The Goddess Tarot 25th Anniversary Edition

Also by Kris Waldherr

Selected Card Decks:

The Goddess Tarot

The Lover’s Path Tarot

The Goddess Inspiration Oracle

The Sacred World Oracle

Selected Books:

Tarot for Storytellers: A Modern Guide for Writers and Other Creatives

Unnatural Creatures: A Novel of the Frankenstein Women

The Lost History of Dreams

The Lover’s Path: An Illustrated Novella

Bad Princess

Doomed Queens

The Book of Goddesses

Contents

Title page

Also by Kris Waldherr

Foreword

Introduction

The Structure of The Goddess Tarot

The Major Arcana

The Minor Arcana

The Suit of Cups

The Suit of Staves

The Suit of Swords

The Suit of Pentacles

Using The Goddess Tarot

Card Meditation

Choose a Card

Two Choices reading

Past-Present-Future reading

Glow and Grow reading

The Goddess Path reading

The Burning Question reading

The Goddess Circle reading

The Beginnings Tree reading

The Celtic Cross reading

Goddess Index

About the Author

TAROT FOR STORYTELLERS excerpt

Introduction

PART ONE: Tarot Basics

Chapter 1

Do you follow signs as they appear? Tarotists are well versed in reading future portents, but it’s also fun to connect the dots in retrospect. Case in point: it was spring of 2003 when I graduated from Manhattan’s Hunter College. My sister handed me a gift, which I eagerly tore open to discover a framed tarot card. It was the High Priestess expressed as Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of speech, wisdom, and learning from Kris Waldherr’s Goddess Tarot deck. The perfect present! As I proudly stood in my cap and gown holding The Goddess Tarot’s High Priestess, little did I know that my love of tarot and magic would blossom into a publishing career, and that Kris Waldherr would become a dear friend and trusted colleague.

Kris Waldherr’s unique talent and vision ignites the genres of tarot, non-fiction, and fiction with unbridled creativity. A common thread runs through her publications from Doomed Queens to Unnatural Creatures and to The Goddess Tarot. No matter her subject, Kris expresses the nourishing power of the feminine.

The High Priestess from The Goddess Tarot.

Cartomancy feels audacious. A juicy and delicious quality hangs in the air when purchasing a new tarot deck. The reader needn’t be raised in a staunchly religious or strict background to sense that tarot is a slightly forbidden thing, reverberating with an underbelly of witchcraft and sorcery. Reading tarot is a bold act of daring.

Soothsaying and augury are historically acts that would (and, in some parts of the world, still could) get a woman killed. After all, what could be more threatening to those who control social systems than a tool encouraging personal agency? Those engaging in contemplative tarot practice, exploring past, present, and future, invoke power. Supernatural power. Goddess-like power.

Cartomancy is traditionally a feminine art form. Conjure visions of a tarot reader and one might imagine a mysterious woman divining behind closed doors. Whether your vision includes a wise, all-seeing crone reading cards at the kitchen table or a long-lashed, mysterious female under a carnival tent, the figure is undeniably matriarchal. Despite this, everything published on the subject of tarot from the eighteenth-century through the early twentieth-century was written, publicly orated, and distributed by men, including the world famous Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot sprang from a secret London magical society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn when author A. E. Waite hired Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 to illustrate his deck. Waite’s main focus was the twenty-two cards of the major arcana which, like older historical tarot packs, are encoded with secret Hebraic kabalistic, masonic, Rosicrucian, alchemical, and Christian mystical symbolism. These symbol systems are an attempt to document and explain the interface between visible and invisible worlds. A visual mapping out of what the female does naturally: ie, how something new and fresh is birthed into the material world.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot grew in popularity due to two unique properties. It was the first tarot since the Sola Busc of circa 1491 to contain a fully illustrated minor arcana, which Smith crafted with seemingly little input from Waite. Secondly, Smith’s ground-breaking images are gentle, fluid, and easy to interpret, making the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot cards as accessible as a graphic novel. Anyone with a knack for storytelling could read the visual narrative unfolding in any combination of cards. The tarot was suddenly accessible to everyone.

The Goddess Tarot adopts its structure from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, but it’s uniquely crafted with a double feminine twist. Kris does away with Waite’s patriarchal lens of mystical symbolism in the major arcana. Instead, The Goddess Tarot focuses on expansive archetypal goddess energy, pure and unrestrained. Four major arcana goddesses birth pathways to the worlds of the minor arcana. Kris leans into Smith’s evocative minor arcana symbolism, but populates it with gentle feminine characters. The result is warm and welcoming.

The Goddess Tarot was published in 1998, before the millennium. Back then, tarot was still a sequestered art form. Tarot decks were hidden away and often gathering dust in the back corners of bookshops. 1998 was prior to meet-up groups, long before social media created safe digital gathering spaces and prerecorded spiritual soliloquies for the viewer’s scrolling pleasure. It was long before online marketplaces would deliver any one of a thousand possible tarot decks to your doorstep with a few keyboard strokes.

The Goddess Tarot was an early omen of female empowerment and agency at the turn of the twenty-first century. As such, The Goddess Tarot is an iconic deck, a welcome addition to your bookshelf and magical practice no matter your spiritual, magical, or divinatory preference. Kris Waldherr is the most gifted blend of artist, mystic, and writer. Your gentle soul and potent imagination could not rest in more capable, nurturing hands.

—SASHA GRAHAM

author of Llewellyn’s Complete Book of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

Some years are more pivotal than others. The year 1997 was one such in my life, for it was the year I married. I can still recall the frenzied preparation before departing for the wedding, which was to be held hours north on the New England farm tied to our family. There was the packing of the car, the organizing of the ceremony items, the printing of maps and guest programs—in other words, the gathering of everything we needed to transition into our new life as husband and wife.

If that wasn’t enough pressure, I was also aiming to tie up loose ends on a big illustration project before closing my studio for several weeks. Luckily, I managed to finish the last watercolor painting before departing New York City. Such was my rush that I ended up shipping the art to my publisher from my hotel hours before my wedding!

Some months later in 1998, those illustrations entered the world as The Goddess Tarot—and now here we are, a quarter of a century later.

During these intervening years, my husband and I have raised a child, created several homes, traveled about the world, weathered a pandemic, and much more. During this period, The Goddess Tarot has endured as well—and beyond my wildest dreams. Much of this is due to the brilliant support of my publisher U.S. Games Systems, whose founder Stuart Kaplan championed The Goddess Tarot from the beginning. It’s also due to all of those who have loved and worked with The Goddess Tarot all these years.

When I first sought to create a tarot deck that would honor women’s mythic pasts, I truly had no idea The Goddess Tarot would be embraced by so many. To be honest, I only wanted to create something akin to that famed William Morris quote: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Just as a wedding marks an ending and a beginning, so it’s been with The Goddess Tarot and myself. Looking back, I can see how the seeds of its creation were planted when I was a child, years before I even considered illustrating a tarot deck of my own.

The first time I encountered the tarot, I was a child of nine visiting a grown up cousin, whom I regarded as infinitely sophisticated. After all, she lived in a tiny studio apartment in Manhattan, which seemed a universe away from the New Jersey suburb I called home. My excitement at visiting her urban abode was only heightened when I discovered a brightly colored tarot deck scattered across her bed.

Crowning the deck was a card depicting a serene, ethereal woman draped in veils—a card I now know to be The High Priestess, a potent archetype of feminine mysticism and secrets.

Jump forward a decade. While studying illustration at the School of Visual Arts, I was fortunate to take a painting class with David Palladini—and it was here that the tarot re-entered my life with a flourish. It turned out Palladini was the artist behind the Aquarian Tarot, a 1970 tarot deck inspired by the Art Nouveau movement from the early twentieth century.

If that wasn’t enough enticement, a fellow student in our class gave me my very first tarot reading using the Aquarian. Though the Aquarian Tarot wasn’t the same deck I’d encountered in my cousin’s studio way back when—I later learned this was the Rider-Waite-Smith—the cards appeared close enough.

Reader, I was hooked.

The Aquarian Tarot became the first tarot deck I owned, though certainly not my last. I soon started reading tarot for myself and friends, as well as creating drawings inspired by the major arcana. I also started to consider creating my own tarot deck, but was too intimidated by the sheer amount of work involved to continue.

Once out of art school, I tried my best to succeed as a book illustrator, determined to follow in the footsteps of the Pre-Raphaelite artists I so admired, such as William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. As a small child, I was obsessed with fairy tales featuring outsider princesses triumphing against overwhelming odds; two favorites were The Six Swans and The Goose Girl. Unsurprisingly, my first two illustrated publications, Rapunzel and The Firebird, were picture book retellings of fairy tales.

However, my third picture book went in a new direction. Persephone and the Pomegranate, a retelling of the famed mother-daughter myth, was the first book I both wrote and illustrated. It was also my first goddess-inspired book—and it whetted my appetite to delve more deeply into stories of the Divine Feminine.

In time, Persephone and the Pomegranate would nudge me toward my most ambitious project to date: an illustrated volume of twenty-six goddesses. I undertook this book as a challenge to myself. My intent? Illustrate a goddess for every letter