I first came across the Deviant Moon Tarot around 2010, when I was expanding my collection, and looking for decks with interesting correspondences, such as Day and Night, Sanity and Madness, Dream and Nightmare. I'd already found and acquired the Night Sun Tarot, when a troll through my favourite Tarot site, Aeclectic Tarot, turned up the Deviant Moon by Patrick Valenza.
The imagery struck me immediately - both sensual and, in many ways, grotesque beyond normal comprehension. Stylized humanoid figures and nightmarish monsters populated scenes of arid bleakness and graveyard lithography, digitally enhanced with industrial images and asylum escapees! Just the kind of stuff I was looking for!
The deck I received was more than I had hoped for, but, sadly, the LWB that accompanied it was incredibly underwhelming, so much so that I don't even remember it at all. I guess I have been spoiled by the recent practice of new decks coming with a glossy handbook as part of the package that described the creators inspirations for both artwork and meaning, and there was nothing, it seemed, like that for the Deviant Moon Tarot. Still, the iconography and imagery compensated through it's sheer power and beauty - albeit with very little in the way of explanation regarding the premise of the deck and the source of the visions and symbology contained therein. So, after a few studies and practice spreads, working on the assumption that the deck was designed to follow the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, I let it lie for a number of years, disseminating its deviance amongst the other decks collected together in the wooden chest I keep them in.
Then, about four years ago, on a trawl through a search on Amazon, I came across the Deviant Moon Tarot book by Patrick Valenza. I had to admit, I was thrilled to find the book, and expected it to be a small paperback in much the same way most of the other books for Tarot decks were. However, it turned out that this was a hardback book, and the cost was over 150% MORE that what I'd paid for the deck itself! So I baulked at spending so much on a book that, in my deluded opinion, should have either come in a package with the deck, or not cost more than the deck itself! So, like the deck, I let it lie on Amazon, adding it to my Tarot wishlist, and keeping an eye on it every now-and-then to see of the price dropped.
And, eventually, it did!
So, a couple of weeks ago, I finally succumbed to the temptation, and ordered the book!
Still expecting something the size of a normal paperback, I was somewhat bemused when a large - for a book - box turned up on my doorstep a few days later, and even more surprised by the weight of it! My curiosity fully piqued, I opened the box to reveal a humungous tome of a book - 340 large pages of heavyweight paper - full of glossy card images, theme derivations and prescribed card meanings, along with an end-to-end study of Valenza's genesis and development of the Deviant Moon Tarot.
Make no bones about it, this is a phenomenal book, and, for what is essentially an expanded LWB, something unique among the Tarot books I have collected over the years. Valenza not only describes each card in detail, but goes deep into the origins of each image, and, in the process, exposes how he first discovered his artistic abilities around the age of 8, and how these quickly developed into his lifelong fascination with Tarot and its ability to uncover the deeper, darker side of the psyche. He goes on to narrate how, driven by recurring childhood nightmares, and the close proximity of various cemetaries and the Pilgrim State Asylum, New York State, filled his mind and his sketchbooks with visions and phantasies both inspiring and unsettling, leading to the deck and book we have before us today. He also tells of his path from pencil and paper (or ink) to digital media, and how he uses these to manipulate the collection of drawings, images and photos he has pulled together over the years, to construct the scenes and characters for each card, and how he ties those back to the meaning of the card when it appears in a spread.
The denizens of the Deviant Moon Tarot, in the main, are dual-faced, with the fore-face (I coined a word!) representing the outward facade of the character, and the inner, deviant face representing the hidden, subconscious aspect. Some of the characters are, perhaps surprisingly, warm and potentially friendly, while others are distinctly not so. Add to these the backgrounds drawn from blasted and withered landscapes and buildings, ruins and monsters culled from Valenza's nightmare childhood, and you have a complete new Tarot world to wander through and wonder about, although maybe the possibility of getting lost in these psychically charged tales might snare the unwary or keep the inexperienced (or feeble) at bay! This is not a Tarot for the light-hearted, although there is joy within the scenes - albeit the joy of artistic creation and the ability to achieve such a high standard of self-expression and clarity.
Having taken the plunge and bought the book, my only regret is that I waited so long to do so. The insights it provides, along with the full explanation of the deck's card meanings, makes it an invaluable part of the Deviant Moon Tarot package. (Maybe the publisher's should offer a deck-and-book package?) Knowing what I now know, I am approaching the deck again with an inspired new interest, and am looking forward to applying my new-found knowledge.
If you feel inspired to discover something new, you couldn't do much better than this incarnation of the RWS!
Patrick Valenza's Website: https://deviantmooninc.com/
Amazon.com link: Deviant Moon Tarot
