The Fairy Tale Tarot

Fairy Tale Tarot by Lisa Hunt

Creator: Lisa Hunt

Artist: Lisa Hunt

ISBN-10 ‏: ‎ 1646712137

ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-1646712137

Book pages: 154

Card #: 78

Card size: 12x6.5 cm; 1.18 x 3.27 x 5.24 inches

Card stock:  smooth, matte, flexible, no gilding, no gold foil, borderless

Box: sturdy two-piece box

Language: English

Publisher: US Games, December 2024

Purchase here:

Changes in majors: some majors have been renamed, for example: 0 Innocence (Fool), II the Sorceress (High Priestess), III the Fairy Godmother (Empress), IV the Wise Old Man (Emperor), VIII Courage (Strength), V the Mentor (Hierophant), X the Wheel (Wheel of Fortune), XIII the Transformation (Death), XII Entrapment (Hanged Man), XV Temptation (Devil), XVI Deception (Tower)

Suit names: Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles

Court cards: Princess, Prince, Queen, King

Card backs: fully reversible

For many years, Lisa Hunt’s Fairy Tale Tarot was out of print, and it was only available for fantasy prices on the second-hand market. Its new release was long-awaited, and if you love Lisa Hunt’s art and especially her tarot art (as I do), and if fairy-tale themed decks speak to you (as they do to me), this is a dream fulfilment deck.

Lisa Hunt’s detailed, highly skilled and strongly atmospheric watercolour art needs no introduction. She has produced a unique body of tarot decks over the years, and each of them reflects her deep understanding of the tarot archetypes by transporting them into different settings: the world of Ghosts and Spirits, or the past of the US countryside in the Pastoral Tarot.

Both the tarot and fairy tales dive into the magical world of Jung’s collective unconscious, so it’s not difficult to understand why fairy tale tarot decks work so well.

The booklet brings the tales and tarot archetypes together. For each card, it gives us the name of the story, the culture it came from, and some carefully chosen keywords. While the deck is multi-cultural and includes African, Scandinavian, Hindu, Serbian, Norwegian, Middle Eastern and Central Asian fairy tales, many cards are from the collection of the Brothers Grimm, i.e. German or Central European.

Some of these fairy tales have been popularised by Disney movies, but many of the tales that inspired this deck are less well-known to non-Germans. Lisa Hunt goes back to the Grimm tales themselves, which is great because the pre-Disney versions are rougher, tougher and are strongly anchored in the popular culture before the Industrial Revolution. The same is true for Hans Christian Andersen’s poetic and melancholic fairy tales.

As the tarot deals also with negative experiences and emotions, Hunt’s choice of original fairy tales is very apt. One of my favourite fairy tales from my childhood, the Goose Girl, appears as XI, Justice, and this resonates so strongly with me. These cards are not only beautiful, but they also have a lot of depth, and her choices reveal the core of the tarot archetype AND the fairy tale at the same time.

The cards are borderless, and the card names appear in decorative banners at the bottom of the card without covering up important elements of the artwork. The Roman numerals of the Minors float in decorated round cartouches with scrollwork at the top of the cards.

As always in Hunt’s arts, there are lots of details to discover. The faces are expressive, the backgrounds atmospheric, and when you know the fairy tale, you immediately recognise it.

Since this deck follows the RWS system, you can simply use it as an RWS stand-in, but I recommend reading more about the fairy tales to discover how they found their way into this deck. This also means that for me, this deck is best used in smaller spreads or as single cards for meditation work or affirmation. It’s a very dense and meaningful deck.

Like all fairy tale decks, it is an amazing tool for Inner Child readings and shadow work. Nowadays, we often forget that these were not children’s stories but tales that adults told each other, often while busy with manual work in the evenings or in the winter, when it was impossible to work outside. They all deal with challenges and struggles; there are often clear antagonists and real dangers, so there is nothing cute or sugar-coated about fairy tales. Just the opposite: they can be quite confronting. 

I love this deck and find working with it very rewarding.