Prairie Tarot

The Prairie Tarot is for everyone who loves and uses the Tarot. Elegantly illustrated and child-friendly, it brings readings and meditations to life - a useful tool for self-exploration.

The Prairie Tarot measures a hand-friendly 4.75" x 2.75", packed into a lidded box, and is printed on high-quality cardstock for long years of use. It contains no instruction booklet (tarot newcomers are directed to their local library, for any of the dozens of already-existing works on the many uses of tarot!).

The Minor Arcana use the standard suits of Pentacles, Cups, Swords and Wands, and are numbered; the Major Arcana are un-numbered. The card borders are black, and the cardback features a twelve-spoked wooden wagon wheel on a black field.

Shipping is usually quick and responsive, but please allow at least a couple of weeks for delivery (especially if you're located somewhere far from the American West).

					Purchase Prairie Tarot Purchase price: $24.95 + shipping
Major Arcana	Pentacles	Cups	Swords	Wands

The Prairie Tarot comes out of my own experiences growing up in Montana. My background is in the tiny towns on wide plains, next door to Canada, next door to North Dakota - wheat fields, oil derricks, cattle ranches, wheat and flax farms, railroads, cactus - the Big Sky country, where it's gravelly, scraped by glaciers, dry, and windy. Each card image is condensed out of that. My area was only settled in 1880, following the establishment of a Reservation which, incidentally, borders the family farm. My great-grandfather was the first settler in the area.

Included in the Prairie Tarot is an extra card: the Jackalope. A creature rarely seen, this jackrabbit wearing an antelope's horns embodies the fantastic, the unexpected, the surprising…. It can signify luck, a bolt from the blue, or the crazy gamble. What does it mean for you? Will the Jackalope mean good or ill? Will you remove it from the deck, like a wayfaring stranger who has no business on your spread, or will you leave it in the deck, as a card to be read right along with the other 78? The choice is yours.

(I know, I know - someone will ask why the Hierophant is a native shaman while Temperance is a white settler. Someone else will ask why Asians or Africans are not better represented. And shouldn't there really be more cowboys? And where's Will Rogers, or Annie Oakley, or General Custer, or Sacajawea? And those questions are indeed reasonable. I can only say that another tarot artist would have come up with an entirely different set of correspondences.
The simple answer is that the Prairie Tarot is a deck made only for myself, and based on my own background and interests. You might call it an 'art deck'. It's not about history-as-a-whole, and it's not intended as any sort of end-all canonical interpretation of tarot iconography translated into every possible symbol from the American West. I'm fully aware that I couldn't possibly satisfy everyone's sensibilities, so I concentrated on satisfying my own. I hope it can be accepted in that spirit.)

User comments:

"It's brilliant.
Reads like a dream..."

"I like that it is so American. I'm American.
I read for Americans. It's refreshing."