The Fairy Tale Tarot by Lisa Hunt comes neatly packaged with the book Once Upon a Time in which Hunt briefly touches on the history of the fairy tale before expansively describing the major and minor arcana, each of which comes with a fairy tale of its own. Tarot such as this aren’t so much divinatory tools as they are guideposts through the psyche, and I can think of few things better to guide us than the stories with which many of us grew up. One of the things that has always appealed to me about fairy tales is their universality — the core stories are found in a wide variety of cultures and offer a timeless affinity with their archetypal characters. Fairy tales may appear to be about wolves and witches and things that go bump in the forest, but at their heart they are about the human condition, often the female condition in particular.
In The Fairy Tale Tarot, Hunt has has culled stories from across the globe for the arcanas, using material from Spain, Denmark, India, Brazil, Germany and Ireland (to name but a few), and even including a “universal” story as the final card in the major arcana, where Happily Ever After replaces The World. And this is what we have to ask ourselves about this deck: how well has Hunt matched the stories to the cards? These correspondences are only meaningful if the stories chosen somehow enhance the traditional attributions of the tarot, or express them in sympathetic terms. To answer this question in full would require a lengthy post in which every card was inspected and judged. I will settle instead for one card, a familiar card to many of us who read the tarot, and one of the most misunderstood cards in the deck: The Devil.
The Fairytale Tarot is drawn from a wide range of fantastic, wise and wonderful magical stories. Favourites such as Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and The Snow Queen are all here, together with stories that you may not know so well - The Superior Pet, Sivka-Burka and the fabulous, funny Tatterhood are perhaps less famous, but equally unmissable. The cards are drawn in a gentle, traditional central European style by artists Irena Triskova (Czech) and Alex Ukolov (Russian). There are also delightful references to
Using some of the world's most fascinating fairy tales with the symbolic, yet story-like pictures of the Tarot these images illuminate both the tales and the cards. But they do something more; they allow us to create new stories, new meanings, and that is certainly special. Rachel Pollack, writer and Tarot scholar.
