Review Persian Tarot from Miss Indira from

The game is delivered in a soft cardboard box. The cards are satin and glossy. A small booklet is slipped into the box.

Created in 1981, the game consists of 55 cards. It is freely inspired by a classic card deck with French brands. Indeed the spades become scimitars, the squares become sickles, the hearts are preserved and the clubs could be écus, knowing that the King and Queen of Clubs exists as such. The sign cards therefore include pip cards and court cards. In addition, there is a series of cards associated with no sign as is the Major Arcana of the Tarot. The comparison with a classic deck of cards or even a Tarot stops there because for the rest, this oracle proposes archetypes and symbols rather far from the divinatory Tarot or even from a Lenormand.

The illustrations of the deck are set in the universe of the thousand and one nights. In that, this game is original and denotes the current production very anchored in the medieval-fantastic and Celtic or steampunk universes.

The small booklet is translated into 3 languages: French, English, German. Each translation is spread over a dozen pages. This makes the booklet very summary in its descriptions and explanations.

The 55 cards are explained on 12 pages. Each card is explained with a black and white thumbnail of its illustration and a few keywords. Some cards have an additional text on its meaning in association with other cards. Obviously, a practitioner who wants to deepen the use of this game will have to acquire a more complete guide. Unless he relies on his only intuition to interpret the cards.

The booklet offers 3 printing methods that are not named :

• Method #1 : This method offers a whole ceremony to draw 14 cards from the deck. First of all, the sequence is like a movie scene where a gypsy woman would make a complex spread of cards. Then I find it excessive to draw 14 cards in this way, especially since none of them has any role or function assigned to them. The interpretation of the spread is therefore left to the free appreciation of the reader, who may find himself confused by a method obviously intended for experienced users of divination.
• Method #2 : The second method does not do any better than the first, focusing primarily on the art of selecting the cards through a ritual and form that seems to have passed from the past. Nor does this method propose a role or function for each location.
• Method #3 : This method makes you smile because it allows you to try your luck at the lottery and the trifecta by predicting the numbers that will come out !

Despite the fact that the edition of the game is recent, the booklet has obviously remained in its 80s style, with a use exclusively for clairvoyance or prediction in a setting that seems obsolete today. I regret that the publisher has made no effort to update the booklet and offer a more modern point of view. Even if we know that this kind of leaflet has in any case little added value, here by its obsolescence, it totally discredits the game.

For once we have animals other than the lion, like the tiger and the panther to evoke the archetype of the big feline. Nothing so that these cards deserve our interest. Concerning the black panther that speaks of jealousy and sensuality, I find it a pity that the author stopped at a meaning taken from popular culture, without trying to evoke anything else through this animal. Of course it is up to the reader to grasp the archetype and meaning of the panther. But here again, the booklet does not do the game any favors.

The Fish Wheel is rather original in its concept even if its meaning is largely borrowed from the Tarot's "Wheel of Fortune".

I appreciate the presence of this symbol which is quite well known but rarely used in a divinatory card game. I regret however that one of the meanings of the card which is "luck" is probably too close to the meaning of the "fish wheel" card. Here again, we would have liked a more in-depth work on the divinatory dimension of the deck, either in coherence or in diversity.

There are 4 cards with 1, 3, 7, or 9 owls in the deck. It is undoubtedly original and even intriguing. But on closer reading of the booklet, in search of meaning for these 4 cards, the reader has only a few disparate keywords. And it's hard to understand the common thread of the cards. Let's say that we can think of a meaning close to "newness" (the bird being seen as a kind of messenger). But then what about the Peacock card that has precisely this meaning? Don't these owl cards duplicate the Peacock card? Moreover, according to what we can read in the booklet, the 3 owls card is negative, while the 7 owls card is positive, without being able to understand why.

The two cards seem too redundant to me even if they both basically speak of a different symbolism, on one side the boat and on the other side the island. But without any additional reference and without adding other symbols, the cards talk about the same things, since you have to take the boat to go to the island, one doesn't go without the other. These two symbols should have been merged into a single card

Very clearly, all these cards seem to carry the same meanings. A bird remains a bird in its symbolism. The absence of additional details (except for the letter in the peacock's beak) prevents us from nuancing the interpretation of each of these cards.

On this card, we find again two owl faces. One can wonder about the diversity of symbols used in this oracle. Is it enough? Certainly the symbolism of the torch, which is of the order of lighting what is hidden, comes of course to reinforce the symbolism of the owl that sees in the night. But we already have the cards of the Peacock, the 3 Swallows, the 1, 3, 7, 9 owls which all announce the arrival of new events. Since the oracle itself is a divinatory tool that can announce and predict future events, what is the point of making and designing such cards ? We don't want to know that something is going to happen, we imagine it and we are already waiting for it, but we want to know what is going to happen ...