Tarot of the Divine - A Deck and Guidebook Inspired by
Deities, Folklore, and Fairy Tales from Around the World
By Yoshi Yoshitani
Published by Clarkson Potter
2020
Like New. No discernible signs of any wear. The deck, book, and box are complete, clean, unmarked, no stains, no rips or tears, no price stickers.
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Travel the world with Tarot of the Divine
Take a step forward on your spiritual journey with this carefully selected series of 78 fables, myths, and historic tales are effortlessly woven together with Yoshi Yoshitani's vivid artwork and the themes of a traditional tarot deck. Explore the globe and enhance your spiritual practice with life lessons from over forty countries worldwide.
• Features rich, vibrant art and a keen understanding of traditional tarot archetypes infused with worldly insight and folkloric spirit.
• Illustrator Yoshi Yoshitani brings fables, ancient mythologies, and spiritual legends to life on the Major and Minor Arcana cards, inspired by the cultural traditions of China, Japan, Peru, Norway, Persia, England, Greece, Denmark, the Maori tribe of New Zealand, and more.
• The companion guidebook provides insight into how these fables from around the globe support traditional tarot imagery and themes.
About the Author
Yoshi Yoshitani is a California-based artist whose vibrant illustrations draw on inspiration from across the globe, with a particular focus on multicultural identity. Past clients include Disney, DC Comics, Valiant, Image, DreamWorks, and Netflix. Yoshi spends time researching world mythologies, listening to audiobooks, creating fashion inspiration boards, and attending comic conventions and art expos across the country.
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Reviews:
An INCREDIBLY beautiful and informative deck.
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2020
I am in love love with this deck. The art is astounding and colorful with vibrant depictions of a number of ethnic groups and cultures. There is no shying away from the richness of skin color and portrayal of clothes and fabrics associated with each individual group. I'm not 100% sure about how accurate the depictions are, but the inclusivity is 110% better than most mainstream, white-washed decks that one would typically find. Also, the cards (and stories associated) are LGBTQ inclusive for those looking for a little bit of that. I adore the finish of the cards because I simply have a hard time shuffling cards without a little grip (I have butter fingers). I also really like the linen texture to the cards, giving it a more multi-sense experience for me as a tactile person.
Universal appeal!
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2025
The cards are great for small hands, beautifully drawn, and they feel heavy and good. Each card depicts a story from a different world culture. It makes me want to read all of the stories, and I will! This would be wonderful for literary minded people, younger readers, people studying comparative mythology, or just anyone who enjoys vivid artwork and timeless stories.
Beautiful deck, stories perfectly illustrate cards
Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2024
I bought this deck because I kept seeing the beautiful illustrations online. I don’t really relate to traditional Tarot artwork and miss parts of the symbolism because they’re so busy and uninviting. The book that comes with the set has the illustrations and a brief summary of the fairy tale. I like the offered interpretations of the cards, too. They are to the point and accurate. I purchased Yoshi Yoshitani’s companion book, Beneath the Moon, which I highly recommend as an adjunct. I wanted to know more about the fairy tales, because they so beautifully illustrate the meanings of each card. But it’s a perfectly fine deck without it. I have a couple of other decks, and I’m unable to properly shuffle them because I have small hands and the cards are so stiff. In this deck, the cards are the same large format but are flexible enough for me to easily shuffle. They are plenty sturdy. The magic of this deck is the artwork, which is superb, the meanings presented, and the stories, which help me remember the cards better than anything else I’ve used.
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Tarot (first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi or tarocks) is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, tarot-playing cards spread to most of Europe, evolving into a family of games that includes German Grosstarok and modern games such as French Tarot and Austrian Königrufen. In the late 18th century French occultists made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy. Thus, there are two distinct types of tarot packs in circulation: those used for card games and those used for divination. However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, are occasionally used for cartomancy. Tarot cards, then known as tarocchi, first appeared in Ferrara and Milan in northern Italy, with the Fool and 21 trumps (then called trionfi) being added to the standard Italian pack of four suits: batons, coins, cups and swords. Scholarship has established that the early European cards were probably based on the Egyptian Mamluk deck invented in or before the 14th century, which followed the invention of paper from Asia into Western Europe. By the late 1300s, Europeans were producing their own cards, the earliest patterns being based on the Mamluk deck but with variations to the suit symbols and court cards.
In English-speaking countries where these games are not widely played, only specially designed cartomantic tarot cards, used primarily for novelty and divination, are readily available. The early French occultists claimed that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, Kabbalah, the Indic Tantra, or I Ching, claims that have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination. However, scholarly research demonstrated that tarot cards were invented in northern Italy in the mid-15th century and confirmed that there is no historical evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century. Historians have described western views of the Tarot pack as "the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists and it is all but universally believed." The earliest evidence of a tarot deck used for cartomancy comes from an anonymous manuscript from around 1750 which documents rudimentary divinatory meanings for the cards of the Tarocco Bolognese. The popularization of esoteric tarot started with Antoine Court and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (Etteilla) in Paris during the 1780s, using the Tarot of Marseilles. French tarot players abandoned the Marseilles tarot in favor of the Tarot Nouveau around 1900, with the result that the Marseilles pattern is now used mostly by cartomancers. Etteilla was the first to produce a bespoke tarot deck specifically designed for occult purposes around 1789. In keeping with the unsubstantiated belief that such cards were derived from the Book of Thoth, Etteilla's tarot contained themes related to ancient Egypt.
In the occult tradition, tarot cards are referred to as "arcana", with the Fool and 21 trumps being termed the Major Arcana and the suit cards the Minor Arcana, terms not used by players of tarot card games. The terms "Major Arcana" and "Minor Arcana" were first used by Jean-Baptiste Pitois (also known as Paul Christian) and are never used in relation to tarot card games. Some decks exist primarily as artwork, and such art decks sometimes contain only the 22 Major Arcana. The three most common decks used in esoteric tarot are the Tarot of Marseilles (a playing card pack), the Rider–Waite Tarot, and the Thoth Tarot. Aleister Crowley, who devised the Thoth deck along with Lady Frieda Harris, stated of the tarot: "The origin of this pack of cards is very obscure. Some authorities seek to put it back as far as the ancient Egyptian Mysteries; others try to bring it forward as late as the fifteenth or even the sixteenth century ... [but] The only theory of ultimate interest about the tarot is that it is an admirable symbolic picture of the Universe, based on the data of the Holy Qabalah." However, the origin of the Tarot pack has since been documented, showing that it was invented in Italy in the early 15th century and is unrelated to any "Holy Qabalah".