. Sometimes it appears as a vine, sometimes as coral or wheat; elsewhere, it becomes something entirely mechanical, such as the tread-marks on the Mars rover in the Chariot. I just love that this visual theme is able to link apparently disparate forms, suggesting that everything, whether organic, cultural, or technological, branches from and into everything else 💜.

The deck also comes with an 80 page colour booklet with keywords and a explanation of what each Tarot card represents, with a focus on reading the cards queerley. Pierhotski mentions that sustainability was hugely important to him when he was creating the deck, and he wanted to ensure that he was putting an environmentally responsible product out into the world. As such the deck was printed by a UK company, Ivory Graphics, using sustainably sourced materials.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Hierophanies Tarot

This warm, bright Fool card taps into so much of my ’80s and ’90s movie-plot childhood: the plucky-but-foolish little dreamer htichiking their way to Hollywood, determined to make it and become a star against all the odds. It reminds me of the end of Pretty Woman, when Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are snogging on the fire escape, and the Happy Man crosses the road beneath them, delivering his immortal lines: “Welcome to Hollywood!  What’s your dream?  Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep on dreamin’ – this is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on dreamin’.“

Because although that dream may look foolish to everyone else, sometimes it really does come true – but if you never take the risk, it definitely won’t! The Fool reminds us that we can’t guarantee the Hollywood ending; we can only pick up our bindle, stick out our thumb, and give ourselves the chance of one.

And, of course, it recalls that earlier moment in Pretty Woman when Vivian (Julia Roberts) asks Kit (Laura San Giacomo) to name just one person they know who actually got their happy-ever-after:

Vivian: “I just wanna know who it works out for. You give me one example of someone that we know.”
Kit: “Name someone? You want me to name someone? You want me to, like, give you a name or something?”
Vivian: “Yeah, I’d like a name.”
Kit: “Oh, God, the pressure of a name…”
Kit: [Thinks, then suddenly lights up] “Cinda-fuckin’-rella!”

[Author’s note: I’ll love you forever Kit De Luca!]

I love this lush, plump Empress, with her pomegranate tat, her waves of abundant hair flowing seamlessly into a field almost overripe with wheat. She is just pure, glorious abundance. I am a big fan of pomegranate imagery in Empress cards. Rich with sweet seeds – and with a fairly vulvic vibe going on – the pomegranate is a perfect symbol of fertility, sensuality, and lush, natural beauty. Here, tattooed directly onto the Empress’s skin, it feels like an embodied part of her creative power. It also recalls the story of Persephone (linked to the High Priestess) and Demeter (linked to the Empress), whose reunion restores life to the earth each spring.

The Chariot as a Mars rover (either Curiosity or Perseverance by the look of it – v. apt Chariot-coded names!), is the card that sparked a whole conversation among those of us who’d previously met at the London Women’s Tarot Meetup. We all agreed it was a SUPER clever Chariot! The rover is quite literally a vehicle of focused, purposeful advancement, travelling into unknown territory and overcoming terrain that appears almost impossible to traverse. Its progress depends upon precision, control, and the successful coordination of many complex parts: very Chariot-y ideas about directing different forces towards a single goal.

It also represents extraordinary ambition: deciding that even another planet is not beyond our reach! And because it’s a scientific explorer rather than a military vehicle, it reframes the Chariot’s traditional conquest imagery as curiosity, discovery, and the expansion of knowledge. The little rainbow badge tucked away on the top panel adds some cool queer resonance too: venturing boldly beyond the ‘traditional’ world, making space for brand new possibilities.

We get more space-themed imagery in this gorgeously uncanny Moon card. Though here it’s Moons plural, as we can see four of them circling Jupiter’s great red eye, glimpsed through the portal of a spaceship. Our figure slumbers on, her hair floating dreamily in zero-g and slipping free from the everyday constraint of its clip, while her lobster tattoo seems almost to reach its claws yearningly towards the pull of the planets. IRL Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is itself a giant, spinning storm – a perfect symbol of the Moon’s ‘wild unknown’, and of the storms inside all of us that we keep hidden deep during the light of day.

There’s something I find super unnerving about Jupiter at close quarters. Close-up images of it give me megalophobia: some of its clouds and storms are larger than the entirety of our poor lil planet! I often imagine how it would feel to stand on one of its moons and look up at Jupiter looming overhead – an epic and beautiful sight, certainly, but also profoundly, unsettlingly horrifying. In Outland, Alan Dean Foster’s science-fiction novel about a mining colony on Io, newly arrived workers experience “the flinch”: an involuntary physical response to the sight of something so unimaginably massive hanging above them. Foster writes that “the station crew would watch with interest to see how sharply and how often a new arrival would flinch away when first confronted with that psychologically devastating sight… billions of tons of mass floating just overhead, seemingly poised to obliterate you.” This card captures that same sublime terror: the awful, irresistible beauty of something too vast for the human mind to comfortably contain.

Our sleeping figure cuddles her pillow for safety, anchoring herself within the small, familiar world of her bed. Yet her hair drifts towards Jupiter, forming wisps of red smoke and fire, echoing the Great Red Spot – as though something in her is being drawn into the storm. It speaks eloquently to the Moon’s territory: the loss of ordinary scale and certainty, the unconscious pull of forces we cannot understand, and that unsettling threshold where wonder becomes fear. Under the Moon, we are tiny creatures confronted by the immensity of both the universe and our own inner worlds.

This Death card is so clever and packed with little Easter eggs. The skeleton and white horse of the RWS are amalgamated into a single skele-horse, depicted in the transom glass above the front door, while the setting sun glows in the far corner. The door opens into a porch, which opens in turn onto the great white nothingness that awaits us. Because perhaps the most terrifying thing about death is the not knowing: the possibility of blankness, of everything we are simply being erased.

Yet that same white expanse also holds all the possibility of rebirth. It is the clean page awaiting its first sentence; fresh snowfall awaiting the first footprints. The story of your life begins anew. You set off on a brand new journey.

The card also domesticates Death, transforming it from a terrifying stranger into something familiar and almost tender. When I posted Pierhotski’s card on Instagram, thelauvster responded with a quotation widely attributed online to Lilies Abounded: “I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” It’s a beautiful expression of what the historian Philippe Ariès called “tamed death”: the “household sort of death” that was once a familiar presence, woven into everyday life, rather than the “wild”, strange, and unspeakable terror it has become in modern culture. Here, Death is still a departure and a loss, but it is not an abandonment. The people we love have simply been carried into the next room: beyond our sight, but never beyond our love.

The Sun is clearly a deeply personal card for Pierhotski. He writes that “during the illustration process I came to terms with my gender identity and came out as trans just as I drew the Sun card – the divine masculine, reinterpreting it as The Son, a trans man.” It’s such a joyous, happy card – the figure’s raised hands blaze into fuzzy indistinctness, as though he is simply too full of light to be contained, has too much joy to hold. I especially love how the vines – one manifestation of the dendritic motif twisting throughout the deck – curl beneath the Son’s pecs, becoming the scars that top surgery leaves behind. Here, they also evoke the laurel branches that Tarot loves so much (the World, the Six of Wands), transforming those scars into symbols of triumph, of glory and recognition – of finally being seen for who we really are.

The Judgement card depicts a heart inside a surgical transport box – the device used to preserve and transport donor hearts for transplantation. Pierhotski asks, “What legacy do we want to leave the world?”, noting that “if you don’t like what you see, now is the time for a change of heart.” Judgement calls us to reevaluate our lives, much as we might after a near-death experience, or after receiving a transplant that suddenly places possibility back into our hands. To me the image also has a hint of a heart resting upon a modern set of scales, recalling the ancient Egyptian myth in which the heart of the deceased was weighed against a feather to determine whether their soul was light enough to enter paradise. This Judgement card asks us to take stock before our own heart reaches the scales: What will our life amount to? What will we leave behind? And, above all, it urges us to live well now.

The Three of Wands as a blueprint is SO smart. The plans have been drawn up but the project itself still needs to be constructed, and that takes time, effort, and commitment. I love that the blueprint is translucent, allowing the figure to look through it towards the horizon: they can already see how their imagined future might map onto the real world. There is nothing now to stop us realising our vision if we’re prepared to put in the work.

In my head, this Six of Wands is on a boat on the Thames, sailing towards Tower Bridge as the fireworks go off for New Year’s Eve – a gloriously public spectacle of recognition and success. The six wands themselves become the points of a radiant crown, celebrating the central figure’s moment of triumph. As both an iconic landmark and a gateway through which she passes, Tower Bridge gives the card the feeling of a triumphant arrival – the moment when a long journey finally carries us somewhere worth celebrating. But there’s a vulnerability here too – note how her hands hover around her head as though she can scarcely believe it, capturing that slightly dazed thrill of suddenly finding yourself crowned the winner.

Then I love me this fabulous King of Wands in his flaming high heels. It’s a perfect example of Pierhotski’s desire to break down gender binaries and depict men and masc people luxuriating in femininity. His make-up, long nails, elegant fan, and glorious shoes do nothing to diminish his authority: he remains poised, powerful, and completely secure in his own magnificence.

The Two of Cups (Vessels) with its mer-figures holding hands across the ceramic barricade, as it were, is sooooo cute, I love it. It’s such sweet image of intimacy across difference – the discovery of someone willing to reach beyond the boundaries of their own little world and meet you there.

Then, in the Six of Cups (Vessels), we have all these adorable little anthropomorphised pieces of ceramicware sat on some rocks around brightly coloured cake, as though they’ve been arranged for a child’s teddy-bear picnic. It captures the wonder of childhood so well – that time when (in our heads) toys and ornaments had entire personalities and adventures of their own.

Ah, and here we have my problematic fuck-boy, the good old Knight of Cups, lol. The book he is reading must be poems, surely, especially as he has that whole Byronesque thing going on, with his artfully tousled quiff, pearl earring, lace ruff, and star-studded belt. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know“? Yep, that’s the Knight of Cups IMO. Byron is another figure who had that moody, broody, swaggery, masc/fem thing down pat; he was a man who wasn’t afraid to revel in the feminine (even if he was an arsehole to his actual female lovers, lol), and he embraced his bisexuality (as much as one could embrace being a man who fancied men in the world of Regency England! ‘Ours too the glance none saw beside; / The smile none else might understand; / The whisper’d thought of hearts allied, / The pressure of the thrilling hand‘ as he wrote for his, ahem, ‘friend’ John Edleston). Behind him, a heart forms in the clouds – but it is hazy, shifting and filled with shadow, capturing both the intoxicating romance and dangerous insubstantiality of this Knight’s promises.

I also love the King of Cups (Vessels) as a tender, loving father, his authority expressed through care rather than dominance. The sleeping child rests completely against him as he gently cups their head: this is somebody whose emotional steadiness allows another person to feel utterly safe. That enormous crescent moon behind them, only the thinnest sliver illuminated while the vast majority remains occluded in shadow, also feels signficiant. It evokes the immense emotional and unconscious world that lies beneath this King’s composed exterior – feelings he does not necessarily display, but is neither frightened nor ruled by. The whole card reminds me of this absolutely beautiful poem by Kate Baer:

What kind of man weeps at the feet
of his wife in pain, holds up the pink
and shrieking thing and feels the throb
of time. What kind of man wraps a cloth
around his waist and holds the baby to
his chest, walks through the streets swaying
like a drunk in morning. What kind of man
feels the rage of men and only swallows at
his daughter’s fists at his chest. What kind
of man does not give up his time, his many
pleasures, but hands them over without a
sound. What kind of man bends to hold
them in their suffering, in their questions,
in their garbled turns of phrase. What kind
of man admits his failures, turns over his
heavy stones, stands at the feet of grief and
wanting and does not turn away. What kind
of man becomes a father. A lasting place.
A steady ship inside a tireless storm.

‘What Kind of Man’ by Kate Baer

Throughout much of the Swords (Blades) suit, Pierhotski’s swords become pens – equally sharp and cutting (well, potentially, lol), but honouring the intellectual and communicative emphasis of the suit. In the Four of Swords, the classic rest & recuperation card, the sleeping figure is surrounded by half-finished canvases: creative work that can wait until his mind has recovered enough to reawaken to its own imaginative power. I also love how his mattress resembles a pile of enormous books. Rest can mean curling up in the arms of other people’s writing, taking comfort from those who have fought similar cognitive battles and wrestled with the demons of their own imaginations. Sometimes, we lay down our own pen and let somebody else’s words carry us for a while.

Now, I don’t know if this was Pierhotski’s intention, but the Ten of Swords gives MASSIVE writer’s-block vibes to me! She looks like she’s been felled by her own pens, surrounded by discarded pages and abandoned drafts, one still clutched limply in her hand. And because the pens pierce her clothing without any blood, the violence feels psychological and creative: it’s her self-criticism and tortured attempts to find the right words that have finally finished her off (we’ve all been there 😭). Yet – YET – the sunrise remains on the horizon, as in the RWS. This particular creative battle may have ended in apparent failure, but after the Ten comes the Ace, with a clean page and another chance to begin.

I just love, love, love this Page of Swords (Blades), with their book covered in scissors. Their face, it’s so beautiful yet so fierce; they are strong – look at those arms! – but the world hasn’t always allowed them to feel safe in that strength, so they’ve learned to be guarded. Yet they still want to be tender. This is such an eloquent image for me, such nuanced art from Pierhotski. I can barely look at this as simply the Page of Swords, to be honest, because it reminds me so intensely of a beloved friend who transitioned – it even looks like them! Coupled with the beautiful cut of the figure’s outfit, the scissors on the book resemble dressmaker’s shears: tools of transformation, cutting away what no longer fits and freeing us to reshape the material of our lives – to author ourselves anew. While I see this cutting away as liberation, shedding the old, the youthful energy inherent in the Page restores that sense of newness: the precarious, exhilarating potential of becoming. They hold their story close without closing themselves entirely to the world. And above them, a shooting star streaks hope across the sky: a wish, a new beginning, a brief blaze of possibility pointing towards the person they might yet become.

And then there’s an absolutely stunning Queen of Swords (Blades), knitting together the very fabric of the galaxy with her wisdom and strength. Her needles take the place of swords – still sharp, precise tools, but here used to create rather than sever.

Oooooh, the Five of Pentacles is very interesting here, because it places us ‘on the other side’, as it were. We’re the ones inside the warmth and shelter, looking out at a Little Match Girl type-figure with her nose pressed to the glass, peering in at all our abundance while she struggles in the cold. This reversal gives the card’s traditional themes of material scarcity, isolation, and exclusion a much sharper ethical edge. Rather than asking only where we feel shut out, it asks us to notice who has been excluded from the comfort we enjoy – and whether we are prepared to fully open that ajar door.

The Ten of Pentacles gives us a literal family tree (or perhaps a family vine?) with coins growing among its branches like fruit, each bearing the face of an ancestor in the style of real currency. Yet these may be queer ancestors as much as biological ones: the legacy-makers whose courage and resistance allowed later generations to flourish. As Pierhotski writes, “for the queer community, our legacy has been built by many movements and brave people that have come before us fighting for our rights.” The card’s abundance is therefore collective and inherited: its fruits were cultivated by people who may never have lived to enjoy them themselves. We grow among their branches, sustained by what they fought to leave behind. As per the old adage: “a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”.

Then the Knight of Pentacles is one of my faves – the absolute workhorse of the deck – so it’s v. fitting that here he’s an actual horse, steadily ploughing the furrow. Yet this isn’t a bleak image of endless toil, delicate flowers grow from his mane, making visible the abundance produced by patient, consistent effort. He may not be the flashiest Knight, but he is the one who puts his head down, does the work, and leaves the world more fertile in his wake.

Pierhotski also connects the card to the need queer people may have to withdraw from the “loud heteronormative ideas about relationships” and discover who they are and what they genuinely want – including whether they want another person in their life at all in a sexual or romantic sense. Sometimes we need to travel beyond the pull of everybody else’s expectations before we can hear ourselves clearly.

Overall, the Hierophanies Tarot is a wonderfully imaginative, deeply personal deck that honours the structure and symbolism of the RWS while sending its (dendritic!) branches in entirely new directions. The cards are clever, strange, tender, and bold; rich with visual detail, but still beautifully readable. You can buy it from Pierhotski’s website here for £37, which is a bargain for an independently produced deck with this much thought, heart, and artistic integrity poured into it!

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