For the second edition of my highlights series, I wanted to showcase a really cool item that I adore on so many levels: the Charmed Book Of Shadows tarot.
As I've mentioned before, I'm a professional tarot reader! But even before I started reading professionally, I had been studying and reading tarot for over a decade beforehand. I love the idea of TV-themed decks in general, but I rarely come across one that truly connects with me. I think that the Game Of Thrones tarot was done superbly and the unreleased Buffy tarot by Dark Horse would have been up there, too. So when I came across a full set of beautifully done Charmed tarot cards, I was overjoyed!
Unfortunately, I don't know who quite to credit with creating this deck. As far as I know, they were created by a fan in the early 2000s and limited to 500 copies. My copy has a blank card but another one I've seen had the number of the run on the card instead, it also had rounded corners whereas mine aren't. Beyond that, I really don't know anything else. If you do, please let me know and I'll amend accordingly!
The cards themselves are glossy and illustrated to perfection. The traditional Rider-Waite-Smith names are replaced with characters, locations and items relevant to the series. Characters strongly feature in the major arcana and the minor arcana is very much a pip-style.
The backs of the cards look like the book of shadows itself with a red triquetra and page effect.
In tarot, the major arcana consists of 22 trump cards, going from 0-21. In the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck, they are labelled with roman numerals. The artist clearly put a lot of thought into matching Charmed related things up with it because I couldn't have thought of better ideas myself. One of my personal favourites is having Halliwell Manor depicted as the Tower. Of course, it isn't literally a tower, but it is a place of great destruction and change just like the Tower card.
But of course, the most important thing in a Charmed tarot would have to be the Charmed Ones themselves! Paige is the High Priestess, Piper is the Empress, Prue is Justice and Phoebe is the Star. Intuition is a strong aspect of Paige's journey and personality much like the High Priestess, Piper has the maternal energy of the Empress, Prue embodies Justice with her thirst for truth-seeking and decisiveness, and Phoebe is a creative optimist like the Star.
In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the minor arcana is grouped into the suits wands, cups, swords and pentacles. This deck has replaced wands with potions, cups with chalices and pentacles with triquetras while keeping swords unchanged.
As a bonus, here are some of the cards I drew for my tarot group laid out together.
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