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In my last blog post I shared the Major Arcana birth cards for the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine. We saw that Putin is governed by 16 The Tower and that Zelenskiyy is governed by 6 The Lovers. When I looked at the Majors who would go on to be their companion cards through 2022, I was surprised to see that they were both served by 14 Temperance. However, it’s important to note that they both reach Temperance by a different route!

Since this is a blog about court cards, I also looked at the birth court cards for Putin and Zelenskiyy. For Putin, that Tower card morphs into the King of Wands and for the Ukrainian President, The Lovers translates as the Knight of Cups.

When we look at The Tower and the King of Wands, it feels very noisy, energetic and very destructive. The King of Wands is usually a character that I feel very warmly about, but as the invader of another sovereign state, I am inclined to focus on the King’s less attractive traits. I freely acknowledge that all the things that make me usually love the King of Wands; his glamorous, expansive, charismatic and passionate personality – are probably what endear him to the Russian people that support him. But such a fiery person burns for only what can be achieved by (and for!) himself alone – burning bright, setting a torch to everything that comes into contact with him, toppling the edifice. But he also illuminates himself so that all the world may see him. And while he hopes that they see a noble and heroic warrior (shirtless, riding a bear or whatever the hell it was) what the world actually sees is someone consumed by their own ego, ambition and actions. Someone prepared to turn a country into a burned out wasteland. The King of Wands is not a natural team player; this is leadership through assertion at best and aggression at worst.

Zelenskyy’s Knight of Cups and The Lovers feels like an appropriate pairing too – but in a different and less frenetic way. While The Lovers feels like choices being made, the Knight of Cups has made his choice and rides off into the sunset with his bride. In this case, his country. The Knight of Cups is always a character who looks like he’s on a quest by love and for love. Let’s face it, the entire world is a wee bit in love with Zelenskyy. Of course, that motorbike will be noisy too – we just have to hope that someone switches off Putin’s amplifiers lol!

Now, both Presidents will have the same Guardian card for 2022, but how well do their birth cards sit with this year’s model? With a total of 14 giving us Temperance as the Major Arcana card, we can look at the table of court card number allocations and see that The King of Cups is numbered 14.

As a guardian for 2022, the King of Cups shows us that this is a year for diplomacy, for leadership through empathetic understanding. Hmmm which leader do you think will be more attuned to that? How do the Presidential birth courts look next to their year card?

No idea what is going on with this photo. Have tried to rotate it a billion times.

For Putin, the King of Wands must learn to act in a King of Cups manner for the year card to work in his favour. That assertive aggressiveness of the Wands’ King needs to be tempered (oh, there’s that Temperance reference again!) into the heart-led qualities of the King of Cups. Which I don’t feel is very likely at all, do you?

For Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, his Knight of Cups birth card matures into the King of Cups, his Airy Knight nature which could feed so much of the King of Wands fire is transmuted into fire itself – but not the all consuming, all devouring passion of the King of Wands. Instead he becomes a leader whose strengths are in sympathy with his birth card energies – he cares about other people and that’s not going to change at all. But Zelenskyy will grow to be a strong adversary to Putin.

The battle itself may show Putin’s strength, but the battle for hearts and minds is most definitely won by Zelenskyy.

What do you think?

The first time I saw the Bianco Nero Tarot ‘in the wild’ was on a facebook post by Serge Pirotte. Immediately smitten by this monochrome deck, I messaged my son with a link to the deck and asked him to get it for me for Christmas. Which he did!

The deck was published by US Games Systems Ltd in 2018 and the artwork is by Marco Proietto with the Little White Book (LWB) by Arwen Lynch.

Let’s take a quick look at the LWB which is 62 pages long and which provides keywords and interpretations for each card and a spread for the deck with a worked example.

Each card is presented with keywords for rightsides and reversed work and a paragraph that taps into the imagery of each card (about 80 words or thereabouts). It’s a comprehensive LWB which you would expect from someone with Lynch’s experience.

Moving on to the cards, we have a 78-card monochrome deck that draws deeply from the artwork of the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) deck with the odd splash from the more ancient Visconti Tarot. Being rooted in the RWS is in no way a criticism – it makes the deck immediately accessible to anyone familiar with that deck. The RWS, previously under copyright to US Games, is now out of copyright and every man and his dog is bringing out their own version of it, so why shouldn’t US Games bring out a different, stylish RWS-inspired deck too?

The artwork is in the style of antique engravings – the work and woodcuts of Doré and Dürer have inspired the artist – and it makes for a nice, clean, graphic deck.

Each card has its number at the top (Roman numerals throughout) and name at the bottom (suit name, in the case of the Minors). This is a deck with Strength at VIII and Justice at XI. The cards are a standard tarot size and the card stock is nice and slippy for easy shuffling and the card back design allows for reversals.

Of course, being obsessed with the Court Cards, I’ll mostly be talking about them.

The suits remain the traditional Cups, Pentacles, Swords and Wands and the court card ranks of Page, Knight, Queen and King are retained.

Looking first at the Pages, each card consists of a solo young man wrapped in robes or belted at the waist with the symbol of their suit. The backgrounds are as you would expect – pyramids for the Page of Wands, ploughed fields for the Page of Pentacles etc. The Page of Cups even has the same frilly head-gear as he does in the RWS, but in this deck he does not look at the fish in his Cup, but rather at us, from the corner of his eyes. This is one of the small changes that adds a dash of something-new to the familiar RWS classic tarot.

The Knights are fabulously RWS with everyone and their warhorse doing exactly what you would expect in exactly the landscape that you would expect. These guys are the court cards who are most like their original counterparts.

The Queens are all quite low-cut robe kinda gals. In fact, if the Queen of Wands (who is seated modestly with her legs crossed a la Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) stands up, she’ll be naked from the waist down! Which kind of fits the ‘passion/sexy’ aspect of this character’s persona. The Queen of Cups sits on a windy shore, her hair whipping around her face and looking pensively out to sea – there’s a King Canute feeling to this one. The Queen of Swords sports a crown of butterflies. And yes, the little hare in the RWS Queen of Pentacles can be found in the Bianco Nero Queen card too, sitting in the shade of her throne.

Almost all the female forms in this deck are slender, depicted with a shoulder exposed, shoulder straps slipping, ribbons of fabric covering their bust or hips et – but no actual exposed boobs if that’s a concern to you, I hasten to add. I wasn’t surprised to read that Marco has studied the human form in life drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, his love of figure drawing is clear in this deck!

The Kings are again easily recognisable thanks to good use of RWS symbolism employed in new ways – the little salamander from the RWS King of Wands clings to the side of the Bianco Nero King’s throne, just beneath the lion that the king absent-mindedly strokes. The jolly little boat in the RWS King of Cups becomes a magnificent fully rigged clipper, heading straight for the rocks! As with the Pages and Queens, the Kings are all decked out in flowing robes or cloaks that cover their modesty – except the King of Pentacles who is entirely swathed.

I really like this deck – it’s very easy to read with thanks to those Rider Waite Smith roots and the LWB that comes with it. However, although the artwork is very RWS in orientation, it IS different enough to keep things interesting and allow you to interpret the cards in a different way to the RWS, especially those courts.

Who would love it? Anyone who loves their RWS would like working with this deck. If you are a learner looking to branch out into a new deck, but still feel confident – this is for you. If you are a collector looking for a monochrome deck that you can actually use, rather than have it lie on a shelf and grow dust-bunnies, this is for you too.

I’d be interested to know what you think about it if you have it in your collection!

In the UK, like the deck, but don’t want to buy it from that big river place? Try here on bookshop.org. This is an affiliate link and I get a shekel if you buy it there.

I have tried so hard to get to grips with The Gypsy Witch deck (US Games Systems Ltd) I really have. I took a beginner’s course last year with Brant Williams via the WDA which certainly got me off the blocks, but I still couldn’t read with any degree of competency. Sure, I would look at worked examples and say: ‘oh yeah, that makes sense’ but as soon as I laid down a combination of cards on my own, I was immediately befuddled as to what I might say. And let’s face it, the LWB leaflet for the deck is not the most enlightening!

When US Games announced that there was to be a new book on the Gypsy Witch called ‘Reading Fortune Telling Cards’, I was beyond excited and immediately threw my money at the pre-order button at Amazon – this would be my big opportunity to gel with the deck at last!

Note: If you don’t have the Gypsy Witch cards, there is also a book and deck set available too (links below).

As with all things at the moment, the book’s release in the UK was well behind that of our American cousins and I simply had to cool my heels for a few weeks as I waited impatiently for the day the book arrived … and Reader, that day dawned last week! I’ve now devoured the little black book and am ready to review!

The book is 17.5cm tall and 12.5cm wide and comes in at a slender 125 pages. The book was written by Fabio Vinago and originally published in his native Dutch. A special nod of thanks should be given to Ruth Gistelinck for translating Vinago’s words into English that is nice and natural to read.

I have not heard of Fabio Vinago and since the strap-line for this book is a ‘Romani’ approach to reading’ the cards, I assumed that he was Romani himself. However, on reading through the book, he makes no claims to this at all. At one point he says ‘In my experience, their way of reading the cards gives very accurate and detailed interpretations’. So, I’m taking it that Fabio is not Romani, but an interested observer with experience of Romani card-reading. This is not in any way a criticism, but just a heads-up in case folks assume that every secret of this deck will be laid out for us with the full inside-skinny from a bona fide Roma reader.

And on that note, let’s dive in to the book’s contents: There are a few pages devoted to Romani culture, and here there are a couple of important nuggets of information, so read slowly folks! Vinago comments on the fact that the fortune telling cards are NOT the Lenormand deck, even though there are many similar cards found in both systems. This is why the playing card insets on the GW are not the same as Lenormand; why would they be? It’s a completely different system and the Romani do things their own way!

The next section includes an outline of the cards, their suits and their meanings. Vinago expands upon the brief paragraph printed on each card and also includes some keywords to help you remember what the card means. He also includes a short section on how to work with the Joker card too – which I found useful.

The third section covers different types of spreads and how to read them – starting small (past, present and future) and ending with the massive Gypsy Witch Cards’ Grand Tableau, which takes many pages to explain in itself and will take me a LONG time to gain competency with! A query that I have about the GGT is in the diagonals; some diagonals are not included in the list of diagonal cards (for example, p84 – why are 11 and 5 not counted as a diagonal?). I need to know why 😀

Although the book doesn’t say a lot about what each playing card reference might mean or why they are allocated to particular cards, there is a comprehensive section on the face cards (Knight, Queen and King) and how to incorporate them into your reading.

The final section contains different card combinations that hold significance. In other words, this is not every combination of every card, but those that could be picked out as meaning something specific – eg The Sun and Fox – you find out who you can and cannot trust.

The book concludes with a list of suggested Dos and Don’ts – including: never talk about death, stay loyal and kind, take your time, don’t read card when you are not feeling well.

In conclusion, what do I think of the book?

I think I had such high hopes for this book that it was inevitable that I am left feeling slightly deflated. And yet I struggle to really put my finger on why that is the case – the book is full of good information and spreads. And yet. Maybe I was hoping for EVERYTHING that I struggled with to be included – namely the playing card inserts. Vinago says that the playing card insert suits can be used to help establish what else is at play in a reading. For example – a love question with many Diamond cards in the answer might signify money concerns. But I read that the 9 of Spades ‘speaks of overspending’ and I am left flicking through the book muttering ‘where, WHERE does it say that?’.

On the whole though, this is a useful book if you want to work better with the Gypsy Witch fortune telling cards. It doesn’t have all the answers, but then, maybe that’s part of the joy of working with these cards – you don’t need all the answers to be able to work with them.

I may update this review as I attempt to become more competent with the GW cards with help from Vinago’s book.

You can buy the book HERE which is my affiliate link at bookshop.org – an ethical online storefront that supports local bookshops too! Fancy the book/deck set? HERE is the link at bookshop.org for that too.