The Relative Tarot

I bought The Relative Tarot on my Mum’s birthday. It’s twenty-eight years since she passed and this year I will have lived longer without her than with her. So, while I have been drawn to ancestral work for a while now, in all honesty, this was a comfort buy. Though, having worked with it I now feel it was a guided purchase. When I flip through the deck it feels like home. That probably sounds a tad odd, but it is honestly the best way I can describe it. These aren’t cards, they’re people, and they want to be heard. So they talk. They talk a lot, and I love listening to what they have to say.

The Relative Tarot deck

Inspired by Mary K. Greer’s Archetypal Tarot and Angeles Arrien’s The Tarot Handbook the emphasis of The Relative Tarot, whilst still a traditional tarot deck, is to encourage you to create your tarot blueprint. And, I have used The Relative Tarot in this way. However, I use this deck as a reliable portal into ancestral work more so than anything else. For me, used in that way, it talks and it talks and it talks. Pair it with Carrie Paris’s other deck, The Beloved Dead, and it becomes even more powerful for this type of work.

Physical aspects

Nevertheless it is also a standard RWS based deck. So much so that details from the RWS drawings are included on many of the cards. I find these inclusions ground the images as they provide a point of focus for the messages that come through. This is great because it helps shape the conversation, which, once started, takes on a life of its own. Possibly even more importantly, collaging the vintage photos with drawn elements, created landscapes, and celestial overlays transports me to a liminal space where I feel safe and welcomed. This probably influences my overall impression of the deck.

For example, I’m not normally a fan of borders but I actually like how these frame the scene. They also ensure the titles and the included numerological associations are clear. The numbers to the left correspond with the Major Arcana and those to the right with the Minors. This feels a little superfluous but since they don’t chunk into the card in any way I don’t find them to be an issue.

The suits follow standard RWS nominations — Pentacles, Swords, Cups and Wands — with Kings, Queens, Knights and Pages for the Court. To cater to various people’s approaches, this is an 82 card deck. There are two Strength cards (VIII & XI) and two Justice cards (VIII & XI) so you can choose the numbering that you like to work with. And, she has included three Lovers cards so you can select which one feels most applicable there too. I haven’t separated the additional cards from the deck as I find each speaks to me in a different way but the general idea is for you to do so.

Measuring 7.5cm x 12.5cm the cards are ever so slightly larger than standard size which is surprisingly noticeable, albeit not enough to make them unwieldly. Printed on semi-gloss cardstock with gold gilding they are nice to shuffle in any manner and they fan well.

As you can see above the card backs are similar in both the upright and reversed presentations but they are not truly reversible. When they are mixed and fanned this is more obvious than you may imagine. But this doesn’t bother me because for me The Relative Tarot is all about the people.

Individual cards

I have found there are various ways they reach out to me.

VIII Strength & IX The Hermit

Many of the cards visually remind me of people from my past. The woman on the Strength card reminds me of a childhood neighbour in both appearance and personality. Many underestimated her but she was strong in her own way. Personally I remember her kindness and as I look at this card I can see her loungeroom and hear her stories. As I write this I can hear her affirming the confusion I felt at certain stages growing up. I also see some of her flaws and it reminds me that you don’t have to be perfect to have a positive effect. This is something I needed to hear.

In The Hermit I see my Dad which surprises me. If you asked me to pick a card for my Dad it wouldn’t have been The Hermit but this card had me thinking of him in a different way. Now I can see an aspect of him that I hadn’t previously considered and I feel I am starting to unravel the meaning behind it. He popped up in my Cottage Magic Tarot review as well suggesting he’s been around me much more than I had ever realised. I just had to be ready and willing to listen.

Nine of Cups & Nine of Pentacles

Other cards speak to me through their energy or the artistic choices. The Nine of Cups is my Mae West card. No she’s not blond, but there’s something about her countenance that gives me Mae West vibes. Her contentment comes from her confidence.

Then there’s the Nine of Pentacles. This is such a powerful card for me because of one simple artistic choice — the pentacles in shadow. Placing a hood over a falcon’s head stops it from flying. What aspects of our shadow are doing the same thing?

It’s not what’s on the outside that defines your worth. It never was and it never will be!

Woman on the Nine of Pentacles

This is just a fraction of what she has had to say to me. I’m not sure who she is as yet but I feel she is just waiting for me to remove the barrier between us so she can remove the hood.

XX Judgement & Five of Wands

There are so many ways a card can speak to us. Music, I’m sure is familiar to many. When I looked at the Judgement card and saw the two trumpets I was thinking along the lines of two lineages which is actually four, then eight and so on when I heard, “There are two paths you can go by” which is a line from Stairway to Heaven. That took me down many, many paths. The bridge brought me back.

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one, and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll

The Five of Wands is probably the most direct. No-one wants to listen. But, what is not clear is why. Is it the wrong crowd or the wrong message or just a refusal to listen because the message conflicts with what we think we know or what we want to believe? As comforting as I find this deck, it isn’t always gentle.

A pairing

There are so many cards I could talk about but I thought instead I’d wrap up this section with a random pairing. Initially I had three but this post was getting long.

Nine of Wands & Six of Cups

As soon as I drew these cards the message came through — keep pushing through your own resistance, (the wind represents my thoughts), to get back to where you always knew you wanted to be. Your inner child doesn’t question whether what they want is considered acceptable by others. Conditioning hasn’t taken hold yet. This is such a beautiful card to me for so many reasons. Many personal messages come through as I look at this pairing but the overarching message holds true.

The Relative Tarot Guidebook

The 94 paged, full colour guidebook that accompanies The Relative Tarot is different to most. Titled The Relative Tarot: A guidebook for the diligent diviner, it focuses in on what Carrie Paris had in mind when designing the deck — creating a tarot blueprint. So, you won’t find the general information breakdowns for each card. Therefore, if you were hoping to use the deck as a standard tarot deck you will need either previous tarot knowledge or a willingness to locate the information elsewhere.

What’s in the book

Following an Introduction, the guidebook is broken into four sections:

1. The Major Arcana: Birth and Annual Cards
2. The Minor Arcana: Body, Heart, Mind and Spirit
3. The Court Cards: The Significator
4. The Nine Tarot Blueprints

Each section shares the information necessary to calculate the various numbers along with a brief example. Anyone familiar with numerology will already be comfortable with the process. Author Tina Hardt shows you how to calculate your birth card (based on your life path number), your inner and outer expression (which differs from the numerological approach), and your annual card (personal year number). The Blueprint Review makes the entire process clear.

Next she moves on to using Court cards as significators based on elemental Astrology and age rather than the zodiacal modalities (cardinal, fixed and mutable). In this system I am more likely to be the Queen of Pentacles than the King.

Cards are grouped according to number. Therefore, The Magician, The Wheel of Fortune, The Sun are together with the Aces and the Tens because they all reduce to a one. For each grouping there is a blueprint breakdown and keywords for the Major Arcana cards. There are also sections for the Blueprint’s soul urges, the shadow and the Minor Arcana number.

Example: V The Hierophant & XIV Temperance

I’ll use The Hierophant and Temperance as the example. I won’t share the full list of keywords for The Hierophant and Temperance but here are a few for each, followed by the Blueprint’s Soul Urges, Shadow, and Fives entries.

HIEROPHANT:  Teacher. Student. Acolyte. School and university. Problem-solving. Truth and spirituality. Orthodoxy. Spiritual leader. Knowledge passed through the filter of an institution. Conformist.

TEMPERANCE:  Moderation. Synthesis of chalk and cheese in pursuit of a middle ground. Alchemy of getting it right for self and others. Tempering reactionary behaviour. Putting Humpty Dumpty together again. Mining for inner spiritual resources. 

BLUEPRINT'S SOUL URGES:  Experiential wisdom. Making knowledge accessible. Searching for ideals. Destruction and creative reconstruction of conventional beliefs, ideas, and knowledge. Evolution from student to an enlightened teacher. Iconoclasm, Pursuit of perfection. Causes that aid humanity. Compassion. 

SHADOW:  Dogma. Prejudice and bias. Fear of getting it wrong. Rigidity. Reliance on accepted ways of acting and thinking. The path of least resistance. Submission. Rebels with or without a cause. Resistance to accessing natural gifts of intuition and empathy. Sanctimoniousness. Self-absorption. 

FIVES:  Disruption of the status quo and complacency. "Wants to be Divine". Initiations of defeat, loss, scarcity, and failure, which lead to transcendence and the discovery of your true voice as a teacher and healer. 

As you can see there is no differentiation between the individual fives even though their energies are different. But The Relative Tarot could have come with no book and I wouldn’t have cared.

Wrapping it all up

The Relative Tarot spoke to me from the very first flip through and it hasn’t stopped talking since. But this isn’t a voice coming from “out there” somewhere. It is the voice of those close to my heart with messages only they could give me. Along with Carrie Paris’s other deck, The Beloved Dead: An oracle for divining ancestral wisdom, The Relative Tarot has influenced my tarot practice more than any other decks I own. I have a few decks I use for ancestral work (Rosebud Tarot, Cosmic Seed Tarot especially), but this is on a whole other level. To be fair, that is probably because I am ready now in a way I hadn’t been previously.

Even though I began with numerology seven years prior to tarot, thanks to a twenty-first birthday present from my Mum, I don’t use The Relative Tarot in its prescribed manner. Though it definitely serves its intended purpose for me. On the back of the box, pictured below, the first line reads:

Discover your true potential by connecting with your beloved ancestors.

And, wow, it has lived up to its premise. If ancestral work appeals to you at all, and my personal experience is anything to go by, I cannot recommend this deck highly enough.

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Publishing details

Created by: Carrie Paris with Tina Hardt

Published by: Originally a Kickstarter, the pictured version is the mass market edition published by Weiser Books in 2021

ISBN: 978-1-57863-762-1