By Sarah Taylor
I read something interesting by Kristin Lee-Gray in her review of the Röhrig-Tarot on the Aeclectic website. She had been doing some focussed work with a particular client for a period of time, using the Röhrig-Tarot for the readings in each session. However, because the appointments were conducted over the phone, the client hadn’t seen the deck — until, that is, she sent him some photographs of it.
Gee whiz, I don’t know why I was surprised to learn how stunned and shocked he was when he saw the pictures for the first time. He expected a medieval dressed bunch of Knights and Queens, however his first visual introduction was the Chariot. A race car driver in some sort of Indy 500 hotty car. I’m still laughing about this … . Once he got over the shock and I explained the cards to him, he settled down and got back into it.
My first reaction to the Röhrig-Tarot was that it alienated me while drawing me in inexorably: the modern imagery, voluptuous nudity and hyper-realism, which sit side-by-side with an other-worldly quality, a feeling that I’ve landed on an outer planet.
The deck came to me in an unusual manner, too: I was the only bidder for it at an auction at the 2012 UK Tarot Conference. Its name seemed somewhat familiar to me, and I found myself putting my hand up in the absence of any other offers, with the clear sense that the deck was mine. But not mine as in my own child is mine — someone who feels familiar to me. No: this was a stranger — an extraterrestrial creature that was bundled at me, but who was still apparently mine.