Afro-Brazilian

The record

Giuseppe Palumbo’s Major Arcana imagery is the most successful element of Alice Santana’s Afro-Brazilian Tarot, a new deck from Italian publisher Lo Scarabeo. Palumbo’s watercolor paintings reflect his background in cartoon illustration and tell their stories with bold simplicity and vigorous angularity. A hunky-looking Fool races across sloping ground that crumbles beneath him. In Temperance, a white-clad figure prances over gray, dry land while a rainbow springs from his head towards a roiling sky. As The Sun’s kneeling supplicant raises the palms of his hands towards our huge star, I can almost feel its heat on my own skin. In these images, everything whips up, billows, whirls, twists, pelts, lunges, and surges. This movement aptly represents a culture that respects, channels, and dances the fundamental forces of nature. Santana envisions her deck as a synthesis between Tarot’s classic archetypes and the Yoruban traditions of reverence for primary spirit beings known as orixas that West African slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere. Her deck contains the standard Tarot breakdown of twenty-two Major Arcana and fifty-six Minor Arcana cards. The imagery is Afro-Brazilian but the

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