A Conversation With James Wanless

The author of the authoritative Encyclopedia of Tarot and other books about the Tarot - cards used the world over for divination - speaks with us about his research into this fascinating treasury of art and history.

The Monthly Aspectarian: James, you are the creator of the Voyager deck, one of the more popular of the recently created decks. What is the difference between your deck and what we think of as the standard deck, the Rider-Waite?

James Wanless: There's a big difference -- not in the organization of the cards -- there's still the same number of cards and the four suits, but I wanted to take the Tarot out of the medieval world of kings and queens and swords and castles and bring it into the contemporary world . . . and also get it out of just a bunch of white people running around in Europe. Voyager is very transracial; it's universal. A lot of Tarot decks are very particular, very specific. They're medieval, or feminist, there's a Mayan deck, a Buddhist deck, a cat people deck -- and I said, "Let's make this Tarot big, let's try to include as many kinds of people and cultures as possible." If you look at the cards, you'll see a lot of really ancient sculpture as well as a lot of very modern scientific, technological stuff. I tried to make it as broad as possible. That's how it mainly differs.

TMA: So you drew images from different places but it's still the Magician, it's still . . .

JL: Right, but in the Magician, who is the classic mythological god Mercury, instead of a painted figure with winged feet, for example, I've got the planet Mercury pictured. A lot of Voyager symbolism is very literal and it's collage art, so it's pictures out of a magazine. It comes from our real world.

TMA: You were the creator -- and you had an artist working with you?

JL: Right, Ken Knutson, who knew zero about the Tarot -- which is the Fool in the Tarot -- which was great; he had a very open and intuitive mind about it, whereas I came from a place of knowing what I wanted to create, so there was a wonderful working combination of the Fool and myself classically as the Emperor archetype. When you have the Fool and the Emperor working together -- if they can work together -- you really have something special.

TMA: Here's a question I've asked Stuart Kaplan as well. What do you think about the plethora of new decks out now that are not Tarot?

JL: I think they're great, they're terrific. I'm all for these kinds of tools. Anything that can help us discover ourselves . . . some of the medicine cards and all of those may not be great for involved readings, but they're an excellent one-card-a-day practice just to see the qualities within from the animal symbolism. But I don't feel they really take you in depth into contemporary issues.

TMA: There seemed to be a direction being followed by people a few years ago to create decks for themselves, using any kind of images that struck them as important.

JL: And that's really wonderful as well. I'm very open to people creating their own symbologies. Ultimately, that's what it's about, people finding their own symbols and metaphors that give them power and insight into their lives. The most powerful practice for me was actually making the Voyager deck. You really have to get into the consciousness of those archetypes and those qualities in order to produce them.

TMA: There's also the fact that all of the divinatory arts work by analogy, and if you know the analogies, you can read cracks in the sidewalk.

JL: Oh absolutely, clearly. The thing about an oracle, whether it's a Tarot deck or coffee grounds or cracks in the sidewalk, they're just symbols that invite us to entertain our own intuition. They're just triggers to our own insight in terms of who we are, so it really doesn't make any difference what it is. That's not important. It's what it does in terms of your own self discovery process.

TMA: I know that many of the creators of Tarot decks these days are not really Tarot people but artists.

JL: That certainly does happen. It's not too often that you see a modern Tarot deck done by an active professional Tarot teacher or consultant. There are a lot of collectors out there, so a lot of Tarot decks are made by artists for the purpose of collection.

For me, it's a very practical, everyday tool. I pick a card a day as my mirror, as my ally, as my insight, my message for the day, and take action on it. For me, the whole thing about the Tarot is, what are you going to do about what you've learned? What's the action, what's the intuition? And there's "into action," and I'm very much into using symbols to trigger the action for the day. For example, my card for today was "dullness." In the Voyager deck, it's a bunch of rocks and stones. Ordinarily, it's like, oh, this looks like a dull day . . . but for me, it's a day of doing some of the business aspects such as sending out mailings, etc., that may not be the most exciting but need to be done. So today is just laying back and doing the kind of mundane work which we all have to do.

TMA: And this is the day I pick to call you!
(laughter)
JL: Well, you're exciting, what can we say! The dull business has already happened.

The other thing about Voyager, let me just say, and one of the bad raps about Tarot in general, is that it can be seen as very negative. People can use it very abusively. There's people being stabbed with swords and all of that. In Voyager, we got rid of all the Swords; it's called Crystals. Instead of kings and queens and knights, it's the human family of mother and father and child, grandmother, grandfather. It's really to be used positively. Let's say I get a so-called negative card like disappointment or maybe even dullness or whatever, it's to be seen as yes, this quality exists and now how can I transform that into opportunity? How can I grow from that? Voyager is a very positive philosophy and psychology.

TMA: I'm sitting here trying to figure out which card in the traditional Tarot corresponds to dullness.

JL: There may not be a traditional card. I took some liberties with the so-called minor arcana. What I was trying to create was a psychology, a map of the human psyche. For example, you have these personality archetypes: there's the magician type and the emperor type and the fool type and the priestess type . . . you know, all these various types.

TMA: So the major arcana have retained all their same names?

JL: Yes, and what I wanted to do with the minor arcana is to make them into personality qualities of those archetypes.

TMA: Did you use four suits?

JL: Yes, four suits.

TMA: Do they correspond to the four elements?

JL: Yes, but instead of, for example, discs for Pentacles in traditional Tarot, in Voyager they're called worlds, which are actual, physical planets pictured to represent our material worldly life as in traditional Tarot but it's just different symbolism.

TMA: And for the other suits?

JL: Instead of Swords, which represent the mental, I used Crystals for the mind. Cups are cups for the heart and the emotions, and Wands are wands for spirit, but in Voyager, the wands are everything from totem poles to redwood trees to lightning rods to -- they're not just funny-looking sticks.

TMA: The Five of Wands would be the lightning rods?

JL: In the Voyager deck, it's the Man of Wands, the actor, I call him, which would be the Knight of Wands in the traditional Tarot. This is the firebrand, the revolutionary, the activist who brings the new insight through and moves on it and makes things happen -- in the symbolism of the lightning rod.

There are other differences. In Voyager it's not abstract art, it's very real, pictures from around our entire universe. On the back of the cards is a picture of DNA, of our human genetic chromosomes, and it's awesome because for me it represents when you go into a Tarot deck, you're dipping into the human gene pool. All cards are true of all people at all times as long as you're looking at them as a mirror of who you are and not as a prediction tool.

TMA: The way I usually put that is that the Tarot cards tell the now . . .

JL: Yes, exactly.

TMA: . . . and you've got time to change.

JL: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. It's like, who am I now? What's going on now?

TMA: So it's not telling the future, except it tells the future if you don't change.

JL: And some people don't! In the old world, the future was a lot easier to foretell. There wasn't so much change.

TMA: People had many fewer options.

JL: Exactly. In our day, anything can happen. We're free to go anywhere and be anyone, so it's very hard to predict unless we're locked into these patterns.

I like also not only to use the cards for the present but proactively: to plan for how to create the future. Not so much what's going to happen, but how to create what it is that you want to have happen. So Voyager is much more of a creativity tool, a proactive tool, than a passive prediction thing.