Deck Review: The Lubanko Tarot

The Lubanko Tarot by the designer and illustrator E. Lubanko is an indie gem that has been in my collection for a while now (you’ll see it cropping up in my Deep Dives quite often). The exciting news is that a mass market version is coming out with Llewellyn in October 2025 – you can find stocklists where you can pre-order here. I’m (pleasantly!) surprised this deck found a home with a publisher, as I know E, the creator, really struggled. Despite being an indie darling (the Lubanko is one of those decks fans rave about on Tarot forums, and, before its second print run, it turned up on a lot of those ‘white whale/deck unicorn/the one that got away’ lists on Reddit), its explicit and confronting art style meant Lubanko wasn’t sure it would ever be picked up by a producer who believed in it and its original vision.

They stress in this blog post that they’re not here to make art that’s palatable, tidy, or safe. And they were fed-up with publishing houses who claimed to like the deck but wanted it bowdlerised in some way – in Lubanko’s words: “We love who you are, really, but please remove 80% of what makes you, you.” That demand to strip out queerness, grief, wierdness, messiness, honesty (and I imagine some of the nudity too tbh!) – the very things that make this deck so special – was not a demand the creator was prepared to give in to. Lubanko writes about how honest art is a lifeline. It says “you are not alone” – and when you’re at the bottom of the pit, that kind of art is what gives you the strength to look around, to reach for someone else’s hand, and maybe pull each other out. Lubanko felt that agreeing to limit or edit their vision would be the equivalent to “pulling up the rope”.

“I was saved by art that spoke frankly about grief and mess and truth, and I will not spit in the face of my younger self who was saved by that.”

E. Lubanko

Lubanko writes that they’re fiercely aware of the current wave of censorship and sanitisation sweeping across the cultural landscape – one that disproportionately targets queer creators and anyone making work that dares to present anything other than whitewashed, santisied happiness. As an academic and lecturer who researches and teaches on sex and sexuality, this really resonated with me. As Lubanko writes: “When we say ‘We can’t show pain, or anything strange,’ we tell people that their pain cannot be talked about. We tell them to struggle alone.” This deck stands firmly against that. It’s not a deck that is deliberately dark in a way that tries to shock, or that shows violence or despair just for the sake of it. It’s a reminder that struggle happens, and that acknowledging it is what makes solidarity, and healing, possible: “I am always willing to create handholds on the way to talking about struggle… But I am not willing to say that struggle does not happen.”

So it’s really great news that Llewellyn have picked it up in its original, un-censored form 🙌.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The Lubanko Tarot is a full 78 card deck (and the mass market version is set to include two additional Lovers cards, so 80 cards in total). The cards are printed on 350gsm soft-touch matte art stock, with holographic silver foil edges that catch the light just right (though they do scuff a bit). The deck comes in a sturdy, velvet-matte magnetic box with silver foil accents. It shuffles well, and has that ‘quality’ feel to it.

The accompanying black&white paperback guidebook offers a brief intro to the deck and insight into each card’s meanings, both upright and reversed (NB the mass market LWB will expand on this, and be twice as long!) The card images themselves are roughly based on the RWS – if you’re an experienced reader, you’ll spot the familiar architecture, but there’s also plenty of purposeful divergences.

The deck is a true mixed-media creation. While the later cards were painted digitally, some of the earlier ones began as ink drawings before being coloured in Photoshop. Borders aren’t really my vibe, as readers of this blog will know, but I like these black borders well enough. What’s particularly thoughtful, and what Lubanko themself draws attention to, is how each card is designed for readability: strong contrast, big bold colour values, compositional clarity – even considerations for colourblind readers. These cards aren’t just gorgeous; they’re functional, legible, and made to be used.

There’s something about the Lubanko Tarot that feels weirdly nostalgic to me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Then it hit me: it reminds me of the slightly surreal, abstract oil paintings that used to hang in my grandparents’ old house in Maidenhead back when I was a kid. Their home was peak 50s/60s glam: all G Plan furniture, jewel-toned fabrics, and bright blue Formica in the kitchen (and a top filling washing machine – very American, and very sophisticated to little British Lucy!) The paintings were contemporary to that era, modern but not minimalist, full of ambiguous figures and dramatic colour palettes.

Lubanko’s work taps into that same aesthetic world: bold, stylised figures, intense colour contrasts, a kind of psychedelic expressionism that feels halfway between dream and myth. Think Joan Miró meets Remedios Varo, with a splash of mid-century surrealism and a whole lot of queer, mythic electricity.

The result is something that feels timeless and strangely familiar, as if the cards belong not just on your bookshelf, but hung up in the hallway of a 1960s cocktail party, quietly vibrating with meaning.

As a writer and avid reader of poetry – as well as an academic – my natural instinct is to poke around in things for meaning; for deep, dark, confessional meaning. And I’m not sure I can (or want?) to rein that in. I guess all I can do is try and make myself a bit vulnerable in these reviews too, so it’s not just a one way street!

“I want to hold out my hand to those who feel alone in the complexity of their feelings, and give them a tool of reassurance that I have so badly needed myself in the worst of times. I want people to know they are not alone.” 

E. Lubanko

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Lubanko Tarot

First up, this spooky Hierophant with his mask slipping and his many hands all clawed and bloodied is an image that really points to the dark side of this card. Lubanko writes “the mask is hypnotic, but reveals intentions not overtly stated. It extends hands of blessing and knowledge, but do we let its hands touch our own? Does the knowledge contained in the books strengthen or bind us?” Sometimes, the Hierophant points to figures in our lives who preach tradition with dangerous rigidity – people so wedded to orthodoxy they cause harm by refusing even the smallest deviation from ‘the way things have always been done’. Lubanko reminds us that “the history society and tradition shows a history of power”, and that power has often served to oppress, exclude, and control.

The Lubanko Tarot’s Hierophant invites us to stay mindful of whose counsel we keep and who we give spiritual authority to. As Charlie Claire Burgess so perfectly puts it, “the systems we look to for meaning matter, and it’s in how we engage with these systems to define our values and guide our actions – in other words, what we make of them – that all the grace and all the trouble lie”.

A hauntingly powerful Lovers card. It shows a connection that feeds and nourishes. It’s sexual, yes, and also a bit feral, to be honest. This isn’t the clean, candlelit romance of Hallmark movie type-decks. It’s the kind of love that makes you want to crawl inside someone’s skin.

I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

From ‘Poem XIV: Every Day You Play’ by Pablo Neruda

But, of course, every radiant union casts a shadow. The Lovers card can also speak to co-dependency, emotional enmeshment, even abuse – the ways desire can curdle into control, and intimacy into possession. The shadow here is destructive love, toxic patterns, the slow erasure of the self.

Lubanko doesn’t flinch from that intensity. They write that the dark side of the Lovers is “an over-intensity that creates tunnel vision and hurts one or both partners”, and obvs you can read the image as a pair of lovers literally eating each other alive. It’s sexy and raw, but it’s also grotesque – and, above all, painfully honest.

“The Lovers” card is very important to me because it is the closest to my roots – a feral howl that is disconcerting at first glance but is actually about the intimidating fear of new love, new relationships, and the all-consuming feelings of love when we are young and learning what it means to connect with others. It goes directly face-first into metaphor and does not apologize.”

E. Lubanko

And nor should it. This card doesn’t just ask, “Who do you love?”

It asks, “What are you willing to risk to merge? And how much of yourself will you lose – or find – in the process?”

The Wheel of Fortune in the Lubanko Tarot looks like an ancient cave painting – all ochre and ash. There’s a primitive, uncanny air to it, as if this card belongs to a time before language. It reminds us that the big wheel has been turning for a long time – eons before we mastered fire, shipbuilding, electricity, space flight. And it will keep turning on and on, long after us.

This is not the kind of fate you can outsmart or dominate. The Wheel moves with a rhythm older than civilisation, older than memory. You can’t control it. You can’t slow it down. You can only learn to ride it. As the guidebook puts it: “If you try to fight the bucking horse, you’ll get thrown off. Get used to its rhythms enough and you might just stay in the saddle.”

This card reminds us: sometimes, surrender is survival. And even the wildest spin of the wheel is part of a larger pattern, albeit one we may never fully understand.

The Cosmic Dancer in Lubanko’s World card becomes a sort of many-armed god, evoking the majesty of Hindu deities, particularly Shiva Nataraja, the aptly named Lord of the Dance. Shiva dances the universe into creation and destruction, his movements a cycle of death and rebirth, all while radiating divine energy from his crown – just as Lubanko’s figure does, light pouring from the head like a cosmic halo.

It’s a testament to Lubanko’s skill as an artist that this figure conveys both motion and stillness, suggesting, as Shiva does, a state of eternal wholeness through transformation. This is not a tidy bow wrapping up the end of a journey: it’s the ecstatic awareness that every point on the path is part of the whole.

As Lubanko writes:

“The World is about having control over one’s level of ‘zoom’, from the smallest personal pains to a global howl to the cool nothingness of space-time. It is the collected wisdom of not only oneself, but of generations, of civilisations, of cultures overlapping and beyond our scope.”

And honestly? That’s how I feel about Tarot itself. It lets you zoom all the way in – down to your bruised heart and tangled thoughts – and then all the way out, to the mythic, the archetypal, the universal. It’s all part of the same dance.

The Ten of Wands in the Lubanko Tarot is visually stunning, as well as super clever. It doesn’t just show us the burden, it makes us feel it. It’s bad enough to be labouring under our pile of wands as we trudge over the flat, but here, we’re hauling them up a mountain, clinging on with our fingertips, exhausted and perilously close to the edge. The stakes are higher, the danger hotter: a very Wandsy escalation. The card captures that feeling of having started with fire and purpose, full of vim, vigour, and confidence, only to find ourselves on the brink, wondering how we got so overloaded. One slip now, and it could all come crashing down.

But as Lubanko reminds us: “even when we feel like we are hanging by a thread, it is always important not to lose sight of the horizon. You may be closer to the summit than you think.” There’s hope in this exhaustion, a final push to the peak. The message isn’t “drop it all”, it’s “don’t give up yet”. Your burdens are real, but so is your progress.

I love that in the Ace of Cups, the figure is dunking their whole head in. And why tf not? When the universe hands you a cup brimming with the potential for emotional connection, love, intuition, intimacy, why wouldn’t you plunge in, face first? This is not a cautious card. It’s not asking you to test the waters. It’s saying: Feel everything. Let it pour through you. Get soaked.

Lubanko describes this moment as “a desire to go all-in, emotionally and otherwise”, and that’s exactly what the Ace of Cups offers. A full-bodied, heart-forward invitation to engage with life not just with feeling, but with emotional courage.

There’s something so striking about the thread of connection between the two blindfolded figures in the Two of Cups. It reminds me of the idea of fated mates (yo, I read a lot of AO3), two souls drawn together by something larger than themselves, even though they’ve never ‘seen’ each other, not yet met. Lubanko’s version honours the sweetness of this union, but doesn’t shy away from its potential pitfalls. As they write, the card can represent “two people who are so intertwined with each other that it may not be healthy”. That’s the shadow side of the Two of Cups: when love becomes fusion, when we lose ourselves in the image of another. The card asks: Is this connection affirming your wholeness? Or is it reflecting something you’re not ready to face within yourself?

Also, if you look closely, the two figures are actually mirror images. That thread doesn’t just represent connection with another, perhaps it also speaks to the first relationship we ever form, the one with ourselves. The Two of Cups in the RWS has strong connections to the Strength card, and I see that mirrored in Lubanko’s artwork. Sometimes, the first thread of meaning we weave isn’t with someone else, it’s the one that binds us to our shadow, asking us to love even the parts of ourselves we don’t yet recognise.

The Ace of Swords comes smashing in, shattering illusion into tiny shards. Or as Lubanko puts it, with “the sharp sound of newness.” It’s not gentle, but it is clarifying, and that is a kind of tenderness. It reminds me of Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known‘ (1 Corinthians 13:12). That’s the power of the Ace of Swords: to cut through distortion, denial, and fog, until we finally see what is. Not through the dark glass of projection, but with the searing clarity of knowing, and being known. Not always comfortable. Always necessary.

The Four of Swords here gives me Rapunzel vibes, and at first I was like: huh…? But then: ohhhhhh… maybe she liked the quiet peace of her tower? Maybe she didn’t need some random bloke scrambling up the walls to rescue her from her own sanctuary. Lubanko’s interpretation of the card flips the script from damsel in distress to girl interrupted.

I’m reminded of Bitter Greens, the gothic, feminist retelling of Rapunzel by Kate Forsyth (who I once had the pleasure of meeting at a Conference on the Erotic, no less!). Forsyth’s novel intricately weaves the old fairy story with the life of Charlotte-Rose de la Force, a sharp, scandalous 17th-century French noblewoman and one of the earliest known tellers of the Rapunzel story. Exiled from Versailles and sent to a convent (her own kind of witch’s tower) Charlotte-Rose begins to write her memoire as a way to survive, to process, and to transform. In Bitter Greens, the tower becomes more than a prison. It becomes a cocoon, a sanctuary.

That’s what I see in this Four of Swords too: not just rest, but recalibration. A retreat that isn’t defeat, but deep preparation. Sometimes solitude isn’t what we’re rescued from, but what we need to rescue ourselves into.

In Lubanko’s Six of Swords, the swords themselves appear almost as oars, steering the vessel toward calmer waters – but there’s a sense of forboding nevertheless. The figure we glimpse is posed almost as if in death: lying back, hands in a gesture of prayer or surrender. This isn’t a triumphant crossing, it’s a quiet, private passage. A letting go.

The guidebook describes it as “akin to the mournful, quiet feeling of stillness during a long bus or train ride from an old home to a new, unknown home.” That heavy silence, that liminal ache. Lubanko explains: “The Six of Swords is important to me because it is the opposite end of the spectrum [to the Lovers]. It is quiet, barely-a-whisper, and is about the near-silent grief and ache of change in the passage of one place to the next.” The kind of sadness that lives in your bones during a departure you chose, but that still hurts. It’s about moving on, not rowing forward with big showy splashes, but with small, quiet ripples… and maybe a little fear.

You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case
Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face

Mother will never understand why you had to leave
But the answers you seek will never be found at home
The love that you need will never be found at home

Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away

From ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat (Somerville/Steinbacheck/Forrest Steven)

This is the softer, lonelier sibling of the Fool’s leap. Less naive joy, more hard-earned Swordsy clarity. And yet it’s still movement. Still hope.

The Ninja Assassin Seven of Swords is kick ass. Just the framing, the composition – beautiful.

The Queen of Swords here sits almost veiled and gloved in blood. Like the edge of the sword she wields, her sharp intellect and cutting wit aren’t merely natural gifts, they’re the result of time in the fire and blows received. This is a Queen who’s been through it, and come out honed. Every scar is a lesson, every boundary a line she drew in blood. She doesn’t just know better, she’s earned that knowledge. She will not sugar-coat truth, nor soften herself to make others comfortable. Though as Lubanko warns, “when we speak mind-first and our face does not follow, it presents a persona that can be hard to interact with”. This Queen can become too distant, too sharp, too guarded. Her greatest strength can also isolate her. She is a testament to the power of surviving, but she reminds us that even steel needs softness to remain whole.

The Lubanko Tarot’s Ten of Pents is a really beautiful card, with the ten pentacles nestled like fruit in the branches of a great tree: inheritance, legacy, the rewards of long-term care. But one figure sits apart, separate from the others, and it draws the eye. This is the card’s shadow: estrangement. The one who’s stepped (or been pushed) away from the family tree.

And yet, like the proverbial apple, they haven’t fallen far. Good or ill, it’s hard to escape our legacy: the stories we carry in our blood, the parts of our ancestors woven into our DNA. Even in distance, there is lineage. Even in separation, there is connection. The Ten of Pents often celebrates stability, tradition, and generational wealth. But this version reminds us that not all inheritances are chosen, and not all belonging feels like home. It’s not my place to speculate if this is one of those cards Lubanko feels ‘personal’ about, but I do think it’s a card that speaks very much to the queerness of the deck and queerness in general. The sad truth that not all families hold space for every branch, especially if you grow in an unexpected direction: queer, weird, defiant, tender in ways they don’t understand. When I look at this card I think: I never want my kids to feel like that. I want to grow a different kind of tree from the ones our parents and grandparents’ generations grew for us. One with room for every fruit. Even the weird ones. Especially the weird ones!

And finally, here’s my favourite card in the Lubanko Tarot: the Five of Cups. Or as I think of it, Gatsby, looking out at his green light. It’s got that same energy: a solitary figure staring into the distance, part longing, part consumed by memory. It also reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. It has that whole Byronic hero archeytpe vibe: Heathcliff, Rochester. Even Batman brooding on a ledge. Doomed romanticism, suffering alone, consumed by memory and loss.

Lubanko writes of “making space for the great landscape of grief, even in its dramatic moments.” And that’s what this card does. It doesn’t flinch from loss or try to neaten it into platitudes: it lets it sprawl, lets it crash.

The Wanderer, Gatsby, Batman, and this Five of Cups share that rear-facing stance: the lone figure turned away from us, gazing out. It places the viewer behind, putting us as witness, but never quite participant. There’s a wall of grief or introspection that we can’t breach.

To this extent, I feel Lubanko’s Five of Cups sits more in the Thoth tradition than the RWS, although at first glance its imagery is very Pamela-y. In the RWS, the Five of Cups is a card about grief and emotional disappointment, yes, but with the suggestion that not all is lost – if you can shift your perspective. Crowley, on the other hand, sees this as a card of emotional disillusionment and spiritual failure: not gentle melancholy, but crushing disappointment in love, trust, or ideals. He writes that the cups “are empty”; they have “fallen from the Tree of Life.” Their force is spent. There’s a kind of existential letdown here: your deepest desires have been poured out and nothing satisfying has replaced them. It’s not just “I feel sad about what’s been lost”, it’s “I’ve seen behind the curtain, and the dream is dead.”

For Gatsby, the yearning and dreaming of Daisy was in many ways more satisfying than actually being with her. Once the fantasy dissolved into reality, all that shimmering promise collapsed into something ordinary, even hollow. That same sense of disillusionment sits at the heart of Crowley’s – and Lubanko’s – Five of Cups: the ache not just of loss, but of having believed in something that turns out to be nothing at all.

“Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

From ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

So it is with the Five of Cups, longing for the cups we lost (or perhaps we never had), ignoring those we still have (or might yet have). The grief here is not always over something tangible – sometimes it’s the absence of a dream, the moment when the green light flickers back into ordinariness. But there’s a valour in this image too, the same valour Nick attributes to Gatsby. Not because he was wise or right, but because he believed. He reached. He dared to hope in technicolour.

If I had to answer what the past is in the Five of Cups, I’d say this: the past is a state of longing. We never quite get what we desire. We can run fast and try hard but we will always be pulled away from satisfaction.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

From ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

That is the Five of Cups. Not just sorrow, but the poetry of wanting. Not just grief, but the ghost of what might have been.

There’s def a reason this deck has become such a cult classic. Lubanko’s art is rich with meaning, memory, and metaphor. These cards ask you not just to read them, but to feel them: in your body, in your bones. Like all good art, they don’t just show you something. They change you a little in the seeing.

You can currently pre-order the deck from Llewellyn for $28.99 (approx. £22).

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