How this deck speaks

One way of looking

Every deck has a visual grammar of its own. Olivia’s cards look carved: ivory figures in low relief, set into polished lapis lazuli, under a night sky flecked with gold. The card pages describe what that carving shows, symbol by symbol, and this course takes those descriptions seriously.

What follows is one way of looking, not a secret code and not a statement of what the artist meant. Nobody hands you a key. You are training your eye, and your eye is allowed to disagree. The reward is practical: a deck you read closely gives you more to say than one you read from memory. Describe The Fool from a Waite-Smith book and you will talk about a sun that is not on this card, and miss the gold star that is.

Ivory, lapis, gold

Ask three questions of any card, in this order. First, what is ivory? Figures, animals and the things they hold are usually carved in ivory, so this is where the gestures and choices sit: the Fool’s staff gripped, his rose held low, the slack rein on The Sun’s horse.

Second, what is carved into the stone? Landscape, walls, trees and water are cut into the lapis itself, in lighter or greyer blues. Sometimes an element you might picture as bright sinks into the stone instead. On The Sun the sunflowers are blue-grey lapis, not gold. On The Fool the swallows are the pale grey-blue of the lapis, not ivory. You can read such things as part of the setting rather than actors in the scene.

Third, where is the gold? This deck spends gold sparingly, so where it lands, the eye goes. On Temperance the largest area of gold is an upward-pointing triangle on the breast of the robe. On the Two of Wands even the taller wand is grey-blue lapis, not ivory; beyond the scattered stars, the only gold is the bud opening in gilded leaves at its tip.

The night under every scene

Lapis brings its own sky: gold flecks of pyrite, pale mineral veins, hairline cracks. Card after card sets its scene under that lapis night, The Sun included, where a gold face with closed eyes fills the upper sky and a band of silvery chips still crosses the lapis beside it. One reading the Symbol Trails offer: daylight in this deck shines inside the night rather than erasing it. On many cards the flecks gather into a band that reads as the Milky Way, which is not a traditional tarot symbol at all but part of this deck’s own language.

A caution. Some of what you see is the stone’s texture rather than a carved choice. Give most weight to what has been shaped, such as a cut star or a gilded bud. Notice the veins and flecks, but do not build a reading on a crack alone.

Where Olivia departs

The Olivia deck follows the Waite-Smith compositions closely enough that you will recognise most scenes. The departures are where it pays to slow down. The Fool’s face is tipped towards a gold star where Pamela Colman Smith drew a sun. Smith crowned her Empress with twelve stars; here the twelve small ivory stars stand apart in a ring against the lapis, framing a plain pointed crown. The Fool’s swallows are Olivia’s own addition. The tradition section on each card page describes the older designs, so you can set them beside the carving yourself.

Treat a departure as a question, not a correction of the older deck and not a hidden message. What shifts if the Fool steers by a star rather than walking in daylight? Keep both in view: the Waite-Smith lineage tells you what readers have said for over a century, and the carving in front of you gives you something particular to look at.

Follow a Symbol Trail

A Symbol Trail follows one image across the deck: the star, the sun, the Milky Way, the hand, the threshold, the crown. There are twenty-eight of them. Each opens with the image’s history, then walks card by card, noticing where it sits and what it is made of. The star trail moves from The Fool’s gold star to the ungilded star cut into the wall on the Two of Wands, and ends on The Star, where a great eight-pointed gold star is arched over by seven smaller stars cut in pale silvery blue, not gilded.

Trails train exactly the attention this lesson asks for. They also help in a spread: when the same image turns up in two cards, compare its material and position before you decide what the pair says together.