MY TAROT HISTORY

When I was a child of eleven in South Africa, I accompanied my mother to get a reading from a tarot reader on the other side of Johannesburg. As I waited on the wide verandah, I thought about destiny, about wisdom and faith. These were new concepts for me and I was taken by them. The predictions of that tarot reader came to pass; within a year my mother divorced, fell in love with a foreigner and left to live with her new husband on the Mediterranean Sea.

Many years later after my mother had died, through a mysterious set of circumstances the old Marseille deck she had bought from the tarot reader came back to me. I immersed myself in the study of Tarot. I was living in New Mexico near the Zuni Indian reservation. On the winter solstice I did a shamanic journey where I travelled to a small black and white temple in the Upper World. On the throne lay a tarot card of the High Priestess: Isis. She instructed me to paint a tarot deck.

I painted this tarot deck as if it were a tarot reading: receiving divine wisdom. Each time I pulled a card to paint I was amazed how perfectly the meaning of the card related to the world I inhabit. I opened my senses to messages. Synchronicity was my guide. I painted intuitively, having faith that I would convey through the visual medium of the tarot, a message that would have meaning and wisdom.