A view from the deck: The Immortals Tarot by Jamie R. Stone

By Sarah Taylor

Last week, Eric pointed me in the direction of a website showcasing a tarot deck by, in his words, an “outrageous artist,” suggesting I look at how he uses symbols in his work. The only hint I had about the kind of deck came from the web address itself: the word “punksthetic” stood out immediately. What stood out more were the images I found on clicking through. My first reaction was that they were not only eye-catching; they caught my gaze and held it.

Temperance from The Immortals Tarot by Jamie R. Stone. Temperance is the 14th card in the 22-card major arcana. Click on the image for a larger version.

The Immortals Tarot — which you can find here — is designed by Jamie R. Stone, a young, Oregon-based graphic designer. It is a work-in-progress (all but one of the major arcana are completed, and Jamie is now embarking on the minors), and is an offshoot of the graphic novel of the same name that he is co-creating with Brenda Gonzalez.

I am not unfamiliar with graphic novels, but I perhaps fall into that large middle-ground of people who appreciates and is excited by its broad aesthetic without being immersed in its culture and sub-cultures. (I’m more Asterix than Watchmen — although I loved Dave McKean’s Black Orchid.) So I’ll leave that area of expertise to Jamie himself. What I can do, however, is approach the imagery in The Immortals Tarot as a tarot reader, and see how it dances with the themes that I have come to know from my own tarot explorations.

My first four thoughts when I saw the deck: 1) The use of colour and tone is striking; 2) the illustration work is polished and painstakingly detailed; 3) it is a very ‘masculine’ deck in terms of the energy it exudes; and 4) not unconnected with the third point, it strongly embodies the idea of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ as described by mythologist Joseph Campbell:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. [“The Hero with a Thousand Faces”]

Joseph Campbell believed that we lived a meaningful life when we saw ourselves as part of a larger, mythical story — one where the gods roamed the earth in human form. In Jamie’s own words:

The story of The Immortals [the graphic novel on which the tarot is based] is brimming with stories told from multiple perspectives, all told in one cohesive narrative that takes place over a thousand years in a world similar to our own. There are stories of gods and mortals and how their actions affect one another. There are themes of family, fate, trust, love, lust, deceit and revenge running throughout the story.

Tarot expresses the idea of ‘life lived as myth’, each of the 78 cards representing an archetypal situation, behaviour or character trait. The major arcana seem to me to be more concentrated archetypes, associated as they are with themes of the soul rather than everyday situations and life-stages, which are the realm of the minor arcana. We, as humans, cannot become an archetype in its pure form,  but we can identify or align with one and in some way give it form here on Earth. Thus, immortality is conferred on us when the gods, as archetypes, choose to express themselves through us, and when we, in turn, choose to express an aspect of the gods.

Jamie continues:

[The Immortals] focuses on man and his hopes, his dreams, his fears and explores the concept of immortality. … Gods are not the strong, invincible forces you’ve been led to believe. They are weak and fragile, just like us, but they can outlive us a hundred times over… but have they always been this way or did they have to earn this everlasting life?

A self-confessed skeptic when it came to tarot’s divinatory qualities, Jamie nonetheless found himself drawn to the idea of creating a deck, and took his inspiration and guidance from the Mythic Tarot, created by Juliet Sharman-Burke, Liz Greene, and Tricia Newell. Having said that, it is clear that this deck is very much Jamie’s own in terms of skill and intuition. I’m including a small interview with Jamie at the end of this article, which gives a greater insight into the creative process. But I wanted to add one or two personal observations about the symbolism because, given its stark contrast to the decks I use and have written about, we can start to appreciate the differences between decks and yet also the ideas that tarot keeps returning to and reinforcing.

The Chariot from The Immortals Tarot by Jamie R. Stone. The Chariot is the 7th card in the 22-card major arcana. Click on the image for a larger version.

The first is what I’ve come to think of as the ‘mandala motif’ that I have found in several of the cards — The Tower, The Wheel of Fortune and The Star, for example. All three of these have a circular formation that has the effect of drawing our eye into its centre. A mandala is a Buddhist and Hindu symbol for the universe, reflecting the many parts that are all connected and come to a single point in the centre. The tarot consists of the multiple expressions of a single idea — whether you see that idea as life, the soul or god/dess, in whichever way you choose to think of him/her/it. It is the travelling out and the ultimate return to the part of oneself that lies at the centre of all things. It is transpersonal — mythic.

The second has to do with where some cards are based on more traditional tarot imagery, and where others express the same archetype quite differently. The Chariot, for example, has parallels to The Chariot in the Rider-Waite Smith version, most notably in the figures of the two horses, which find their counterparts in the black and white sphinxes at the driver’s feet. Temperance, on the other hand, expresses its archetype through the use of ‘Frankenstein-cross-Jekyll and Hyde’ imagery, where a balance is sought between the two sets of protagonists that are nonetheless connected with each other.

Finally, there is a palpable sense of the co-existence of and permeable boundaries between the lands of the gods and the lands of the mortals, the waking life and the dreamtime, the conscious and the unconscious. Compare Temperance to The Moon, which show that point of contact between both worlds — a graphic illustration of ‘the veil’.

And, if you feel so inclined, take a look at “The Hanged Man” on the site and the way in which Jamie has chosen to treat a figure that is so often suspended upside-down in other decks. What are your thoughts and feelings about it? For someone who had very little interest in tarot until a year ago, Jamie has managed to create a deck of some significant depth — which I think is exactly what can happen when we choose to work in partnership with the gods.

I’ll leave the last words to Jamie:

[W]hether Tarot cards really have any sooth-saying properties to them or not is irrelevant, because they ultimately tell very interesting stories. They capture people’s imaginations, which is exactly what I set out to do with The Immortals.

 

Process, Technique and Inspiration — An Interview with Jamie R. Stone

What was the practical process that you went through to create a card? Did you work with the Mythic Tarot beside you? Did you do any research into card meanings and, if so, how did that inform your illustration? Was there a place where your own intuitive process took over? (I’m assuming this is, indeed, the case.)

My process for creating each card starts out with a sketch on drawing paper, scanning it into the computer. I use Photoshop for everything else, including highlights on a grayscale background, shadows, coloring and, if necessary, special effects like fire, magic, etc. A lot of times I’ll rework the highlights or shadows if things don’t look quite right. Once I’m done, I add a slight film grain to make all the elements mesh together… Oh, and the tarot card template that I use with the gears on it so that you know what kind of story you’re in for.

At first, I didn’t start out with such a streamlined method. Back when I was doing cards like The Devil, Strength, The Lovers and etc., I was still experimenting with how to do things efficiently, but I was also trying to get my bearings on what I was going to put in each card. At first, I wanted to just take the lazy way out and just draw the characters, but I decided that was cheap. There’s no point doing anything if you’re not going to give it your all, so, I went all out and drew a background for each card. Some backgrounds look more primitive than others. This is telling of how early on I did them. I also went on a lot of art forums for critiques. It was discouraging some of the time, since they’re not very friendly or tactful a lot of the time, but I think it was a good, humbling experience for me to get my act together and really take this seriously. Every artist should be humbled once in a while to build character and growth in one’s abilities.

And I did indeed work with the Mythic Tarot in creating this deck. Sometimes I would take an assortment of inspiration from different sites and my mother’s interpretations and combine them into one generally-accepted meaning. I would usually do this if I had trouble figuring out the meaning of a particular card. Some cards were hard to translate because I either used up an already established character on a preexisting card or there was no event in the story to compare to. In these cases, I would do what is called “fudging,” which basically means I shoe-horned an event that was similar into the meaning of a particular card.

The Chariot is a good example of this. Whereas the original meaning denotes that there is a torn mind as both stallions are headed towards a mutual goal but are diverging simultaneously, there is an event in The Immortals of two friends who head towards the same goal but have differing personalities and destinies all their own, diverging away from one another along the way. In this way, the meaning sort of works, though it is a bit of a departure from the original meaning.

In terms of the designs of the cards, most of the time I tried to be original as opposed to taking the original card and just pasting my characters in. That way seemed cheap and didn’t really explain the story that I was trying to tell, so I took a lot of liberties, you might say. Some will like this, some won’t, inevitably, but that’s the risk any artist takes.

And you’d say, therefore, that your attitude towards tarot in general has changed through all of this?

Amazingly, my attitude towards the Tarot has shifted from one of skepticism to one of harmony. The Tarot has not only taken a big role in my work atmosphere, but also how I connect with people. It also keeps me open to other differing belief structures that are different to my own. You could say I’m still a skeptic about the whole thing, and you’d probably be right, but now the Tarot is simply what I’m doing as opposed to what I’m avoiding.

Finally, did one card ‘speak’ to you more than the others? If so, which one, and in which way? And was there a card that was particularly challenging? And, if so, why?

The Moon from The Immortals Tarot by Jamie R. Stone. The Moon is the 18th card in the 22-card major arcana. Click on the image for a larger version.

Interesting question… To be honest, I don’t really compare any of the cards to my own life, since I have such a detailed story to grapple with, I’m inundated with that universe… But if I had to pick one card that I relate to more than the others, I would have to say The Moon.

In this card, the main character, Theo, wrestles with the decision to introduce a serum into the water supply to make his troops super fighting soldiers. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Skegs (the man on the bottom who is actually a god and also represents the Devil) dumping the serum into the water supply. While this doesn’t literally happen in the story, he does ultimately trick Theo into believing he needs to do this in order to win the war.

This card represents deliberation; should I do it, shouldn’t I do it… and I feel like I get hooked into that situation more often than I would like, haha. It’s that internal struggle we all have, when our choices turn into actions … but in my translation, the emphasis is on doing something out of fear (e.g., “I’m afraid if I don’t do this, we’ll lose the war”) that will usually always end in regret.

I would say the most difficult card I had to do would have to be The Devil. Though it’s been a considerable while since I’ve done it, it was only the 3rd or 4th card I had done and the ones before it weren’t really up to my standards. It was the first card I did that even came close to matching my expectations. The difficulty lay in the multiple light sources. There’s light coming from the portal he’s stepping through (a big part of the story is based on this), there’s light coming from behind him in a sunset-like fashion. Then there’s the melding of the two worlds to show that he’s stepping into the Mortal Realm from the Underworld. I had to have the light from the portal bounce on everything in conjunction with the ambient light surrounding him as well as the light shining from the back. It’s a very involved card. I wanted it to look believable.

– Visit The Immortals Tarot website
– ‘Like’ Jamie’s Punksthetic Art page on Facebook.

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.

5 thoughts on “A view from the deck: The Immortals Tarot by Jamie R. Stone”

  1. Thank you, everyone!

    aword – Why not go for it, even if it is simply to start seeing how it is that tarot starts to work with you? 🙂

    I love this deck. It isn’t one I would have even thought existed until I found it. I can’t wait to see the minors!

  2. interesting. i’m an oldschool fangirl with a small collection of random faves. this one reminds me of a late 70s comic, Elfquest, meeting a modern day (read West vs. East) anime style. a little confusing when it comes to titles considering there is another graphic novel (and movie) similarly titled (Immortals: Gods and Heroes); Jamie lists his as Im/mortals. look forward all results (book, cards, etc.) as five years is a lengthy development period even for us perfectionist virgos. 😉 thanks Mr. E & Sarah.

  3. Sarah,
    Wow, you must have worked your tail off on this piece (go ahead and look – bet you don’t have one!), Seriously, thank you for a comprehensive and deep look into an auspicious work in progress. You really did justice to the culture, concept and artist from which this new deck is springing forth. Please accept my appreciation for the thorough education.

  4. Sarah (Eric) this is very inspiring! I’ve a friend who often mentions wanting to create a Tarot deck, but he had no idea that there was meaning behind the cards! Of course he can just draw “pretty pictures” if he chooses, but I am encouraged to hear — “Amazingly, my attitude towards the Tarot has shifted from one of skepticism to one of harmony.” — as no doubt the energy of working with a known deck gave Jamie a different perspective.

    I too, wish to create a tarot deck and find that listening to your bit of interview helps me toward that goal as well.

    Thank you!

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