My spread:

Page of Quills (swords), Knight of Ink (wands) and the High Priestess

Page of Quills in this deck is taken from Sense and Sensibility and represents wit, charm, chatter, and skillful wordplay.

Knight of Ink in this deck is taken from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and talks about making your own way, going against the grain, and being reckless at times (reversed meaning).

The High Priestess is taken from King Lear and represents calm, inner knowledge and expression of divine feminine understanding.

For me all of these cards have more than one figure, engaged in some kind of action involving communication with each other. There is a sense of movement, of pairings, of testing and asking. In each set of cards, there’s a sort of parry back and forth between two figures- exchange both positive, negative and supportive.

In terms of meaning, there’s a lot of interconnectedness with knowledge and communication- sometimes rash and not well planned, but still. These cards are also court and major arcana cards, or what I think of as ‘people’ cards, because of their figures.

Together, I’d read them all as ‘Be careful who you start shooting your mouth off to, especially if it’s a female in a power position because that’s probably not going to go how you’d like it to.’

What do you think? How would you read these cards?

Happy Readings! 💛💛💛

-Madame Starbeam

Alright, let’s get into it!

The Literary Tarot started as a Kickstarter campaign (as many indie tarot decks do). It promised to blend classic stories with tarot imagery, and it was being run by a nonprofit, so there was a promise to fund educational programs in underserved areas. All sounds good!

The campaign ended up taking 2 or slightly more years to fulfill, and instead of having something that backers were under the impression would be backer-exclusive, you were able to purchase it at a major book retailer here in Canada, and for a brief moment in time, you were able to purchase it for much less than what backers who had waited 2 years and needed to pay shipping costs that seemed inflated, had paid for it. I ended up snagging it this way- it was on super discount at Chapters/Indigo, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I had also wanted to back initially, but I think I missed the window for pledges.

Now the box for this deck is pretty though slightly oversized. The cards are standard tarot card-sized. The gilding is a little too bright on some cards, or maybe some cards are too dark, so it looks a bit garish. The gilding on the side comes off on your hands when you shuffle, though it doesn’t seem to be a large amount lost.

The cards are overly rigid-too thick- and difficult to shuffle with. The gilding also had some of them stuck together, so I had to be careful not to damage them by prying them apart. The link to stories and the help you can find in the guidebook is lovely, the illustrations are, for the most part, beautiful. I’m curious as to how this deck is going to work for me, so stay tuned for the challenge to see what we get!

Happy Readings! 💛💛💛

-Madame Starbeam