By Sarah Taylor
After a reading that provoked strong emotions last week, I decided to take a different approach to the Weekend Tarot Reading and introduce and work with a new deck every four or five weeks. Hopefully it’s more inclusive, avoids any single deck outstaying its welcome, and makes use of the fact that there is a deck to suit every predilection. (We’ll also be taking a more in-depth look at some of the decks over the coming weeks as the tarot column resumes a twice-weekly publishing schedule.)
In the meantime, for the next few Sundays, I will be reading from the Xultun Tarot deck, which has popped its head round the door here at Planet Waves every now and then. The Xultun deck was created nearly 40 years ago by artist Peter Balin.
As the story goes, one of his guests at a dinner party suggested he create a tarot deck, and at the point where Balin was telling her “how crazy I thought she was,” the major arcana appeared to him in a vision. He sequestered himself thereafter and over the next three months the deck came to painted life.
The Xultun Tarot is unusual because its major arcana (the 22 cards associated with the broader, archetype-driven themes that affect us at a soul level) can be assembled to form a single picture — which is how Balin painted them. Seen this way, it is easier to feel the interconnectedness of the cards and what they represent; they work together to weave a picture of the soul’s evolution, and it is both horizontal (linear) and vertical (lying outside space-time) in nature.