By Sarah Taylor
Last week, Eric pointed me in the direction of a website showcasing a tarot deck by, in his words, an “outrageous artist,” suggesting I look at how he uses symbols in his work. The only hint I had about the kind of deck came from the web address itself: the word “punksthetic” stood out immediately. What stood out more were the images I found on clicking through. My first reaction was that they were not only eye-catching; they caught my gaze and held it.
The Immortals Tarot — which you can find here — is designed by Jamie R. Stone, a young, Oregon-based graphic designer. It is a work-in-progress (all but one of the major arcana are completed, and Jamie is now embarking on the minors), and is an offshoot of the graphic novel of the same name that he is co-creating with Brenda Gonzalez.
I am not unfamiliar with graphic novels, but I perhaps fall into that large middle-ground of people who appreciates and is excited by its broad aesthetic without being immersed in its culture and sub-cultures. (I’m more Asterix than Watchmen — although I loved Dave McKean’s Black Orchid.) So I’ll leave that area of expertise to Jamie himself. What I can do, however, is approach the imagery in The Immortals Tarot as a tarot reader, and see how it dances with the themes that I have come to know from my own tarot explorations.
My first four thoughts when I saw the deck: 1) The use of colour and tone is striking; 2) the illustration work is polished and painstakingly detailed; 3) it is a very ‘masculine’ deck in terms of the energy it exudes; and 4) not unconnected with the third point, it strongly embodies the idea of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ as described by mythologist Joseph Campbell:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. [“The Hero with a Thousand Faces”]
Joseph Campbell believed that we lived a meaningful life when we saw ourselves as part of a larger, mythical story — one where the gods roamed the earth in human form. In Jamie’s own words:
The story of The Immortals [the graphic novel on which the tarot is based] is brimming with stories told from multiple perspectives, all told in one cohesive narrative that takes place over a thousand years in a world similar to our own. There are stories of gods and mortals and how their actions affect one another. There are themes of family, fate, trust, love, lust, deceit and revenge running throughout the story.