Two of my favorite tarot decks in recent years have come not from a traditional occult publisher but from Belt Publishing, an independent literary press based near Cleveland, Ohio. Belt’s niche is books about the Rust Belt and the greater Midwest, which includes titles like A Pandemic in Residence: Essays from a Detroit Hospital and Chicago Transit Hikes: A Guide to Getting Out in Nature Without a Car – not necessarily the first place one would look for divination cards. But David Wilson, one of the publisher’s creative directors as well as a graphic designer and independent comics creator, has used the ecology of the Midwest to create two distinctive tarot decks that are sure to be of interest to anyone with ties to the region.
The first of these decks was Rust Belt Arcana, published in 2018. That deck melded striking naturalistic imagery to the symbol structure of the tarot in ways that were surprising but perfect: my favorite card in the deck is the Hanged Man, who Wilson casts as none other than a hissing possum being raised by the tail. Other illuminations included the Devil, depicted as Photuris pennsylvanica, a firefly species whose females use the Luciferase enzyme to lure in males of other species in order to eat them, and the Hierophant, cast as a deer hunting man with rifles crossed in the place of Colman-Smith’s keys.
The Hierophant and the Hanged Man from the Rust Belt Arcana tarot deck [Belt Publishing]
Rust Belt Arcana‘s suit cards are intriguing too, using a wide range of ecological images for the numbered suits (flowers for cups, insects for pentacles, birds for swords, and trees for wands) with quotes from prominent naturalists like Annie Dillard, Ursula Goodenough, and E.O. Wilson for the court cards.
The deck was accompanied by a book of essays by Matt Stansberry, which described each of the trumps in moving prose. “They’ll finish a maze with food in it faster than a rat or a cat,” Stansberry writes of our Hanged Man opossum. “They don’t have any power. They are ridiculed. They scavenge the roadsides, cleaning up after us. Think about these things when you see one of these stumbling along in the dark street – what it has survived, and what it yet must do, before its short, brutish life is over.”
Unfortunately, there is no accompanying book to Wilson’s new deck, Great Lakes Tarot, but the deck itself is of the same quality as Rust Belt Arcana. While the two decks have much in common, in Great Lakes Wilson has opted for a more stark and spare art style, reminiscent of woodblock printing, rather than the lush watercolors of his previous deck. The minimalist color palette makes each card pop, and the overall effect of flipping through the deck is a dream-like series of impressions.
The Strength and Wheel of Fortune cards from the Great Lakes Tarot deck [Belt Publishing]
Without Stillman’s explanatory essays, some of Great Lakes Tarot‘s trumps are inscrutable – why exactly is the embodiment of Justice a seagull? – but many are vivid meditations on the underlying meaning of the cards. In Strength, we see the South Haven Lighthouse in the midst of a crashing wave off of Lake Michigan; in the Wheel of Fortune, the life cycle of the Pickerel Frog; in the Devil, a plastic bottle surrounded by other litter on the riverbed. (And even the more obscure cards like Justice provide plenty of grist for contemplation.)
In Great Lakes Tarot, the suits are again themed, this time with fish from sturgeon to steelhead for the cups; flowers, including buckbean, wild lupine, and smooth penstemon for the wands; all manner of animals, such as moose, loons, and otters for the swords; and poignantly, human activity for the pentacles, from the unobtrusive bird-watchers of the Ace to the barge industry of the King.
This is an important theme in both decks, as I have touched upon. Both of Wilson’s tarot decks present a nature that is not in any sense “untrammeled,” but rather one in which humans are deeply embedded, for good and for ill. Our litter is here, but so are our efforts to eliminate it (the Fool in Great Lakes Tarot is Eddie Olschansky, a “trash fisherman” who cleans the Cuyahoga River five days a week.) We are not absent from these landscapes, nor are we merely villains who will inevitably despoil them. Like every other animal, we are part of the ecosystem, and it responds to our choices.
A selection of suit cards from the Rust Belt Arcana and Great Lakes Tarot decks [Belt Publishing]
While there is no book accompanying Great Lakes Tarot, Wilson does provide a brief guide for the cards on the Belt website. I do wish this had been included in the box with the cards; unless the reader is already a devoted naturalist with a great understanding of the Great Lakes region, it can be hard to identify the particular varieties of fish in the cups suit, for instance, and there is always the worry that Wilson’s guide will disappear from the Web at some point. There were also some print quality issues with my deck, with light smudges of black ink appearing on many of the cards.
That said, what I appreciate about both Rust Belt Arcana and Great Lakes Tarot is how grounded they are in an actual landscape and ecology. These are not universal tarot decks, but then, neither is any species of flower or bird. Nature is a series of particular communities, made up of particular species interacting in particular ways, and too often we end up collapsing all of that complexity down into a single monistic “Nature.”
David Wilson’s tarot decks have been brilliant tools for me because they resist that impulse. Instead, they invite readers to explore the subtleties of one particular ecosystem. These cards should present many familiar neighbors in a new light for those living in the Rust Belt or the Great Lakes. And for those of us who live in the regions nearby – or even further afield – they provide many opportunities to consider how our own environments resemble these, how they differ, how the living world outside our doors functions and changes and reacts to our presence.
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