By Sarah Taylor
The Mary-El Tarot caught and held my eye the moment I saw it on a friend’s Facebook page a few months ago. The reason I think it made the impression it did was two-fold. First, the artwork on the deck is a vivid labour of love, ten years in the making by artist Marie White. Every stroke seems to have crafted an emotional impression into her canvass. Second, the imagery in the cards reflected my descent into depression at the time — and that reflection was far from comfortable.
Some of the cards captured my experience in a way that was hard to look at without feeling the reality of what I was going through. I found it a little like ‘tarot homeopathy’ — a dose of what it was that was afflicting me as medicine for the soul.
There is something about this medicine that feels both rooted in the history of ancient shamanic practices and otherworldly. There is an alien aspect to it that I can’t quite put my finger on, but perhaps has a lot to do with the distorted anatomy of some of the figures and the jarring compositions in several cards. I see this most notably in The Hierophant, where two imp-like figures hang from the breasts of the hierophant, who holds their heads with talon-like fingers. Many of the cards’ protagonists are hermaphroditic — a unification of masculine and feminine that feels more asymmetrical than congruent.
Yes, the Mary-El Tarot takes me into a different world, one that feels dream-like and where nothing fits comfortably into a waking narrative. It’s probably the reason why my writing has so quickly veered off the beaten track in terms of a conventional deck critique. And in fact this won’t be a conventional critique. I am going to approach it in the same way I approach my readings: intuitively.