Deck Review: Wild Earth Tarot

Mass market Tarot decks have been on fire recently, and here’s another fab one, the Wild Earth Tarot, from the very pleasingly named Coni Curi, an illustrator, graphic artist, and influencer from Argentina currently living in Valencia. Curi writes that the deck “seemed to draw itself while I simply watched”, and there’s certainly something wonderfully natural about the artwork. With its rich, earthy colour palette, bold shapes, and clean compositions, you can almost imagine the images growing organically out of the tubs of paint themselves, lol.

Flowers, birds, fruits, insects and the changing seasons abound, and the whole deck feels warm, throbbing, alive. Glowing, even. It’s like standing in a Spanish taberna, basking in the warm late summer sunlight filtering through the windows. Maybe with a nice glass of red wine. Or three.

As I said earlier, there’s something deeply seasonal about the deck. It immediately puts me in mind of the Wheel of Fortune, and the idea that everything has its season. A time to flower and fruit, a time to dig deep and establish a resilient root system. A time to make honey, and a time to sting. The natural world here isn’t simply decorative; it’s alive with the rhythms of growth, abundance, decay, and renewal. There’s a sense that everything is interconnected, that every season has its purpose, and that even the periods of apparent dormancy are part of something bigger.

Curi describes her artistic style as rooted in what she calls neo-nostalgia, “where the present world and the past constantly feed into one another, creating a unique and instantly recognizable visual style.” Her work is fuelled by what she calls her “major nostalgic obsessions” with fruit wrappers, matchboxes, advertisements, and porcelain plates, and once you know that, you can def see it. There’s something of the old botanical journal about the deck, but also the bold, graphic simplicity of vintage travel posters and commercial packaging. It feels both familiar and fresh, like something you might have discovered tucked away in a dusty antique shop, but which somehow also looks entirely contemporary.

And I particularly love the way Curi draws her human figures. They have this wonderful, almost sculptural solidity. The shapes are flat, but the people don’t feel flat. They feel earthy, sensual, embodied. There’s a pleasingly fleshy physicality to them that complements the deck’s broader preoccupation with the natural world.

There’s something quite… I don’t know… muscular about the deck, too, which, combined with its Mediterranean warmth, puts me rather unexpectedly in mind of Ernest Hemingway and his fascination with Spain (“the last good country left”). There’s a similar appreciation of the physical world in all its beauty and brutality, of bodies, appetites, endurance, and the rhythms of life and death. Although Curi’s vision is considerably more generous and celebratory than Hemingway’s, lol, he really was a bit of a miserable old git. This is a deck that revels in the sensual pleasures of being alive, whilst remaining keenly aware that nature has teeth. Again, I think of Hemingway and his love of “the high cloudless Spanish sky that makes the Italian sky seem sentimental and… [the Spanish] air that is actively pleasurable to breathe.”

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The deck comprises 78 cards in standard Tarot size. The cardstock is fine – a little on the thin side, but nicely elastic, with a smooth, semi-gloss finish that makes the cards easy to shuffle. Aesthetically, I think this particular style of illustration, and the general earthy, organic vibe of the deck, would probably suit something a bit thicker and matte-r, but from a practical point of view, these are very usable cards.

The deck comes in a sturdy clamshell box, accompanied by a nice chunky little full-colour guidebook. Happily, this is written by Curi herself, and actually discusses the imagery and symbolism of these particular cards, rather than simply trotting out the standard generic Tarot meanings. Which is always appreciated!

The cards have gold-gilt edges, which look lovely and really complement the warmth of the artwork, although you know I’m always a little wary of how gilding will hold up over time and with repeated shuffling!

The deck is based on the Marseille tradition, although Curi has very much made it her own. As she explains: “Unlike other tarot cards, here the minor arcana have their own voice. Its structure is based on the Marseille deck but the content is replete with cycles, elements, and narratives that speak to each other.”

The elemental suits are colour-coded, making them easy to read, and each suit has its own corresponding natural symbol. We have flowers, with their fast, flashy growth, for Wands; swans, with their watery combination of delicacy and strength, for Cups; bees, with their sharp little stingers, for Swords; and fruit, with its succulence and nourishment, for Pents (Coins).

As Curi explains, “Together they tell a story of growth, balance, death, and regeneration, where every element depends on the others and every card contributes to a larger narrative.” And I agree! Birds are obvs connected to bees through the old adage, and bees and flowers are inherently connected, as are flowers and fruit. This works for me, because Curi isn’t simply assigning four unrelated natural objects to the suits; she’s choosing things that participate in the same ecological cycles. Which makes her claim that every element depends on the others feel genuinely embedded in the artwork rather than just a nice bit of guidebook rhetoric!

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Wild Earth Tarot

One thing that becomes apparent as you work through the deck is that there’s a lot of… ‘contemplation’, for want of a better term! Curi often depicts her figures holding objects aloft, examining or considering them.

It’s an interesting recurring motif, and one that begins with the Fool himself, who appears to be staring at a mask – perhaps bearing his own face(?) His actual face, meanwhile, is completely blank. Is he putting the mask on, or taking it off? Is he examining the identity he’s about to assume, or questioning the one he’s been wearing?

Either way, it’s a lovely interpretation of the Fool as ‘card zero’, a figure of pure potential whose identity has yet to be shaped by experience, by life’s great journey. And there’s something rather apt about beginning a Tarot deck with a character contemplating an image of himself, given that this is, in many ways, precisely what we’re doing when we read the cards! I also absolutely love the key phrase Curi chooses here: “The traveller is formed in tandem with the path.”

The High Priestess is another figure holding an object aloft, in her case a book (obvs). I particularly love her hair becoming her veil/cloak becoming the water that surrounds her. It’s an interesting blending of traditions, too, because whilst the book is familiar from the Marseille Papesse, the water is much more RWS-coded. The fact that she’s becoming the water rather than just sitting in front of it gives a real sense of fluidity to her, a dissolving of boundaries. It puts me in mind of Stevie Nicks singing about Rhiannon in the song I picked for my High Priestess deep dive: “She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness.” The High Priestess doesn’t simply possess the mysteries; she becomes them. (Also, bonus points for a normal-looking boob, lol. GRAVITY ALWAYS WINS.)

The Empress, meanwhile, appears to be having a bit of an “Alas, poor Yorick!” moment, contemplating a skull filled with pomegranates, lol. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of life and death, nourishment and decay, with the pomegranates bringing in all that wonderful Demeter and Persephone symbolism traditionally associated with the card. In Greek mythology, Persephone, daughter of Demeter, the goddess of harvest and fertility (e.g. the Empress), is abducted by Hades (her much older uncle – just… ew) who is “in love” with her, and taken to the Underworld. Demeter’s grief and rage at the abduction of her daughter causes the earth to become barren, until Hades is ordered to return her daughter. But before he does he tricks Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds, binding her to the Underworld for part of each year. During her absence, Demeter mourns and the earth withers into winter, only to bloom again when Persephone returns to her mum’s side. So the pomegranate becomes a really rich, complex symbol of the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Espec. in Curi’s card, where the fruit is being served up in the skull as if it’s a kind of edgy dip bowl, lol. Which, of course, all brings us back to the deck’s preoccupation with the cycles of nature, death providing the nourishment for new life.

In the Marseille tradition, the Tower features a much more agentic ‘god’ than the RWS. The destructive fire pictured on the Marseille Tower card comes from the sun, not thunderclouds. The sun is often taken to be a symbol for God/the divine, and flames from the sun are therefore a sign of God’s punishment. The Tower card is very reminiscent of the Tower of Babel from the Bible, a story about man trying to set himself as equal to God. In response to this hubris, God himself “comes down” to punish mankind (Genesis 11:7), destroying our great tower and scattering our people, confounding our languages so we can no longer understand one another. The Wild Earth ups the ante again, by having a little celestial fist driving a jagged thunder bolt down to decapitate the tower. It’s a very visceral image – bolt from above indeed!

I also think the absence of falling people is interesting. The violence here is directed at the structure, not explicitly at its inhabitants. That arguably makes it easier to read Curi’s Tower as a symbol of a belief system or worldview being forcibly dismantled.

I really love the Tower card visually too; there’s such a striking economy of expression. I think this might be why my mind keeps coming back to Hemingway, who was also well-known for his artistic restraint – his famously sparse prose, his avoidance of elaborate emotional explanation, and, of course, his iceberg theory – the idea that what is left unsaid can give a piece of writing much of its emotional force. As his biographer Jeffrey Meyers explains, “he objectively reported only the immediate events in order to achieve a concentration and intensity of focus – a spotlight rather than a stage”. Curi gives us a tower, a fist and a thunderbolt, and lets those three elements do all the work. Like Hemingway’s minimalist sentences, the restraint doesn’t diminish the violence of the scene; if anything, it makes it more immediate and impactful. There’s no need for tumbling bodies or leaping flames – the moment of impact tells us everything we need to know.

The World gives us yet another figure holding something aloft and contemplating it, lol. Here, the World dancer gently cradles a serpent’s chin, meeting his gaze dreamily as his tongue flickers out to merge with the locks of her hair. Which in turn seems to merge with the serpent’s tail, creating the familiar circular form of the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of eternity and the endless cycle of death and rebirth. The end begets the beginning, and the cycle continues.

But what I particularly love is the tenderness of the encounter, the way the snake and the woman look at each other, as if the end and the beginning are fascinated with each other, as if they’re falling in love. The cycle isn’t simply inevitable, it’s desired. Endings here are joyous, something to be embraced and celebrated.

You’ll see I was not exaggerating about the holding-up-and-contemplating theme! The Fool studies his mask, the High Priestess raises her book, the Empress considers a skull, and the World dancer gazes dreamily into the eyes of her serpent. They all hold something up to the light and consider what it might mean, the objects becoming invitations to reflect on identity, knowledge, mortality, eternity, and our relationships with the world around us. And, ofc that’s a v. apt motif for a Tarot deck, because isn’t that precisely what we’re doing when we read the cards? Holding up an image, studying it, and seeing what it might reveal to us? I love the idea that Curi’s figures are doing much the same thing as the reader, contemplating their own little symbolic mysteries from within the cards themselves. Very meta.

Now, as y’all will know, I’m not the most pippish of gals. However, I do really like what Curi does with her Minors. They’re a good example of how a Marseille-pip can still tell a story without becoming a fully illustrated RWS-style scene. Because, on the face of it, the Four of Wands gives us four daffodils in a vase. That’s it. So my little maximalist brain was initially like: nah, not enough to work with.

BUT. On closer inspection (and reading the guidebook, v helpful to this Marseille novice!) what particularly interests me is that Curi has interpreted the Four of Wands not simply as celebration, but as the relationship between stability and vitality – Four as structure, Wands as growth – and her illustration captures that super smartly with a wonderfully literal representation of that relationship: four living flowers held within a solid, constructed vessel.

The vase gives them structure. It holds them upright, supports them, allows them to be displayed and appreciated. But it also imposes limits – the flowers have been cut from their roots, and their continued flourishing now depends upon someone external maintaining the conditions that sustain them. In the RWS, the card is often understood as the celebration of something successfully established: a home, a relationship, a community, a milestone. It’s the harvest festival card! Curi’s version asks what happens after the celebration. You’ve built something lovely. Now how do you keep it alive?

And I love the lil ram heads engraved on the vase, because they bring in the Emperor (Card IV) – the king of boundaries and structures and order, lol – and connect the two cards through both the number four and the symbolism of Aries. And because Aries (my sign!) is a fire sign, the connection with the fiery Wands suit is especially appropriate.

Then in the Five of Wands, we can see that Curi has created a little visual narrative between the two cards, and for me it really works as a way that Marseille-style pips can tell stories without needing people in them. The Four gave us four fresh, perky daffodils in a handsome ramfaced ceramic vase. The Five gives us five drooping, withered flowers in a vase that’s been smashed – everything has gone to pot, quite literally here 😂. The structure that sustained the flowers in the Four has broken down in the Five – as Curi explains in the guidebook, we’ve moved from stability to disruption. And she also points out that we don’t know who or what broke the vase. Was it an external force? An accident? The inevitable consequence of neglect (natural state of entropy & c.)? Or did someone deliberately smash it because they couldn’t bear the monotony of the arrangement any longer? A big ‘fuck you’ to The Man, lol, even if they ended up cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Curi’s deck is a great example of why I am warming slowly up to Mariselle decks recently; essenitally because there’s more storytelling (I am a storyteller!) than I thought, and also that the numerology aspects aren’t as restrictive as I feared. What we see here is that the Five isn’t an arbitrary disaster that follows the Four. It’s a possible consequence of failing to maintain what the Four established. And that’s a really cool, cyclical interpretation of the numbered cards. Each contains the conditions from which the next might emerge.

The Swords suit is particularly pleasing to me, because it’s represented by bees, all of whom have little swords in place of their stingers. It’s just very clever and cool, and I like it a lot. Little warrior bees!

In the Nine of Swords, Curi explains how the bee has navigated its own swarm of thoughts and emerged with new understanding, but must now reconcile its individual knowledge with the collective wisdom of the hive. The arrangement of the swords – the rigid, intersecting grid versus the central bee’s massive stinger [that’s what she said!] – makes me think of intellectual structure vs. intellectual freedom, the importance of both, and the tensions we face when trying to reconcile them. Curi’s Marseille-inspired take is a much more expansive interpretation of the card, concerned not simply with anxiety (as in the RWS), but with the relationship between knowledge, certainty, and doubt. The mind can be a source of torment, certainly, but also of growth, provided we’re willing to question what we think we know.

I also really like the Page of Swords, who appears to be blowing on her blade, almost as though she’s just finished sharpening and polishing it, and is puffing away the last traces of metal dust [there must be a specific word for ‘metal dust’ surely? Why can’t I think of it?!] before putting it to use. There’s something wonderfully self-satisfied about her expression, lol. She’s clearly very pleased with her handiwork! But, as Curi explains in the guidebook, this Page is still learning to master her element, full of ideas and intellectual curiosity, but not necessarily possessing the experience or restraint to use them wisely.

And the sword has a giant bee-shaped pommel, which is obviously amazing; I want one.

The Three of Cups is another lovely example of how Curi develops little narratives across the Minor Arcana. The two swans from the Two of Cups have apparently had a baby! Their union has produced something new, with the hatching egg representing the creative potential that emerges when two individuals come together. I really like this interpretation of the Three, the idea that the emotional connection established in the Two becomes something generative, something greater than the sum of its parts. (Also that chick looks so goofy, it’s almost out of place in such a sophisticated deck, but it does make me smile).

I also love the Six of Cups, with its wonderfully dreamy, watery, Cupsy atmosphere. The whimsical, flickering other-self the swan sees in the water beneath it. There’s something very as above, so below about the composition, that interplay between the material and the ephemeral, the physical world and its shimmering double. And, of course, it’s a particularly apt image for the Six of Cups, with its associations of memory and nostalgia. After all, our memories are themselves a kind of reflection, not necessarily faithful reproductions of the past, but images distorted and reshaped by time, emotion, and longing. As Curi suggests in the guidebook, there’s a danger in becoming so entranced by the reflection that we mistake it for reality, remaining anchored in what we once were rather than opening ourselves up to what we might become.

I really like how Curi’s Six of Pents isn’t ‘charity’ but exchange: you give me the gold of the lemon and I give you the gold of the coin. It’s the free flowing exchange that makes life so enjoyable, coming after the stagnation of the Four and the deprivation of the Five. Resources aren’t simply there to be accumulated or hoarded, but to be shared and put to use. In true reciprocity neither person is simply the giver or the receiver; both have something valuable to offer, and both are enriched by the ‘swap’.

And then there’s this lush, fleshy, delightful looking Nine of Pents, a papaya with its black seeds glinting like “intimiate treasures”.

And here’s my favourite card in the Wild Earth Tarot, the Hermit. First up, this is just such a beautiful drawing. I love how it immediately implies that flowers are the stars of the earth, and stars are the flowers of the heavens.

And then obvs the cloak full of stars blends into the night, like they’re the secrets of the universe we have inside us, reminding us we must sometimes turn inwards to better understand the outward. I also love the candle smoke wisping up to form the hood; it’s all very, very fluid, with the boundaries between smoke, fabric, body, and cosmos seeming to melt into one another. It puts me in mind of Buddhist and other contemplative traditions concerned with dissolving the boundaries of the individual self, recognising our interconnectedness with the wider universe. Rather than withdrawing from the world, this Hermit seems to be becoming one with it. It’s all gloriously hippie, and this ageing hipster loves it, lol.

And this is another visual theme Curi seems to often return to with her art – interconnectedness isn’t just something the cards depict, it’s built into the very way the images are drawn. The High Priestess merges with water, the Hermit merges with the sky, the World’s dancer merges with the serpent’s eternal cycle. They’re all different expressions of the same underlying idea: that the boundaries between ourselves and the natural world are much less fixed than we imagine.

All in all, I think the Wild Earth Tarot is a really lovely deck. Curi’s artwork is bold, beautiful, and bursting with life, but there’s also a real thoughtfulness to the symbolism, and a coherence to the deck as a whole that I particularly appreciate. And whilst Marseille-style Minors aren’t generally my bag of tea, I’ve really enjoyed exploring the little visual narratives Curi has woven through the suits, helped enormously by her excellent guidebook. There’s something wonderfully generous about this deck, both visually and philosophically. It’s a celebration of the natural world in all its beauty, brutality and glorious interconnectedness, and a reminder that we’re not simply observers of its endless cycles, but participants in them. You can buy it from most major retailers for approx. £20, including direct from Rockpool, the publisher.

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