So far I have created five book and deck sets, four of them illustrated by the late Paul Mason - The Sacred Circle Tarot (Llewellyn), The Fairy Ring Oracle (Llewellyn), The Oracle of the Goddess (Vega) and The Celtic Animal Oracle (Vega) and the latest, The Pagan Ways Tarot (Schiffer). I am working on a sixth deck, The Hearth Witch’s Oracle.
I became fascinated with the tarot at the age of thirteen when I saw a Marseille deck in window of the local joke shop. I saved up my pocket money and bought the cards, and spent many happy hours doing readings for myself and my school friends. They started to call me ‘the witch’…
Before long, I had begun to design my own deck, and on and off for the next decade I played with ideas for the tarot, wanting to remove some of the Christian iconography and restore it to more fundamental archetypes. I even tried to create composite images in the dark room during my time at art college, but this proved to be very time consuming and expensive.
My old friend Paul Mason had been working as a graphic designer and exploring the possibilities of Photoshop, and we decided to collaborate on the deck which became The Sacred Circle Tarot, Paul creating the illustrations from our photographs according to the concept and symbolism I laid down, and me writing the book that went with it. It was the first deck created in Photoshop, and proved to be very popular. We created three further decks together in the same style, and were chatting about a few ideas for another tarot before Paul’s sudden death.
I decided to work on the new deck, The Pagan Ways Tarot, partly as a tribute to Paul, partly because I had wanted to illustrate one since the age of thirteen, and partly because my ideas had evolved since The Sacred Circle deck. I enjoyed the process immensely, and it fulfilled a life-long ambition.
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