Arc Tarot was designed and created in its entirety on one fine afternoon in the summer of 2018, while I was receiving guests on top of the mountain in Norway. Artists and cartomancy students Merete Veian and Nicholas Maher came for coffee, as it were, and we ended up with a Tarot deck. We uploaded the images to the Make Playing Cards website at no profit for us, because we wanted to make a gift to the community in celebration of our activities at Aradia Academy. Whoever wants to buy this tarot, pays for production cost only.

I like collaborative projects that take no longer than an afternoon to create, as are very satisfying. They have the same quality of randomness that is enchanting and appropriate as when work with cards. At the same time, it’s great when impromptu projects develop a unified idea that is right on target.

At the time of the visit, I was sitting with the fine art of paper marbling in the style of Japanese suminagashi, and I saw a connection to what we could do.

Why not make a deck of cards that draws on inspiration from non-traditional Marseille Tarot cards, calligraphy, sigil art, and martial arts — with a Norwegian, Danish, Romanian, American, and Japanese flavor? We did have an entire afternoon for it.

I provided the idea that we create keywords for 22 new cards, based on reading 2-card combinations of old Marseille trumps. We used the Vandenborre Bacchus Tarot from 1780 for it. You can see the combinations in the margins of the new cards here.

I also designed a sigil to go with the keywords, and offered a suminagashi ‘witch head’ to serve as the back of the deck – one of the designs I had created earlier that morning. As the sigils took the unplanned form or arrows, and Cupid showed up upon divining for a name, Arc Tarot presented itself as a given.

Merete Veian provided most of the drawings for the keywords that I came up with in a 10-minute brainstorm, and she was also the head designer of putting it all together.

Nicholas Maher provided ‘occult’ touches to Merete’s primary drawings and also liquified the background of the Marseille cards, so that the suminagashi spirit would be stronger.

So far Arc Tarot has proved to be both sharp and useful, judging by the multitude of divinatory readings that people have shared in the social media already. We can thus say that not only has this Tarot been warmly embraced since we released it, but that it continues to produces very keen insights.

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As an example, here are three real life questions that were answered by using this tarot, Real like the Devil style. The answers are based on the three images featured here. We start with the first.