I recently bought the Genuino Tarot con la Santisima Muerte from an Ebay dealer. There are a growing number of decks dealing with death in this stylised form. La SantÃsima Muerte (Saint Death) is a religious figure, I believe primarily in South American Catholicism, who receives petitions and bestows good luck, and provides protection against evil. A number of decks seem to be drawing on this popular religious idea. As with many of the trinkets of popular Catholicism, these images are rather undistinguished artistically. The imagery here appears to have been created in one of the low quality graphics programs as any angled line shows the stepping we all knew well in the computer graphics of the 1980's (pre 300 dpi laser printers). This gives the imagery a retro look (though probably unintentional on the part of the publishers). The designs for the 22 cards are quite conventional, but with Saint Death, in the form of a skeleton with scythe, added to the imgery of each card.
This is not a deck to buy for its artistic merit, but it is one of the few to emerge from Mexico, so I think it is quite collectable and I am pleased to have it in my collection. It is inexpensive. It will probably disappear quite quickly from view and consequently become difficult to find in a few year time. Perhaps someone will come up with a Kokopelli Tarot - that would be a neat parallel.
It was rather difficult extracting the tarot from the packaging without damaging the fragile box it comes in. I used a sharp blade to cut through the masses of sellotape, and have the box stay in one piece. Any force will rip the thin cardboard of the box.
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 Last edited on Thu Feb 14th, 2008 03:57 pm by AdamMcLean
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