SEATTLE — Marguerite Jones knows the real-life, headline-making story of the little crow girl in Seattle.
“Every day the crows would leave her trinkets, and her mom has lost something out of her wallet and the crows brought it back to their house,” said Jones, a Seattle resident who’s also a crow aficionado herself, and has been ever since feeling a mystical connection to the birds while growing up south of Boston.
After enduring the “worst month of my entire life” in July 2017, including the possibility of becoming homeless, Jones said, she discovered the crows had left her a trinket of sorts: the inspiration to create a tarot deck based on the birds.
An artist who had studied at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, Jones planned only to “take all the art to Kinko’s and print off a deck for myself.” Then things happened quickly for the self-described “accidental solitary witch.” The result: her Crow Tarot is pre-selling like gangbusters on the Indiegogo page she created, and the deck should be in the hands of her patrons by October. Meanwhile, U.S. Games Systems, one the world’s premier publishers of tarot and oracle cards, is scheduled to issue the deck in January.
Artist Marguerite Jones used digital art techniques to create her Crow Tarot. [courtesy]
For her birthday in August last year, a friend gave her the Wild Unknown Tarot “because I couldn’t tap into anything,” Jones said.
“I felt really disconnected. I literally felt like there was a block. My intuition wasn’t working. Nothing was working, so she gave me this deck.”
Jones found the Wild Unknown deck to be “incredibly beautiful but I really didn’t connect with it.” Still, she had a feeling “like something’s up. I have these crows that hang out in front of the house. They’re regular fixtures in my life. I felt I should make something that I connect with, and that’s when I started doing the Crow Tarot. I said, ‘I’m just going to make a deck for me.’ ”
Jones set about creating a major arcana using her digital collage artist skills. She decided to mirror the symbolism of the Rider-Waite deck because “the majority of people learn tarot using that deck. I was like if other people are going to use this, it will be best to make something that anybody can use, not just somebody who is really a professional tarot card reader.”
Jones posted some of her images on a Facebook page devoted to crows.
“People said ‘I love this deck,’ ‘Oh my God make this deck,’ ‘Please, there’s no deck like this,’ ” Jones recalled. “I posted the Fool and one person posted ‘You should send this off to U.S. Games.’ Literally within hours of my posting it to U.S. Games, I had a contract with an advance.”
Jones’s contract allows her to sell decks independently prior to its publication by U.S. Games Systems, which she is doing through Indiegogo, a crowd-funding website. Sales of the independent deck, which will have an extra card and minor differences from the U.S. Games deck, are capped at 2,500. Less than 465 decks are still available, Jones said. A Crow Tarot Journal also is on sale at the Indiegogo site.
The entire deck can be viewed on crowtarot.com and crowtarotshop.com, and a digital “pick your card for the day” feature is on both those sites.
Marguerite Jones, creator of Crow Tarot. [courtesy]
Having grown up “in a house where we had a Ouija board,” she puts that “accidental” tag in front of her self-description as a solitary witch because “I’ve always practiced, but I didn’t even know what to call it. I just did my thing, you know what I mean?” she said with a laugh.
“I think there’s a lot of crossover between Wicca and the New Age spiritual movement. I haven’t studied. I don’t study. I listen to Lisa Chamberlain books. I have the Everyday Witch Tarot. I do listen to certain authors, but it’s all been very organic in how it’s come about.
“I do candle magick a lot. It helps me solidify an intention. If you have an intention to bring something into your world, getting really focused and feeling it is part of the process. For me, candle magick does that. I also work with the moon as well.
“I still have a box that I write something to the universe and I set my intention. I meditate on it for 15 minutes or so, and be clear on what the goal is, and I put it in my universe box. I’ve had that box for years. I haven’t opened it. I can’t remember what’s inside,” she said with a chuckle.
Crows play a role in Jones’s magickal life, too.
“I see them as our connection to the wild,” she said. “They kind of tie us to something that we can’t begin to comprehend.”
That’s especially true of two crows who frequent her home, and which her daughter River named Snow and Charming after characters in the fantasy TV series Once Upon a Time.
“Snow and Charming come by, they talk. they give you a look,” Jones said. “They side-eye you. I feel like they know something. I swear they know you, you know what I mean? But they can’t talk.”
Jones abruptly corrected herself.
“Sometimes they do talk,” she said. “Sometimes they’ll give me a nice cluck, like a loving cluck like I’m part of the group, and sometimes they caw at me, like I’m a pest or something.”
The neighborhood crows “will follow me,” Jones said. “I live two blocks from a grocery store. They’ll be hanging out on the wires. When they see me, they will follow me all the way up to my house. They’re smart. They’re wonderful. There is no other animal out there who is going to follow you back to your home with your keys or bring you trinkets or leave you messages.
“I think there’s a reason why crows have been a symbol and have been a part of the folklore of Native Americans. There’s something about them. They’re magical.”
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