The Healing Tarot: 78 Ways to Wellness
Juno Lucina, illustrated by Monica Knighton · Schiffer · ISBN 9780764343926
The guidebook is the reason to buy this set. It runs 192 pages at full 6 by 9 inch trade size, in dense two-column text, and it works each card through four separate frames: traditional meaning, astrological attribution, Qabalistic attribution, and archetypal reading. Upright and reversed for all 78.
What you get
- 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana with full courts
- Black-and-white ink line art throughout
- 192-page companion guidebook, 6 × 9 inches
- Weight: 1.5 lbs
- Complete and ready to read out of the box
About the deck and the art
Monica Knighton draws in pen and ink with heavy crosshatching, and the cards are printed in black and white with no color at all. In a market where nearly every new deck arrives saturated and gilded, that puts the whole reading weight on line, gesture, and symbol. The tone runs wry rather than solemn: figures caught mid-mistake, small visual jokes worked into the scenes, an eye for the absurd side of the situation each card describes.
The imagery follows recognizable Rider-Waite-Smith scene logic, so a reader trained on RWS will read these cards without relearning anything. What shifts is the interpretive layer and its focus on health. The guidebook asks each card the same question, which is what this card has to say about the body and about the work of getting well.
Readers who like to alter their decks should know that black-and-white line art on card stock takes colored pencil unusually well.
Provenance and tradition
Monica Knighton is an Austin, Texas illustrator whose tarot work includes the Tarot of the Dead and The Stolen Child Tarot, both known for dense linework and a strong narrative sensibility. Juno Lucina is a pen name; the same author produced The Kingdom Within Tarot, The Alchemy of Tarot, and Frame This Oracle.
The astrological and Qabalistic material in the guidebook places this book in the correspondence stream that runs from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn through Waite and Crowley: planetary and zodiacal attributions for the Majors, sephirothic assignments for the numbered Minors, elemental dignities for the courts.
Who this is for
Students who want a correspondence reference and are willing to buy a deck to get one. Readers who work reflectively rather than predictively, using cards for journaling, for daily draws, and for thinking through their own relationship to rest, care, and the body. Collectors of black-and-white and line-art decks. People who color their decks.
This deck is a tool for reflection. It does not diagnose anything, it does not treat anything, and it is not a substitute for a doctor, a therapist, or any other clinician.
