The Vedic Tarot - a review

Dwina Murphy-Gibb's gloriously spontaneous new deck exploring the intersections, commonalities and contrasts between Vedic thought and classic Western Hermetic esotericism, amongst much else.

Firstly, I have a guest post about the most significant Little White Book in tarot coming up - never done one of those before. On Thursday (tomorrow, the 16th) you’ll find mine and three other fascinating contributors over at Jenna Newell Hiott’s excellent publication, Spirit Connections! I’m quite excited. And I’m sorry it’s taken me a while to write again - whoever you are, I missed you!

Secondly, I want to talk about Dwina Murphy-Gibb’s Vedic Tarot. I suppose it’s a kind of review?

I first ran across the Vedic Tarot through its author’s Substack. Dwina Murphy-Gibb is an artist and writer with a distinguished track record as a playwright, literary mover-and-shaker and scholar of the esoteric.

Cross-Cultural Tarot

I’m a sceptical sort of Tarotist, as friends and longer-time subscribers might have realised. On the other hand, a sceptical Tarotist is still someone who reaches for a deck of cards as a shortcut (there are no shortcuts) to some sort of truth about an issue, literal or spiritual. I’m also wary of the slippery boundary between influence and cultural appropriation shown by some decks (or spiritual practices - take a bow, sage smudges. For example, my beloved Haindl tarot integrates its Hindu imagery with a great deal of respect but the Native American material has always felt a little like an over-reach - the parallels one can trace between Northern European myth and elements of Hindu scriptures (remember, there’s no such thing as ‘scripture’ for the Northern gods - the sagas were written by Christians in Icelands) simply don’t hold up to detailed scrutiny.

The Vedic Tarot isn’t one of those decks. Dwina lays out her agenda in the first couple of pages of the detailed guidebook (which comes with an introduction from none other than the iconic Caitlin Matthews.

“The system of the Tarot and the Vedic Mysteries comes together in this card deck bridging the divide between East and West and demonstrating the many parallels between the symbolic and spiritual systems of both cultures”

I take this as meaning that Dwina is presenting an exploration of these two worlds and their many points of intersection, not a syncretising mish-mash and I know from both my work with the deck to date and my interactions with Dwina that it’s rooted in a sincere, deeply felt and very personal practice. And that makes such a difference. This is a deck that’s flowed out of someone’s life’s journey, not an MFA project.

I still don’t entirely get on board with the idea that East and West are two distinct worlds, mind. The Indo-Greek Kingdom thrived from 200 BC to 10 AD, with Greeks settling in the area of what would later become Pakistan 300 years earlier. There were Greek converts to Buddhism. The Roman Empire traded with India through its history. We’ve too much shared history and heritage to assume that the boundary between East and West is a clean dividing line. Earlier generations might have found it useful to reinforce stereotypes around the ‘other’ from the East but, living as I do in a melting pot like London, I don’t find that kind of thinking particularly useful. If there’s a boundary at all, it’s extremely wriggly, full of holes and contradictions and liable to break down altogether if looked at too closely. And I think that the core of Dwina’s work reflects this very well, regardless of the ‘East Meets West’ dichotomy.

The actual deck review

But, enough of that! You want to hear about the deck, right? Well, it’s very beautiful! The artwork is deeply thought through but has the sureness of line of a trained and experienced artist whilst maintaining the sense of an ‘in the moment’ inspiration or channeling of sources. Dwina has posted generously detailed discussions on her own substack of many of the cards but phones on the web don’t do the actual framing just. They suggest a true dialogue between the classic imagery of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck with the Vedic currents streaming through Dwina’s imagination.

I also love the sense of optimism (though the bleaker cards are hardly compromising communicated by the vibrant colours. Take the Charioteer, whom the accompanying book identifies as “The Master of Destiny, immovable and unshakable who rides in the chariot as the soul rides in the body.” The card is forceful and bursting with energy, positively vibrating with the Chariot’s driving, controlled chaos. There are also two new Trump cards worked into the Major Arcana sequence, reflecting Dina’s modest reconstruction of the classic magical structure of the Tarot into something more reflective of her own philosophy and life’s work and allowing for three sequences of eight cards. Dwina speculates that her cards stand in for cards that are clearly ‘missing’. I have my doubts but as an act of imaginative intervention in the deck, it works very well and triggers further, interesting transformations. For example, one of the new cards, Oogenesis, illustrates the Cosmic egg that appers on the Crowley’s Thoth tarot’s Universe. In the Vedic Tarot, this new card is numbered 0-15, to position it between Temperance (14) and Deofil (or The Devil) at 15, and to indicate the beginning of a final sequence of eight cards, culminating in the The World showing how the Egg has hatched.

A word about the book. At nearly 300 pages, it’s a genuinely substantial work in its own right, going into considerable detail about the role played by the four different alphabets - Sanskrit, Ogham (the Celtic Tree Alphabet) and Hebrew - assigned to the Major Arcana. The images accompanying the text are comparatively small which makes sense. It’s always frustrating to discover that the book that comes with a modern deck turns out to be composed of mostly large black and white reproductions of cards you already have in front of you and lots of white space. Emphatically not the case here! The only tiny criticism I’d make is the choice of a tiny sans serif font for the body text - a bit hard on my aging eyes! It would be nice to consider a more accessible font in future reprints.

All in all, I’d recommend The Vedic Tarot highly, for people with an interest in expanding their awareness of other spiritualities, readers and anyone with an interest in thoughtful esoteric thinking. I might not agree with all Dwina’s conclusions but I can wholeheartedly embrace the deck itself as a tool for exploration and seeking. I thin I’ll be using it a fair bit over the coming year. Full disclosure - I paid for mine ;-)