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 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).