Spirit Inquiry - Chinese Folk Tarot
Number of Cards: 80
Recommended: Use with Upright and Reversed Meanings
Supports Hidden Additional Cards
[Spirit Inquiry] Tarot is an original deck illustrated by Fool Maker Studio. It is a Rider-Waite-inspired tarot deck that draws inspiration from Chinese folk culture, combining the Rider-Waite system and card meanings to present a Chinese-style tarot deck rich in traditional folk characteristics.
Spirit Inquiry — Touching the warmth of civilization within the folds between life and death.
When paper horses carry wandering souls into the River of Oblivion, and when the bottom of a spirit-invoking rice bowl reveals final words that were never spoken, we finally come to understand that the Chinese reverence for life and death has long since turned into wisps of smoke, lingering within the very bones and blood of civilization.
Creating a tarot deck about folk spirituality has always been something I wanted to do. My previous two original tarot decks focused on deities, while this time I chose to focus on another realm that people have described since ancient times as the place where souls exist after death — the underworld.
In the village where I grew up, traditional funeral customs were still deeply preserved. Completing the entire funeral ritual usually took about seven days. Over those seven days, the adults were especially busy and exhausted, while we children simply kept following along — kneeling, bowing, and offering incense. At the time, I felt funerals were so tiring, and my knees hurt every day. But now when I think back on it, I only feel that it was only after the entire ritual had been completed that we were truly able to say goodbye properly to the departed.
In this design of the four suits, Cups become the spirit-invoking rice bowls that can communicate between the worlds of the living and the dead; Wands become incense burning in blessing rituals; Pentacles transform into underworld paper money used across the three realms; and Swords are refined into gleaming silver needles that can both heal and harm. Every stroke seems to become a summoning of lost rituals.
Are those rituals labeled as “superstition” in fact a code through which humanity speaks with impermanence?
Download Cosmara to unlock this deck
Recommended: Use with Upright and Reversed Meanings
Supports Hidden Additional Cards
[Spirit Inquiry] Tarot is an original deck illustrated by Fool Maker Studio. It is a Rider-Waite-inspired tarot deck that draws inspiration from Chinese folk culture, combining the Rider-Waite system and card meanings to present a Chinese-style tarot deck rich in traditional folk characteristics.
Spirit Inquiry — Touching the warmth of civilization within the folds between life and death.
When paper horses carry wandering souls into the River of Oblivion, and when the bottom of a spirit-invoking rice bowl reveals final words that were never spoken, we finally come to understand that the Chinese reverence for life and death has long since turned into wisps of smoke, lingering within the very bones and blood of civilization.
Creating a tarot deck about folk spirituality has always been something I wanted to do. My previous two original tarot decks focused on deities, while this time I chose to focus on another realm that people have described since ancient times as the place where souls exist after death — the underworld.
In the village where I grew up, traditional funeral customs were still deeply preserved. Completing the entire funeral ritual usually took about seven days. Over those seven days, the adults were especially busy and exhausted, while we children simply kept following along — kneeling, bowing, and offering incense. At the time, I felt funerals were so tiring, and my knees hurt every day. But now when I think back on it, I only feel that it was only after the entire ritual had been completed that we were truly able to say goodbye properly to the departed.
In this design of the four suits, Cups become the spirit-invoking rice bowls that can communicate between the worlds of the living and the dead; Wands become incense burning in blessing rituals; Pentacles transform into underworld paper money used across the three realms; and Swords are refined into gleaming silver needles that can both heal and harm. Every stroke seems to become a summoning of lost rituals.
Are those rituals labeled as “superstition” in fact a code through which humanity speaks with impermanence?