Pagan Phoenix - The English Magic Tarot

The venue for the Conference was at the back of the main building, through Stately Wayne Manor. The room has a bar area as you come in, with a sunken area in the middle with seating facing a stage, and two levels at the far end. Stalls selling all sorts of wonderful stuff were ranged round the sides of the hall. There were pyrography boxes and wands and jewellery and books and CDs and knitted goods and spell packs. Near the door was a big loaf sculpted into the shape of a phoenix, and made by one of the people at the Conference, who is a baker. There was also a table with prizes for a raffle, to raise money for two young people who are going to Kenya to do volunteer work soon. The raffle raised over £300 for them.

The proceedings opened with an Isis prayer, in Ancient Egyptian and English, and the first speaker was Andy Letcher, who wrote the book to go with the English Magic Tarot deck. In fact, he is immortalised as The Fool in the deck. The artist is Rex van Ryn, who has also been a student of Tarot for many years. He used to be a comic artist on 2000AD, so the pictures have that comic art look, with clean lines and a simple colour palette created by Steve Dooley. They just happen to be neighbours of Andy's in Devon.
The method he used to create the deck was interesting. He would meditate on a single card each morning, for about twenty minutes, and then he would sketch whatever came to mind. Which meant that, when Andy Letcher came to write the book, he had to rationalise why there were squirrels on one card, or why hares kept coming up in others. The style of the cards is consistently set in the period from the Reformation to the Restoration in English history, a hey day of English magic.
He also revives a Renaissance technique (used in the TV series Sherlock) of the memory palace, where magicians memorised things by imagining a building and placing images in certain places within it - he said it was also a way of looking at the cards differently so the reader could see different things within them.

I did write down the name of the artist who illustrated the traditional Rider-Waite pack, - she was Pamela Colwell-Smith, a member of the Golden Dawn who also illustrated actors in the days before photography was common - so she was good at showing people in action (in this case, the actors playing their parts).
The illustrator of the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot deck was another woman, Lady Freda Harris, and she had to incorporate some very precise imagery for each card.
However, Andy Letcher said that all sorts of things could be used to do a reading - including a jar full of buttons!

He also talked about meeting his hero Kit Williams, when a public footpath led him across the artist's garden. He was responsible for Masquerade, the picture book that gave clues to the whereabouts of a golden hare. The hare is now owned by some multi-national company, but they did bring it out to put it on display recently, so he got to see it up close ("the big guy lurking in the background of the photo was the security guard").