Hello Kitty Tarot redux (or if you dream it, it will come)

The IT Deck is sort of a myth, I’ve dis­cov­ered. I didn’t actu­ally take to the cards until I spent a great deal of time focus­ing on ONE tarot deck for awhile — that was the Mor­gan Greer. The Aquar­ian is a very close sec­ond, and I recently was able to pro­cure my opti­mum ver­sion of that one — the Mor­gan Press edi­tion with the orange Ouroboros backs (I see a new hor­ri­ble tat­too in my future…).

Tarot peo­ple look out for each other. That’s one of the biggest advan­tages to net­work­ing in this field. My beau­ti­fully aged Mor­gan Greer was a gift from some­one who knew of my tastes. My dream Aquar­ian came from a dealer who had caught wind that I was stalk­ing around for this par­tic­u­lar edi­tion, found one and gave me a deal. Peo­ple begin to learn your tastes; even your BAD ones. Actu­ally, I’ve been sort of infa­mous for my bad taste in most things most of my life any­way (music, men, tat­toos, tarots…). So it’s no sur­prise I get sent a great deal of adorable kawaii stuff.

I’ve posted on this sub­ject before. Some­where in the late 90s or early 00s (I couldn’t track down an exact date, though I found a review by Wicce on archive.org that was dated May ’00), an artist named Joe Ros­ales drew and printed up a 78 card Sanrio-themed tarot. I can’t imag­ine what the recep­tion for the cards was like (I was only vaguely aware of the inter­net in 1999). Even­tu­ally, from what I gather, San­rio shut down sales of the cards. The boot­leg was boot­legged and you can still see clones float­ing around etsy.com and ebay from time to time.

I was gifted one of these clones, a col­ored, highly lam­i­nated ver­sion from etsy.com prob­a­bly four years ago. It was so awful (organza bag. Pointy cor­ners) that I deemed it unus­able. Highly inde­struc­tible though, I gave it to my then one-year old daugh­ter, who even­tu­ally gummed it into oblivion.

Freyja’s First Tarot Reading

Shortly there­after, another tarot-friend in Japan sent me a copy of the offi­cial Sanrio-produced Hello Kitty Tarot. Though over­joyed I was, I do admit to a bit of dis­ap­point­ment about the size, stock and imagery selected for the cards. To say noth­ing of the fact that it was Majors-only. And try as I might, to this day I still can’t get any­thing good out of a Majors-only read­ing. These decks were obvi­ously not designed by tarot read­ers for tarot read­ings though. They were cre­ated by mar­keters and hired illus­tra­tors to move HK merch. If you’re a col­lec­tor of Hello Kitty Krap though, you may be inter­ested in adding this to your col­lec­tion (I also have the Lit­tle Twin Stars Majors set that San­rio did — it is equally dis­ap­point­ing and equally precious).

Which brings us to last week, when an art stu­dent in Utah of all cute-forsaken places, emails me. Turns out she found a boot­leg copy of Joe’s deck, redrew and recol­ored the cards and had some copies made at her uni­ver­sity print shop and would I be inter­ested in one? It’s in a shim­mery pur­ple bag, she mentioned.

Hello, you had me at shim­mery pur­ple bag.

Com­pared to the offi­cial San­rio cards — well, there really is no comparison.

Because aside from the Majors, this deck has 56 minor cards, beau­ti­fully ren­dered and totally usable.

Boot­leg of a boot­leg aside, the deck is lovely and I finally have in my hands a work­ing, 78 card Hello Kitty deck. Brit­tany, the artist behind this ver­sion of the cards, says she used her Thoth tarot as inspi­ra­tion for col­or­ing — which is appar­ent in a few cards (the High Priest­ess espe­cially) and may be the best thing to come from the Thoth EVER (I’m expect­ing hate mail now from you Thothy-types now!). The cards seem big­ger than the other boot­leg HK deck I had and the paper is a lovely, UV coated stock that shuf­fles like a dream.

IT Deck? Hard to say. While it’s per­fect size for my purse, I’m hav­ing a hard time imag­in­ing myself sit­ting across from a sob­bing quer­ent, spilling the con­tents of her tor­mented soul and beg­ging for divine guid­ance, and then bust­ing out some Hello Kitty on her.

How happy am I to have it though?