Story
The Forest Enby Tarot hopes to create a space where everyone can feel included: non-binary and binary alike. I have struggled with gender my entire life and always felt repelled by overly gendered notions about what I can and can't do. I found these feelings spill over into tarot and I wanted to create a deck that stripped all that away and just left the basic concepts of the card.
So, I took a couple years to conceptualize in my head, get over my own fear, aimlessly sketch, and then finally buckle down for 8 months straight to draw an anthropomorphized androgynous animal deck with a gender-neutral titling on each card. I've created a place where I can see myself in tarot. I hope that you will see yourself in here too!
The deck consists of 78 full colour 2.75"x4.75" tarot cards with silver gilt edging on superior smooth premium quality card stock with black-core center layer, and a lot of love.
I took special pains with the titling of Major Arcana and Court Cards. I didn't want to rename every card, but the cards that felt like they had unequal and pointless gender roles attached. Examples include:
The Empress → The Creator
The Emperor → The Protector
The Hanged Man → The Hanged Moth
Queen → Sage
King → Monarch
In this deck, sages and monarchs are co-leaders. One is an intuitive mentor and advisor, and the other is more of an extroverted leader, but both have a symbiotic relationship, like two halves of a whole. In my mind I thought of King Arthur and Merlin - both were powerful in their own ways and both were equal and needed each other.
Each suit has its own colour palette, which is a facet of the major arcana palette. In addition, I picked an animal species that embodies the spirit of the element of that suit:
- Wands (fire): hares
- Swords (air): bats
- Cups (water): cats
- Pentacles (earth): chickens
binx olsen, the creator, is a professional non-binary sea hag with three chickens (lil waffles, steven, and franny), a cat named keeb (for this week at least) and a dog named doots
*SOLD OUT Forest Enby Tarot - Jenn Olsen - INDIE Deck
Murray, UT - USA