The Stolen Child Tarot | Monica Knighton

It may have taken two Kickstarter campaigns, but The Stolen Child Tarot has now been printed, boxed and delivered to the lucky backers!

What a lovely deck it is!

This is a 78-card, fully-illustrated deck, beautifully presented in a flip top box with a magnetic lid. There are two other additional cards – one called Topsy Turvey, which I think you could use as a significator card. And there is also a very cute Title Card.

The deck is 8cm wide by 12 cm tall – bigger in both dimensions than the RWS. The card stock doesn’t feel the thickest, but I don’t think that this will be a problem unless you are quite physical with your decks! The cards have a sort of light linen or matt finish which is rather nice.

The card back, at first glance looks entirely suitable for reversals, but both faces are different, so maybe not entirely suitable for reversals (if you like your reversed cards to look identical to the upright cards when face down).

As far as the deck structure is concerned, we have traditionally named Majors with Justice at 8 and Strength at 11 (Majors have Arabic numerals, not Roman). Major 13 is unnamed.

The theme of the deck is inspired by W B Yeats poem of the same name – The Stolen Child – and it has very attractive child/nature/fae artwork from Knighton, who is an illustrator to trade.

The suits are not traditionally-named, but are straightforward to associate with the usual suits. In place of Wands we have Flames, for Cups we have Brine, Swords becomes Zephyrs and Pentacles becomes Oak.

The imagery is not obviously linked to the RWS, unless you look closely and spend some time with each card – The 9 of Zephyrs for instance – you CAN see a link to the RWS – the feathers from the bird of prey are falling around the hare, terrifying it.

I eagerly await the accompanying book pdf which will be available this month, hopefully. The pdf for the Majors, however, can be downloaded from Monica’s website.

I’m especially interested in the Court Cards, of course, and have made a little video using Adobe Spark to let you see them.

The suit ranks are Page, Knight, Queen and King. There are feathers and birds in the Zephyr cards, Shells in the Brine cards, Acorns in the Oak cards and Flames in the Flames cards (not always immediately obvious though).

There’s a lot going on in these cards and the book will help us unpack Monica’s vision, so I hope to add more detail on these cards when that’s available later this month.

I love the artwork for this deck – it is colourful and beautifully rendered. Desperate to get moving with this one and look forward to that book!

You got this deck? Which card is your favourite?

https://monicalknighton.com/books/the-stolen-child-tarot-78-card-deck-pre-sale