Buckland Romani

The archive review is testimony of the rarest kind: a Romani reader opening the box and finding their own cultural heritage speaking back. Raymond Buckland, himself of Romani descent, built this deck with artist Lissanne Lake around British Rom life specifically, the vardos, trades and traditions of the traveling people, which makes it that valuable thing, culture represented from inside rather than costumed from without. The catalog consolidated its editions here. Tarot's popular history is tangled with romanticized gypsy imagery that the actual Romani never profited from; a deck by a Rom author honoring Rom particulars quietly corrects a century of that, and the reviewer's joy is the correction landing. Lake's warm realism keeps the culture peopled rather than exoticized. It suits Romani readers first, as the review proves, students of tarot's cultural history who want the record set straight, Buckland's Wiccan readership, and collectors of decks where representation is authorship. The turban-mystique shelf should study how this one did it.