I’ve shipped a lot of projects in my life but this is one of my favorites. Daniel Harms and I first designed this tarot deck for the book Delta Green: Countdown (Pagan Publishing, 1999) and its journey to full illustration and publication took more than two decades. But when it was done, with incredible artwork by Kurt Komoda, it was as if a dream I could only barely remember upon waking had suddenly burst into vivid life.
Arc Dream commissioned the deck’s realization and shipped it in 2023 in a beautiful, linen-textured edition. Dan has published some notes about its creation which you might enjoy.
In the accompanying booklet, I provided an account of the deck’s sometime owner, Madame Sosostris. She is best known for her appearance in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as the cartomancer who foresees the structure of the poem, although a version of her also appears in Aldous Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1921). Her history, both literary and temporal, is a surprisingly deep topic, one that I have spent a great deal of time researching and will eventually explain. She also appears as a main character in my forthcoming book The Whisper Labyrinth: Tales of the King in Yellow (Arc Dream, 2027).
The Hermit’s Cave channel on YouTube has posted a lengthy review of the deck. I love everything he has to say about this, especially since as he explains he is not familiar with the King in Yellow mythos. Rather, he is a Pagan with a lifelong interest in divination and ritual, and he has reviewed more than a thousand tarot decks on his channel. His insights into the deck, our goals and aesthetics, and the nature of what we created are wonderful and I genuinely appreciate someone with this much tarot experience recognizing our deck for what it is, and for what it can be.