Cards of Alchemy

Fifty cards, five suits of nine plus overflow, named Alembic, Tree, Retort, Egg and Athanor: the suits are laboratory equipment, and that inventory announces a deck built from alchemy's actual working vocabulary rather than its costume. Each suit maps to a life domain, love, health, wealth, protection, power, and the three-level grading the review describes, Puffer to Initiate onward, imports alchemy's genuine hierarchy of competence: the Puffer was the tradition's own mocking term for the bellows-pumping amateur. Published by Llewellyn, the deck is an oracle in tarot's neighborhood rather than a tarot proper, and its structure rewards readers who enjoy systems with internal logic: a draw locates you in a domain at a level, a diagnostic rather than a fortune. It suits students of alchemical symbolism, system-lovers, and collectors of Llewellyn's stranger catalog corners. Readers who want the familiar seventy-eight should note this apparatus distills something else entirely.