Reflections on Patrick Valenza´s book: The Deviant Moon Tarot

 

The below images are from the beautiful book on “The Deviant Moon Tarot”, by artist Patrick Valenza.

This tarot deck has become quite fascinating to me. In the book Valenza tells that the creation of the deck has been a lifelong journey. It began in the mid-1970s when he was nine years old. He was in a shopping mall with his parents and discovered his first tarot deck in an obscure corridor of the mall. He knew that he had to possess whatever lay hidden inside that mystical cardboard box.

Then the rise of the Deviant Moon began, and Valenza started painting the first illustrations at a very young age. Hereafter he began using digital photo manipulations of photos from cemeteries, a nearby abandoned insane asylum and places across Long Island, New York. The tombstone photos began to become the capes, boots, hats and robes worn by the Deviant Moon citizens. Photos from the insane asylum, and long island, created the background buildings pictured in the cards. Rotted doors, windows and walls became castles, factories and cities.

Valenza tells that he, as a child, felt he was born with past-life memories. Visions of an insane harlequin dancing through a Venetian canal had always been a part of his childhood imagination:

When Valenza tells about the chess game found in the Ten of Pentacles, and that his inspiration for the machine found in the Eight of Pentacles came from one of his favorite teenage drawings, I myself come to think of my free ebook: The Godgame.

The Chess Game:

The Machine:

When you see Valenza´s satirical “newspaper adds” I myself come to think about “the signs from the rebels”: wall paintings, graffiti, weird adds, etc., that inspire you to drop out of the Machine, or the Hamster Wheel, and find your way to an unmapped Pirate Utopia: