Guardian Tarot — Beth Seilonen
A complete 78-card tarot in the standard Rider-Waite-Smith structure, painted in watercolor and published by Red Feather in 2017. Twenty-two Major Arcana, four suits of Wands, Swords, Cups and Pentacles, full Page-Knight-Queen-King courts. The guidebook gives upright and reversed meanings for every card.
What you get
- 78 tarot cards, 3" x 4½"
- 104-page guidebook, organized by arcana and suit, with spreads for personal development work
- Rigid two-piece lift-off box with ribbon pull tab, 3.5" x 5"
- New, factory sealed
- ISBN 9780764353864, Red Feather / Schiffer Publishing
- Shipping weight 0.86 lb
About the deck
The guardians are tree-people: rooted, branch-crowned, painted in loose watercolor washes of blue, violet and green. Most of them have no eyes. The publisher's own copy calls the imagery disquieting; readers tend to either fall hard for these figures or find they can't sit with them.
The card names and running order follow Rider-Waite-Smith, so if that's the system you learned, you'll always know where you are in the deck. The paintings don't reproduce RWS scenes, though, which means the visual memory hooks you may rely on (the figure walking away from the cups, the swords in the back) aren't waiting for you here. The guidebook brings the meanings instead. Reading this deck runs on atmosphere and text more than on scene recall.
Provenance & tradition
Beth Seilonen is a University of Maine, Orono graduate who has produced more than 100 decks since 2007, most of them in small self-published runs. Red Feather, Schiffer Publishing's mind-body-spirit imprint out of Atglen, Pennsylvania, gave this one a full trade printing, which makes it one of the few Seilonen decks available at ordinary retail rather than through collector resale.
The tree guardians are Seilonen's own imagery, developed for this deck.
Who this is for
Readers who already know the 78 and want an atmospheric deck for shadow work, ancestor work, grief reading, autumn and Samhain-season practice, or any working rooted in trees and green spaces. Collectors of independent-artist decks. A good gift for someone who already owns the standard decks and wants a different mood on the table. Workable for a beginner, since every card gets upright and reversed text, though a Rider-Waite clone will teach card meanings faster.
