St. Paul, Minnesota-based Llewellyn Worldwide LTD has the rights to distribute Tarot cards from the Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo in the United States. The trademarked crescent moon logo on the sides of the box provides the only way to tell that the cards are a Llewellyn import. The Lo Scarabeo logo (a stylized beetle that would make a fine tattoo) is on the top of the box and on the product information inside. I volunteered to review this deck when it came in because I have been reading quite a lot of fiction and non-fiction about the cultures of the Middle East in the last few years, and I was interested in trying a reading with these cards. I have been using Tarot cards for divination for nearly thirty years and am quite accustomed to using non-traditional decks like this one.
Lo Scarabeo lists over 50 different Tarot decks in its current on-line catalog. The Tarot of the Thousand and One Nights is a recent addition to the list of classical designs in this collection, so called because they are inspired by classical themes. While this deck has the standard 78 cards (13 cards in each of four houses comprising the minor arcana and an major arcana of 22 cards), the imagery is very explicitly based on the collection of stories known as The Arabian Nights or the Tales of A Thousand and One Nights. In fact, a little web-digging brings evidence that Leon Carre originally painted these exquisite miniatures for an edition of Sir Richard Burton's late nineteenth century translation of these stories that was published in twelve volumes in the late 1920s. Luxury publisher Assouline has an abridged version of this masterpiece (still 400+ pages!) scheduled for release in November 2005.
Yes, the paintings are lovely, and I feel greatly relieved knowing that the artist created them decades ago for a much bigger project. A standard Tarot card is 2 5/8 by 4 3/4 inches, and the paintings inside these frames are less than 2 by 3 inches, rendering much of the intricate detail (plants and flowers, patterns on clothing, carvings on furniture) nearly impossible to see. I feel like I could easily spend several hours in good light with a magnifying glass just gazing at them.
Like the Bruegel Tarot deck from this publisher I reviewed last year, the Tarot of the Thousand and One Nights does not have a companion book. The tiny booklet packaged with the deck includes text in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish, so each section is about 12 pages long, and the narrative for each card is two or at most three short lines of text. Because the images were not originally painted for Tarot use, they do not necessarily depict the symbolism that a card reader might expect to find, even on a non-traditional deck. For example, the house of swords is equated with the element of air. In some decks the sword cards represent the intellect; in some they represent various forms of conflict. The ace card in all the houses tends to symbolize some nascent phenomenon related to the house, so an ace of swords often shows a single sword (or sword-like object) and is interpreted as an idea that is still emerging.
In this deck, the ace of swords shows two people (I think a man and a woman) sitting on a sumptuous canopied bed that is flying through the clouds. Far below in the lower left corner of the painting sails a tiny ship. Well, the element of air is there . . . I would interpret the image as suggesting flightiness (in a somewhat negative sense) or vision (in a more positive sense). All the booklet tells me is that the card upright means triumph, achievement, or power, while reversed it means loss, divorce, or tiredness. That's not very useful. I might as well read the tales and write my own commentaries.
I have a companion to The Thousand and One Nights on my Green Man shelf, along with a hard copy of Sir Richard Francis Burton's late nineteenth century translation of the tales. I think I will keep the cards with these books, with the hope that someday soon I will read enough of the stories to be able to make sense of the cards.
