Celtic

Courtney Davis is one of the defining Celtic artists of his generation, and this 1990 deck with Helena Paterson is where that art met tarot early enough to become foundational: the archive's reviewer, a longtime student of Celtic art and archaeology, bought it at publication as a first deck and found the mythology as compelling as the ornament. Davis's knotwork and iconography carry authority because they come from a career spent inside the tradition's visual sources, not from fantasy-Celtic pastiche. Note the catalog carries a different, unrelated Celtic Tarot by Justin De Burgh, and John Matthews's separate Celtic Oracle; the shared name is an accident of the genre's popularity. This one is the 1990 Davis-Paterson classic. It suits students of Celtic art who want the real ornamental language, readers working Irish and British mythology, and collectors of the foundational decks that fixed what Celtic tarot means. Readers wanting contemporary softness should try a younger deck.