As a queer professional tarot reader, I am constantly trying to translate divinatory context for people who don’t fit into it. For all of the lip service paid to “everyone contains all divinities, both masculine and feminine,” that’s not terribly soothing to hear when you’re a member of the marginalized. I spend a lot of time contemplating how to break down vague concepts for querants so that they aren’t boxed out from the experience.
As such, I’m excited for every single queer tarot deck that crosses my path, and Tarot for You and Me from Simon Element has moved to the top of my favorite pile.
Cover to Tarot for You and Me by Gary D’Andre with art by Jess Vosseteig [Simon Element]
Tarot for You and Me is a deck created by Gary D’Andre, a queer Black mystic with eight years of professional tarot reading experience and extensive spiritual publishing experience, with gorgeous and vibrant artwork by Jess Vosseteig. The deck belongs next to the Modern Witch Tarot when it comes to inclusion and expansion to traditional tarot decks.
Tarot for You and Me is accessible to Rider Waite Colman Smith readers, but with subversions of the most aggressively gendered cards – specifically the court cards. The court cards have always remained troubling for me, because they have felt more anchored in traditional gender and elemental roles than most of the Majors. But in D’Andre’s deck, the page, knight, and king are turned towards community rather than hierarchy. The pages become children, knights become siblings, and kings become elders. The queens remain queens; I interpret this, with the help of Vosseteig’s artwork, to mean that the court symbolizes queer chosen family structures. Both the queen of flags and chalices evoke the beauty and performance of drag and trans women. The queens shift into honoring the power and beauty of the overlooked rather than the typical passive tyranny that can be hard to sidestep in traditional tarot.
As a tarot reader myself, it’s interesting to me what Vosseteig’s artwork does for traditional cards like Judgment, which instead of a religious reckoning shows two women judging and gossiping about a woman who boldly walks past them, unbothered. In D’Andre’s write up, the key words include “walking your own path,” a play on the divine truth of the traditional card. Truth is no longer the call of the Christian god, but a personal divine truth that impacts how the querent must embrace and be embraced by the world.
Selections from the Tarot for You and Me deck [Simon Element]
The Four of Chalices shows a drunk and wrung out writer desperate for inspiration but finding none (as a writer, this one hit too close to home). The Hanged Man is a pole dancer, which ties in beautifully to the self-selection of the Hanged Man’s original meaning of self-surrender.
The suits are reinterpreted too: the pentacles are plants, shifting them from money to natural resources and investment in nature; wands are lanterns; swords are flags. The cups are the one unchanged suit.
The book that accompanies the deck is robust and deviates from standard card write-ups in delightful ways. Cards that can be challenging to interpret, like Justice and the Hermit, are given juicier and more approachable language. The tarot cards that have traditionally felt high concept get brought into modern day with D’Andre’s expert interpretation and analysis. There are spread recommendations and shuffling instructions at the front too, for readers that like a formula when asking the hard questions.
My only critique -and I’m not sure I mean this as a critique exactly – is the Tower card, here depicted as an erect, upright, and not-even-remotely crumbling castle. But the meaning is still the classic one: upheaval, breakdown, and rebuilding. While the promise of the rebuild is going to be more comforting to a querent, I like the dramatic jolt of the Tower’s chaos in the traditional decks.
My deliberation on the Tower aside, the artwork is clean and lush. While not as symbol-heavy as Rider, the artwork gives the emotion and spirit of the card so thoroughly that to add all of the original symbols in would be too busy and alien. The facial expressions are dynamic, the body movements fluid, and a rainbow features as a theme through many of the cards. There are differences of gender, presentation, skin tone, body size, and age across the cards, and the effort to be as inclusive as possible is present and also comes with a sense of ease. Allyship and community are such visually palpable themes that the title speaks honestly – it’s a deck for the You and the Me.
Tarot for You and Me is available May 28th, 2024 from Simon Element and is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
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