The Cryptid Tarot

My Second Deck

I spent my youth fixated on the bizarre. I was drawn to aliens, ancient cults, monsters, anything unexplainable. As my path drew me to the Occult, I began to apply esoteric understanding to the subjects that fascinated me. It was Aleister Crowley’s “Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic” that first set the wheels turning for the deck I released last week: The Cryptid Tarot

Crowley recognized the centrality of the senses in strange phenomena, a theme central to the thesis of this deck. Then through Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings and Eliphas Levi’s Dogma and Ritual I developed an understanding of Elementals. It was John Keel’s Mothman Prophecies and Carl Jung’s Spirit Mercurius that gave me a full grasp of the symbolic, sensual, and occult nature of cryptids and aliens.

As you can tell from this piece, the path to this deck was essentially academic, years of reading, studying and thinking. Fortunately, you don’t have to bother with extensive reading, you can engage directly with this idea and see for yourself!

These cards allow for direct interaction and engagement with some of the darkest and strangest zones in the symbolic realm. In my preliminary readings with them, I’ve found they form deeply poetic and bizarre images and “events”.

This was the first reading (with the Staples paper cut out prototype), envision communing with a mermaid late at night in a dark forest. From that image we can draw out and experience the “answer”.

This deck emerged from years of “Development Hell” after I purchased a Lenormand deck. Seeing the great potential in a 36 card deck, I set about corresponding it to Qabalah, and in doing so formed a perfectly functional tarot. The deck contains the 10 Sephirot, the 7 planets, 12 signs, 3 mother elements, and the four parts of the Tetragrammaton. As such it is the 22 majors, ten minors, and 4 suits.

This is the first in what will be an extensive set of decks that follow the same esoteric pattern. They will allow the user to engage visually and physically with the correspondences I’ve made using 777.

How does the Loch Ness Monster relate to the Mayan God of Death Ah Pook, the Destroyer? Or the Viking rune ᚲ ? How does it appear in fairy tales and nursery rhymes? What about conspiracy theories?

All of this and more will be revealed through these episodic decks.

They are being printed as you read this, so pre-order it now!