Everyday Tarot

Everyday Tarot is a compact 78-card tarot pack by Brigit Esselmont, founder of Biddy Tarot, with illustrations by Eleanor Grosch. Published by Running Press in 2018, it keeps the Rider-Waite-Smith card sequence and familiar scenes, then redraws them in a small purple, cream and gold pack with an 88-page guidebook.

Above: Grosch’s Magician beside the Rider-Waite-Smith card. The raised wand, infinity sign and table of suit emblems remain, while the figure and scene are reduced to flat shapes.

Grosch describes the design task as “demystifying the mystical”. The familiar Rider-Waite-Smith figures, poses and scenes are reduced to flat shapes and a small range of symbols, making the card structure clear for readers learning the system.

This is a minimalist deck, and one of the packs I learned tarot from. I followed Biddy Tarot’s Instagram posts, where these cards appeared in explanations of their meanings. Biddy Tarot is a website for learning tarot, with free card meanings and guides alongside workshops, books, packs and paid programmes. It reports 15 million annual visitors and 16,000 enrolled students.

The box presents Everyday Tarot as a kit. It combines 78 cards with an 88-page guidebook of upright and reversed meanings. Esselmont uses the cards for ordinary questions, describing everyday tarot as consulting “the cards – and your intuition – about everyday things”.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Insight Institute taught tarot by correspondence. It sent printed lessons to students and had tutors mark the returned homework. Everyday Tarot turns that tuition into a retail kit: the Rider-Waite-Smith card sequence, card meanings and reading exercises are all in the same box, with Biddy Tarot continuing the tuition online.