Barbara Walker's

Barbara Walker wrote The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets and brought that scholarship to tarot twice over: The Secrets of the Tarot, her in-depth study of the cards' origins and symbolism, and this 1986 deck as its visual companion, the standard seventy-eight structure carrying her research on its face. Walker's mythography reads the cards through the goddess traditions and older strata she spent her career documenting, and her painted imagery is famously unsentimental, closer to myth's actual severity than to its greeting-card versions. Companion decks to serious books form their own genre, and this is among the genre's strongest examples: the deck genuinely encodes the argument, so reading with it is reading the scholarship. It suits students of tarot history and feminist mythography, Walker's considerable readership, and readers who want their symbolism footnoted. Those who prefer their goddess material soft-focus should know Walker's goddesses predate the pastels, and the deck is proud of it.