Woman Mother Goddess Tarot Decks:
A Picture is Worth 1000 Words

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Click on the name of the deck to get to more information about the deck and a review, if I have reviewed it yet. If not, the link goes to the artist's webpage.

"In ancient times women were considered Divine because we were known to bleed without dying and gave birth to new life. There is power in our bellies and wombs that deserves our honoring." (ALisa Starkweather)

The decks showcased on this page are quite diverse. They are all conceived and illustrated by women, sometimes built in the nooks and crannies of their lives around the needs of raising children (a situation I know all too well at this moment in my own life). More importantly, they reconceive tarot concepts from a woman's perspective. Some decks celebrate prepatriarchal goddesses, while others are extremely modern. Body images tend to be more diverse here than in more traditional decks. Some decks celebrate woman as Amazon, with an existence independent of men. Some celebrate the heroic quest of pregnancy and childbirth. Some celebrate cronehood.

Traditional tarot is often interpreted as a pictorial representation of "the journey of the fool", the heroic quest for selfhood and reunion with the divine. As described in Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi's wonderful book Motherself, the male heroic quest is one of extensionality, penetration, and crossing thresholds. The Thoth deck is particularly clear on this aspect of tarot symbolism. But the hero was born of someone. What does the quest look like from her perspective? Perhaps a story of interiority, containing, protecting one's own sacred spaces; the impact on the definition of self of being able to mother a child who must be encompassed in that self for a time, and the culture-bringing proposition of helping that child move out of the mother's self into its own self.

If we can conceive that there can be more than just one valid perspective on the hero's quest tale, the validity of a woman's tarot will follow. The decks shown here seem to take steps in this direction.