The Last Few Cards For All Hallows’ Eve Tarot

The Death and Hierophant from our newest deck All Hallows’ Eve Tarot, coming soon.

We’re coming to the last few cards of the All Hallows’ Eve Tarot project.

This time around we went for an Egyptian style Hierophant card, something completely different from what we had in the Halloween Waite.

The Hierophant is flanked by two statues of Bastet, and holds a scarab beetle in his right hand and an ankh in his left.

When designing the card I was reminded of my visit to Egypt years ago, and seeing stone carvings of the Scarab beetle up close was interesting. I am no Egyptologist, of course, but even for a regular person like myself you will quickly see that scarabs feature heavily in hieroglyphics and stone carvings throughout Egypt.

With Tarot itself being highly symbolic, it’s often difficult to create interesting visuals without causing confusion.

I think with creating themed decks, especially decks of a darker nature, you end up having a lot of death related cards. Looking back on it now, the Twisted Tarot Tales’ Death card probably didn’t stand out because it was surrounded by other death related cards. So with the Hierophant card featuring mummified figures in the foreground, it could be taken to mean rebirth, and likewise with the scarab and ankh featuring here. Of course, these are religious symbols too and since Halloween is a sort of darker themed part of the year, I just felt that it would still fit the overall feel of the cards. So the card should still be understood as relating to religion, and things related to religious tradition, which the Hierophant naturally represents.

For the pillars I knew I wanted something different. I had pumpkin carvings in the Halloween Waite, but for All Hallows’ I felt it needed to reflect what was going on in the rest of the card. For me, Bastet seemed to be the right choice. While she is considered a protective figure, she is featured here solely for aesthetic purposes.

With our Death card, we went for the headless horseman. This is a figure made popular with Sleepy Hollow, the book by Washington Irving, but the legend goes back to old Irish, Scottish and Welsh stories, and possibly others. In the Irish folklore, he is said to be a sort of embodiment of death and when he stops riding, a persons death will occur. The figure is said to call out a person’s name and then that person will immediately die. We went with a more recognizable, traditional look for this card, but I think with a lot of these lingering entities, they change over the years to adapt to the culture that still embraces them.

The Chariot and Temperance from the soon to be released All Hallows’ Eve Tarot

The Chariot features two dragons at the front of her cauldron themed chariot. In one hand she holds a magic wand and in the other a lantern with a spider themed stained glass motif.

While the Temperance card still has her bat wings, similar to the Halloween Waite, as she stands beside a cornfield close to a river, I wanted to do something a little different with this card.

Temperance is a balance, which was why I added in the cornsnake in the grass, representing a hidden darkness, while out in the open we see a dove, representing the much loftier side of good, of charity and kindness, but also of fortitude in standing for what is right.

It is believed in some cultures that we should neither strive to be totally bad or totally good, but find a place somewhere in between. That sounds like a bit of a philosophical nightmare, but I think the meaning behind this idea, is that whether we like it or not, being 100 percent perfect is not really achievable, nor will you find anyone who is 100 percent evil.

We may not like their actions but it would be silly to assume that from the time they were born until the time they die they will have never done a single good deed, or said something good.

While I think you would be hard pushed to find someone who would openly admit to striving to be 100% evil, we know that achieving such a goal would lead to an undesirable result in the eyes of civilization. Yet, striving for 100% perfection in the opposite direction can very dangerously come full circle and produce the same result As the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sometimes parents will discipline their children so strictly that a lot of cruelty comes from it. Cruel and inhumane outcomes can come about by a strict adherence to laws that are supposed to uphold decency and goodness. In effect they can result in bringing about the same evils that the laws are trying to eradicate in society. In other words, obviously it is best to veer towards the side of good if and when you can but be careful not to become an extremist in any one direction.

So that’s just a few cards we’ve recently worked on. I estimate within the next week or so we will be sending our files to the printer. There’s a few final edits I need to wrap up, along with a box design.

Thanks for reading

James