This week's deck is the Lover's Path, by Kris Waldherr, the same artist who did the Goddess Tarot. With this deck, the theme is well-known couples in history, legend and fiction and the overall organization is similar to that of the Goddess Tarot... each Major Arcana card highlights a well-known love story while the four minor suits focus on one story and tells its story through the suit.
The four minor stories are Tristan and Isolde (Cups), tied to the VII: Desire; Brunnhilde and Siegfried (Staves), tied to VIII: Strength; Cupid and Psyche (Swords), tied to XIX: Awakening; and Zeus and Danae (Coins), tied to X: Fortune. And as you can see, many of the Majors utilize different names from the usual RWS or Thoth.
I really love this deck, while having the same issue with it as I do with the Goddess Tarot - some of the stories do not easily fit into the theme where they are applied for me, and some (Zeus and Danae come to mind) are hardly my idea of a 'love' story at all. And I'm finding, with this and other decks that utilize myth and story by drawing in a major arcana card and giving it detail throughout a minor suit, that I am bothered that four major arcana concepts are given so much more attention than the others, for reasons that don't make a lot of sense to me.
But all that aside - I absolutely love the artwork and as long as I can let myself ignore my issues with the otherall structure of the deck, I find this to be a wonderful deck for matters of the heart, a very interesting way to view Tarot through story and a good addition to a more standard deck. I find I get the most out of it when I compare a card to the URWS, to see how the shades of meaning blend together for me. I would not want to have this be my only deck, but I am very fond of it.
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