Glastonbury

The archive review's provenance is the deck's thesis proven: a seventeen-year-old's birthday visit to Glastonbury, and the deck bought as the town's true souvenir. Lisa Tenzin-Dolma's Glastonbury Tarot for U.S. Games carries the place entire, Arthurian graves, the Tor, the Chalice Well, the abbey's ruins and the town's living mystic economy, local legend dealt as arcana. Place-based tarot rarely gets a site this over-determined; Glastonbury is Avalon's claimed address, and the deck only has to transcribe. Tenzin-Dolma's painted realism keeps the sites recognizable, which matters: readers who have walked the Tor find their memory in the cards, and readers who have not receive an itinerary. Alongside the Sacred Isle's imagined geography, this is the catalog's documentary sacred landscape. It suits pilgrims past and intending, Arthurian readers who want the legend's postal code, English-mystery collectors, and anyone whose spiritual life includes actual hills. The town, as the reviewer learned, sells itself; the deck just makes it shuffleable.