Tarot deck review: The Xultun Tarot – Mayan Book of Life

Editor’s Note: 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. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

Given that we have just entered 2012 — and at least one aspect of Mayan culture is touching our awareness more than usual — I thought it might be fitting to start this series of articles on specific tarot decks with a Mayan tarot deck: the Xultun Tarot, also known as the Mayan Book of Life.

The Xultun Tarot deck.
The Xultun Tarot, a Mayan tarot deck created in 1975 by New Zealand artist Peter Balin.

The origin of the Xultun (pronounced “Shoul-ton”) Tarot has stayed with me ever since I first heard about it from Xultun expert Michael Owen. Apparently, in 1975, New Zealand artist Peter Balin was at a dinner party to which one of the guests had brought a tarot deck. Later in the evening, a friend suggested to Balin that he design a deck. In the same moment that Balin rejected his friend’s suggestion, he received a vision of the Xultun Tarot:

“He said it was ‘like a color slide going on in my brain.’ The image was of the twenty-two cards of the major arcana assembled together to make one picture and all the figures were in Mayan dress. The next morning Balin had a tremendous urge to paint and worked almost day and night for three months. He said, ‘Apparently I had a lot of the qualifications necessary to be able to make this deck. One of [which] was that I knew nothing about the Tarot. Because if I did, obviously I would be tripped up by what I knew. … Obviously something somewhere felt that it was very important to get these cards out’.” [The Tarot Codex, Michael Owen]

The Xultun Tarot is, as far as I know, unique in that all of the 22 major arcana cards form one image comprising five rows of cards (two cards on the top row, and five on the four rows underneath), each card flowing into the ones surrounding it. (You can see an image of the major arcana here.) The idea here is that no card — and no archetype — exists in isolation; each is part of an interconnecting collective, and a story of life is woven as the strands of the journey work back and forth, up and down, as we evolve from first steps of The Fool to moments of completion in The Planet Earth (The World).

For example, the smoke from the fire tended to by The Sage (The Hermit) flows into the row beneath and concentrates, blood-like, in The Dead Man (Death), lightening in The Temperate Man (Temperance) — only to deepen in colour again in The Bound Man (The Devil) and dissipate in The Released Man (The Tower). What we create and fan into existence when we move within in The Sage accompanies us and prepares us for the next stage of our experience as we move out into the world, transform by shedding our skins, learn to balance what we have brought into existence, embrace our shadow, and surrender to the destruction of that which no longer serves us.

This is from the book The Tarot Codex, Xultun expert Michael Owen’s first book on the deck:

The Xultun Tarot is a picture of how the soul (the Human Flowering Tree) comes to know itself by impressing its free will on matter as it moves through time in all eight directions. The traditional view of the tarot is that the Fool moves through the cards in a linear sequence from 0 to 21. But the cards are infinitely more varied in their inter-relationships than a linear progression or “ascent”. …

[W]hen the cards are laid out to form a picture the two cards at the top of the deck (the Fool and the Sorcerer) sit outside of the rectangle formed by the other cards. This denotes their special position as the numbers from which all other numbers are formed. If we imagine the cards as a sphere with all the cards lying on the surface of the sphere then the 0 card (the Fool), which is the potential for all things to be born from nothing, is not located in any one place but inhabits the spaces inside, between and outside all the other cards. It is both the center, the circumference and all places in between. The 1 card (the Sorcerer) is the one-point at the center of the sphere made up by the other 20 cards. Together the 0 and 1 cards represent the feminine and masculine aspects of the Creator.

The Xultun Tarot was the first deck I worked with — the first one I’d ever really looked at — and I found it compelling. The colours, the compositions and the Mayan imagery, at once foreign and familiar; it all worked together to create something quite… potent. I had turned up at a weekend tarot workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2005 because I was intrigued, and I felt at a loose end: Newly separated, I felt some need to ‘get out there and mingle’ again.

I had prepped myself for the workshop by having my “Book of Life” reading done by Xultun expert Michael Owen — who was running the workshop with his wife, Therese — so I had seen the Xultun up-close. It was only when I bought a deck, held it, and started sorting through the cards that it began to come alive for me. I think I must have felt some of that magic that moved Peter Balin to get to work on the deck. It had trickled down the years, through the deck, and into me, much like the smoke from The Sage card.

All of the images in the major arcana have their tale to tell me, but what hits home most of all is the last row of cards, namely The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Planet Venus (Judgement) and Planet Earth. Here, the deck comes into its own as the cards transition from the personal to the transpersonal. The final human figure appears in The Star, but even here she bridges the space between matter and spirit, the world and the heavens. She is in the world, but not of it. Once we leave The Star behind, we are in the realm of the cosmos, the only non-planetary body being that of the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, or the ‘feathered serpent’.

Disclaimer: I am no Mayan expert. Far from it. But it is how the cards resonate with me that I find most valuable. I have no idea why they do; but they do. I have no concrete knowledge of Mayan beliefs, social structure, imagery. However, the Xultun seems to bypass all of that and connects with me somewhere else. So my descriptions and explanations of the deck are somewhat limited to the suggestion that you hold a deck in your hand and feel the impact that they have on you. They are, admittedly, an acquired taste: When I was at a tarot conference in 2010, and we were asked to donate our decks for a group exercise, my Xultun was suggested as a “wild card” deck and barely got a look in.

My one gripe with the Xultun — and it’s a fairly big one — is with the minor arcana. After the bold originality of the major arcana, the minors feel like an adjunct. There is a disparity in feel between them and the major arcana, as if the mundane is set against the otherworldly. They are good solid cards, but they don’t hold the same power, rather relying in no small part on the power of the majors to fuel them. Compare these to the minor arcana of either the Thoth or the Rider-Waite Smith (the other two decks I work with regularly), and you might see what I’m getting at.

Be that as it may, the Xultun stands out for me as a deck that is worth having for the major arcana alone. It is a powerful repository for the archetypes that shape what C G Jung referred to as individuation, and it offers what feels like a glimpse into a world that is thousands of years old, but which seems to be drawing closer by the minute.

– The Xultun Tarot website: www.xultun.com
The Xultun Maya Tarot (Classic Edition) by creator Peter Balin
The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot by Michael Owen; you can also buy it here if you are ordering from the UK.

2 thoughts on “Tarot deck review: The Xultun Tarot – Mayan Book of Life”

  1. Sarah,
    Thank you for an comprehensive and accessible introduction to the Xultun Tarot. From the way you describe it, Peter Balin’s vision of having the major arcana collectively form and individually contain one image is a holographic approach that is consistent with Mayan cosmology. In a way, it reminds me of how Dane Rudhyar was able to project a discernible and unified structure on the Sabian Symbols of Marc Edmond Jones.

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