This week, I'll be working with the Revelations Tarot deck. This is one of those decks that appealed to me greatly when I first got it but then turned out to be more of a challenge than I would like.
First, what appeals to me is the artwork overall - strong colors (you can step back from a reading until you can only see the patterns of the color and get a very good idea of what elemental energy is running through the reading).
Secondly, it has built in reversals and that appealed to me - I bought this at a time when I was struggling to decide how I wanted to deal with them, or even if. As a study deck, it's really interesting to see how a scene is visually modified by flipping the card - having them both there for comparison is a great way to work with sorting through the range of good to bad in each card. Even as you work with one side, the other is there, lurking, to remind you that positive and negative are always in play to some extent in any situation.
But the reversal system has also proved to be difficult for me in reading with this deck - over time, my own system of using reversals has settled out for the most part into two or three variants, all involving some sort of inner work with the card's energy, so at this point, reversals don't generally mean what the card depicts. Reversals here are often treated as 'opposite of...' and the imagery is so evocative it's difficult to ignore the artist's reversal system in favor of my own. Which is okay - sometimes working with a deck according to its own philosophical system is a great way to stretch my mental muscles... but it does mean that I'm more likely to turn to this deck for comparative study than for readings.
The last issue I've come to over time with this deck is that there is something very mechanical and urban about the artwork... When you get to the Pentacles, it's pure earth - dirt, stone, metal, as if you're down deep in Earth. Wands are fire... you're at the heart of Fire... Water depicts underwater dwellers... Air is in the midst of cloud and wind. There's not a lot here that suggests, say, 'go sit out in the sun and dig in your garden' because what's depicted doesn't really show the blended real world we actually live in. After awhile, that felt pretty sterile. Again, great for study... but limiting for readings. (Although, I do wonder if this deck might not read brilliantly for someone living in an urban area who might not find the agricultural slant of most decks equally exotic and unrealistic?)
So... it's been awhile since I pulled it out, but I'll be drawing my daily cards with this deck for the next week. Let's see if it strikes me differently after some time off for a year or so.
Comments