Victoria Regina Tarot

I didn't plan on creating a Tarot deck about Queen Victoria. Actually, I didn't plan on creating a Tarot deck at all. I started out, six years ago, with the intent of designing a deck of playing cards. Pretty pictures weren't enough; I wanted my cards to express a coherent system of meaningful relationships. A friend suggested that I was really designing a Tarot deck, not a playing-card deck. In a way, the journey of this deck, which began as a design project and became something much deeper and more personally meaningful, follows the same path as Tarot itself, which began as a card game but over the years acquired many more levels of meaning. Of course, I didn't know that when I was starting out. I didn't know much about Tarot at all. So I picked up a Waite-Smith deck and an introductory book and started learning. I was hooked.

The Victorian Era Fits
I love the delicate engravings found in late 19th-century illustrations and have used them in much of my collage work. I knew my deck would feature this type of art. In addition, as I learned more about Tarot, the choice to use source material from the Victorian era began to seem more appropriate. Much of the foundation of modern Tarot was formed during this era. I spent many hours at the local university library, searching through old magazines for just the right illustrations. Every so often, I'd be struck by the fact that the bound volumes covering the table in front of me contained magazines that had been published over 100 years ago. Often I found myself forgetting about the art and reading the magazines instead: a rave review of Lady Windemere's Fan; a passionate editorial on Irish Home Rule; a travel essay about northwest Canada or southeast Asia.
After finishing the Empress card, I commented half-jokingly to a friend that, since the deck was called "Victoria Regina," Queen Victoria ought to have been depicted as the Empress. He replied that I could put Victoria on all four Queens instead. It made perfect sense: the passionate young woman, newly crowned, as the Queen of Wands; the devoted, loving wife as the Queen of Cups; the grief-stricken widow as the Queen of Swords; and the aging symbol of a nation as the Queen of Coins.
If Victoria was to be the Queens, then it was only fitting that the rest of the court cards be represented by her contemporaries. This sharpened the focus of the deck, taking the cards from being generally inspired by the art of the period to being much more specifically about life in Victorian Britain. Again, the path of the deck's creation followed the path of Tarot. As I began working on the minor arcana, I found that I had left behind the broader archetypes of the majors for the more direct focus of the minors.

Studying Up
And so my co-author Georg and I added books about Victorian history to our growing reading list. We began with the first volume of James Morris's history of Victorian Britain, Heaven's Command, and Jerrold Packard's biography of the female royal family, Victoria's Daughters. Soon we were deeply immersed in the story. It may sound dry and dull, but the more reading I did, the more the subject and the time period seemed to come alive. In addition to all the books, I found a wide range of materials online, articles from many small journals, newsletters, and penny magazines. The Internet really is a wonderful thing.
I had initially hoped to round out all the court cards with members of the royal family. But a few personalities-Oscar Wilde for the Prince of Wands, Benjamin Disraeli for the King of Wands, and William Gladstone for the King of Swords-turned out to be too perfect a match for the cards not to use them. There were also regrets over figures not represented in the deck, notably Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, the Empress Frederick of Germany. I had very much hoped Vicky would find her place among the court cards, but it just never seemed right; the perfect fit was never there.

New Ways of Seeing
While the cards were being created, there was also the book to write. Some interpretations almost seemed to write themselves. Some required extra research. Some required a bit of meditation, a bit of time spent living with the new card. What Georg and I tried to do with the book is to provide something of the experience we had with the deck. As I worked on the cards and as we worked on the book, we found that our understanding of Tarot would give us a new way of seeing the people and the stories of the Victorian period. Also, the more we read of the history, the more we would find insights and parallels to the meanings and stories of the Tarot deck. I hope that when someone sees the Victoria Regina Tarot, they will have a similar experience, that they will perhaps see something in a new way, that they will discover their own set of meanings in these cards just as I have.