Deck Review: The Lacuna Tarot

This is a weird little deck (N.B. I got mine through Kickstarter, but you can now buy it from the creator’s Game Crafter page). I definitely would NOT recommend it for novice or inexperienced readers, or folks who prefer a straight-talking, to-the-point, traditional-type deck. Hell, I feel I’m a reasonably experienced Tarot reader by now, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it for me! None of this is to say I dislike this deck: I like it. But it’s a very personal deck; it’s basically like wandering into someone else’s brain while they’re in the process of giving a reading. Everything is veiled and imprecise, like the thoughts that flash through our heads – vague and ephemeral – when we are trying to access symbolic meaning. Now, I bloody love wandering through people’s heads:

1) I’m nosy, and

2) I find people really, really fascinating.

It’s why I became a psychologist (now criminologist), and why I love carrying out social science research. It’s also why I love car boot fairs, and used to love, love, LOVE accompanying my antique/junk dealer grandparents to house clearances. I find the flotsam and jetsam of people’s lives truly captivating. There is an awesomely talented theatre company, Punch Drunk, that do these insane immersive plays where you wander around a huge set (normally a massive re-purposed warehouse), observing and interacting with the actors as they tell a story over the course of an evening. The last time I saw one of their plays, I got so distracted by riffling through one tiny area of the set that I didn’t really watch the play at all! They had a 1940s film site set up, with live-in trailers for the (fictional) cast and crew, and each caravan had drawers full of clothes, letters, diaries and journals, notes, inscribed novels, etc. The amount of detail the set dressers had paid to creating full on life-histories for each character was NEXT LEVEL. And it absorbed me for hours…

But, I digress – the point is, I like this deck because it gives me a fascinating insight into Aleks Samoylov’s brain on Tarot. And understanding the deep and complex ways other people intuit and feel Tarot can only serve to improve my own practice. So I will happily wander around in this deck for hours. BUT I doubt I would ever use it to read for someone else. It’s too quirky, and too personal.

I should add that the creator kinda disagrees with me on this, and argues that “the popular notion that figurative decks, like the RWS, are more beginner friendly than the more abstract decks, like the Thoth and Marseilles, fail to account for a lot of factors, including individual neurotype” – and I can’t disagree with that! But I still wouldn’t recommend it as a beginner’s deck unless the style/imagery really resonate with you.

The creator explains that they came up with the name because a lacuna is:

“a gap, a negative space, the unseen, which, nevertheless, lends context, meaning, and shape to the seen immediately around it”

He likens this to the Fifth Element: “unseen yet immanent”. This deck is unsettling and eerie, yet also compelling and inviting, so this name describes it very well.

The deck comes in a simple tuck box, with a small, brief guidebook. The guidebook is not a card-by-card interpretation guide, rather it is a crash course (“extremely simple and extremely… crashy” jokes the creator) to the Tree of Life and the Sephiroth [Sefirot], as well as a brief overview of the re-named suits, court cards, and Majors. It’s a really interesting little booklet, but for those of you who like a card-by-card explainer, this ain’t it. Samoylov puts a lot of emphasis on numerology, so if that’s how you read Tarot I think this deck will really work for you (it’s not how I learned, but neither am I ignorant of it, and I’m keen to expand my knowledge and practice). The card stock is sturdy but slim, and quite slippery (good to shuffle, annoying to stack – but this is often the compromise!)

One of the key things that’s different about this deck is the re-naming of the suits. As you can see from the Aces above, Pents/Earth has become Seals, Wands/Fire has become Beacons, Cups/Water has become Vessels, and Swords/Air has become Tines. This all makes sense (feels like a very organic change), and I had no problem reading with these alterations. Samoylov explains that the changes he made for card names were for one of four reasons: to remove cisnormative gender, to remove specific Abrahamic religious associations, to remove traditional imperialist hierarchies, or just to make some cards “sound subjectively cooler” ;-D.

The High Priestess (re-named The Psychopomp here) is really visually arresting. A psychopomp (literally ‘the guide of souls’ in ancient Greek) is a mystic being whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls to the afterlife. I love her secret internal glow, the seed of knowledge inside her belly. I enjoy me some classic key imagery in a Hierophant card, and this ‘Steward’ card is no exception. The orb, the all seeing eye, the perfect Fibonacci spiral of the snail’s shell. The galaxy contained inside the embracing Lovers is very cool and clever. It reminds me of one of my favourite e.e. cummings poems:

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

‘love is a place’ by e.e. cummings

At first glance Death shows the inky black of the void spilling out of an egg, but if you look closer you can see hundreds of distant twinkling stars. The Ace of Beacons (Wands) as this Victorian style gas lamp is really beautiful, and I like the disjointed take on the traditional juggler for the Two of Seals (Pents).

The colour palette for the Two of Vessels (Cups) is exquisite, and the monster headed knives poised to fall for the Nine of Tines (Swords) work really well. I’m not sure entirely what’s going on for the Seven of Beacons (Wands), but to me it looks like a train moving quietly through the night. Except something is off with the final carriage. IDK. On my Seven of Wands notes for the Thoth I have written, “the army has been thrown into disorder; if victory is to be won, it will be by dint of individual valour – a ‘soldiers’ battle’” (soldiers’ battles describe those where victories are achieved by soldiers fighting on their own initiative without a cohesive battle plan or structured chain of command) – and inexplicably I feel that sits well with the imagery in this card.

This is a super original and quirky deck that I’d definitely recommend to more esoteric readers and those who like modern takes on mystical symbolism and numerology.

You can order it here.

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