Tarot of the Secret Forest

Tarot of the Secret Forest

Changes in majors: traditional names

Suit names: Wands, Chalices, Swords, Pentacles

Court cards: Knave, Knight, Queen, King

Card backs: black-and-white drawing of the card image, not reversible

There are many decks that depict the forest – a beloved metaphor of the soul and its secrets, of life’s journey with its challenges and surprises, and the place untouched by the cultivating hand of humans. Fairies, gnomes and mythological beasts live there, Hansel and Gretel got lost there, and in many cultures, the forest is the wild, untamed paradise that we long to go back to. Simon Schama writes beautifully about the forest as a national origin myth in “Landscape and Memory”, if anyone is interested in that topic.

However, while there is no lack of tarot decks depicting the forest, the Tarot of the Secret Forest is unique in its blend of the natural and supernatural world. Other decks show the forest as an idyllic, enchanting place where you always feel safe. Some of these decks, beautiful as they are, present the forest like a public garden where you walk through and look around, enjoying the beauty but never feeling lost or confused.

Lucia Mattioli, the artist of the Secret Forest Tarot, lives next to a wild forest, and this is what she paints. There are brambles, insects (yes, also spiders, not my favourite animal), and the fairy creatures we encounter when we follow her are neither cute nor inviting. It feels as though they’d rather be left alone. We are strangers in that forest, and we have to respect this wild world that we have left behind us when we started to build houses and cities.  

There are many painted forests that you leave with clean hands and feet, but in the Secret Forest, you’ll get spiderwebs in your hair, dirt on your feet and knees, and scratches on your arms and legs. Lots of brambles, and the few traces of human habitation look as though they have been left ages ago.

In the Six of Chalices for example, a dog sits in front of a half-open garden gate, but the garden looks wild. Nature has taken it back. In the Seven of Wands, lizards crawl on a sarcophagus-shaped stone that must have been sculpted centuries ago. It all feels a bit like Frodo and Sam in the Mirkwood.

I love Mattioli’s art style. She works with oil colours and builds them up to a thick impasto, giving her pictures a three-dimensional, tactile quality. Even in the reproductions, you feel that build-up of colour, and it gives the deck a strong sense of atmosphere. Not everybody may like it, but I find it very evocative.

The colours are murky, muddy and earthy, with some highlights, but most scenes appear to take place in the dense shadows of a wild, uncultivated forest. Your eyes have to get used to this colour scheme, just like they have to get used to the uncertain light conditions when you walk through a dense forest. Some areas will be dappled with light, but others will feel really dark.

The black  borders, with a lighter, thin inner corner, frame these beautiful images very well. (Not everybody will call them beautiful, but I certainly do; I love landscape paintings and Mattioli takes the forest seriously). There are smudges of colour on the top and bottom of the frames: yellowish for the Majors and Coins, red for the Wands, blue-greenish for the Chalices, and grey for the Swords. Over these colour spots, the card numbers and suit symbols are printed. There is not one written word on the cards; even the court cards are represented by easily identifiable symbols. Even the font is rough, as though painted with a thin brush and oil colours.

The special touch is found on the backs of the cards. The artist has re-created the scene on the card in a black-and-white ink drawing. These are not simply reproductions of the card image but new works of art that focus on the main motif. These card backs have the same black borders and numbers, but without any colours. The images look even starker and bolder in black-and-white.

This is the most non-reversible way of presenting a tarot deck I have ever seen, and it might irritate some users. I personally never saw a problem in non-reversible card backs – all you have to do is close your eyes or simply not look at the cards, and that’s it. However, this deck really turns the non-reversible into a unique characteristic because you actually have two decks to work with.

You can switch between the fronts and backs when doing a reading, or you can simply disregard the backs.

Another way of incorporating these double-image cards would be by shuffling them wildly, mixing up the coloured and b/w sides, and reading them differently. The b/w images can represent the shadow side of the card.

Lucia Mattioli’s second deck, the Fairy Lights Tarot, is much more upbeat, has simple card backs and uses a much livelier colour palette. I like it as well, but I prefer the Tarot of the Secret Forest for its earthy honesty and ability to see the magic of untamed nature, even where it’s frightening or strange, or the brambles scratch your ankles. And the fairies have a life of their own. They don’t wait for us. Some don’t notice us, others are busy, and those who welcome us, like the Page of Cups, may have sinister purposes. The Page of Swords even seems threatening.

This deck reads well for me, especially for uncomfortable topics, self-reflection or thorny relationship issues. When you find yourself in a place in life where you’re not sure how to go on, when you tread carefully because you don’t know what’s going to crawl, fly or jump at you next, this deck will give you an idea how to go on.

The LWB won't give you much to work with, but if you like this deck, your intuition will kick in strongly, and the basic RWS meanings will also help you with this deck.