Review by Dan Pelletier
Dan Pelletier Test Drives the Deviant Moon
I received The Deviant Moon Tarot on a Monday and spent four days doing nothing but pursuing the cards.
Back in 1909, Pamela Colman Smith’s artwork set the stage for Tarot in the twentieth century. Her work resonated for ninety-nine years for a good reason. In 2004 Robin Ator, in a brilliant stroke, removed the anachronisms and gender bias leaving color and form from her work with the International Icon Tarot.
Four years later, Patrick Valenza has gone even further; he has dispensed with the humans, the symbology, and everything else recognizable; his work wrests the Tarot from the Egyptians who never had it, the Golden Dawn who bastardized it, and the New Agers who sanitized it.
On his website and in interviews, the artist describes how he created texture maps from photographs of graveyards and an abandoned insane asylum, and then manipulated the images to create the artwork.
The images themselves are absorbing surrealistic humanoid figures in abstract settings, that are at once attractive and haunting. Many of the faces are ‘split’ between a light and dark half, some faces appear to be masked, and on others the masks are faces, some appendages have multiplied beyond the two that we’d see in a humanoid... we expect to see some things, and we see what we expect... and then are left unsettled as the images unfold.
I’m not marginalizing the how the Deviant Moon art was created; but what I care about is how it handles on the road. What I care about is the result of the manipulations of imagery. I want to see how it corners, what kind of mileage would it get? So after four days of pursuing the images, I had an internet-radio spot to do consisting of two hours of reading for strangers I couldn’t see.
And once I began, any expectations I had proved to have fallen short, the images in the deck performed with an uncommon accuracy. The occupants of the Deviant Moon world did the gossip and gavotte adeptly.
But how? Why does it work?
The Deviant Moon is character driven. And as opposed to Asian ‘character driven’ decks that lack any symbolism and use innocent poses, the Deviant Moon takes a rather unique approach.
Patrick Valenza accomplished something quite unexpected, facilitated because he used a surrealistic approach to the Tarot. He has his static humanoids performing the dynamic actions that pertain to the card’s meaning. For most cards, it is a simple matter of ‘what is this character obviously doing now’ (or just completed, or about to do). Because of the organic and narrative approach to the subjects, we are also able to understand how each of the characters feels.
The Tower is a tower, and the Devil is a devil (great feet), Temperance pours from one container to another, there are stars on The Star.
However the images keep unfolding.
There were little details that popped out during the readings, and I had to go to the source for some answers.
“Uh Patrick, I notice there are a few oddly placed clocks with unexpected times displayed, for example in the Eight of Pentacles the clock displays eleven fifty-eight.”
“Thanks for noticing” answered Patrick, with a wry smile, “Yup, two minutes to midnight...all the work you do in a day, and there is always more to do the next. Day in and day out. Hoping for something to show after all of this work...maybe you won't see it today, but maybe tomorrow.”
“How about the Four of Pentacles, the clock there displays nine forty.”
Patrick pauses and leans back. “There’s a background story here. My father-in-law was a greedy, materialistic man. Everything in his life was based on what he owned, and always put himself over his children. Well, the day came when he finally died. We heard the news at about 9:40 one morning. Nobody was particularly heart broken. I always wondered what he thought, lying there waiting to be cremated....does he say to himself, ‘I wish I spent more time with my children as they grew up’, or was it, ‘DAMN, I didn't make enough money!’ So in this card, the death angel leads the miser to the fires of the furnace, with the symbol of time dangling from her mouth. The miser looks back on his possessions in fear that he will never see them again, while clutching a few golden pentacles in a last attempt to "take it with him".
I ask “How about the Hanged Man. His clock says five eleven.”
“I used to work at the most mundane job years ago...a real nine to five. Many times, I would work a bit past the whistle. I found it a total waste of time, but back then I had little choice. I felt I was in limbo, and had to make a real effort to break free of my suspended life. This clock represents my lost time there and the times I worked past 5:00.”
“One last question Patrick, tell me about the borders...”
“The mixed colors come from the cards I created when I was 15. Truthfully, the colors on the majors just looked good with the color compositions of the individual cards at the time, so I just carried that over when I re-began the deck in 2004. However, the minors were different... these colors relate to the citizens of each realm. The borders on the suit of Swords are Red for their strife and pain of the heart. Cups have Blue for the calm purity of the sea. In Wands I used Green for the earth and the natural world. And with Pentacles, Black for the materialistic void they have in their souls.”
So now that we have more information, we’ve also left the antiquated suit meanings in the past where they belong, in the latter half of the Victorian era. Even Majors refuse to pay homage to this era by using the Continental numbering system.
This is a great deck for the reader who does not want to read a book and be told what meaning is.
But I have to provide a strong caveat…if you are a reader who prefers sunny bunny over truth – don’t visit this deck. The Deviant Moon strikes to the heart of issues, with the same ease that it pushes aside six hundred years of Tarot myth-takes; it dives directly towards the truth. That will unsettle many.
It’s often difficult to remember, that the voices that whisper in the darkness from the peeling walls, often speak the truth.
Dan Pelletier is a co-owner of The Tarot Garden, a
most highly respected resource for tarot decks and
related information on the Internet.
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