Lost Hollow Tarot

Lost Hollow Tarot is a tarot pack made by Portland, Oregon artist, writer and designer James Brothwell through PixelOccult. Funded in September 2020, Lost Hollow was Brothwell’s fifth successful Kickstarter, raising $51,286 from 823 backers against a $7,000 goal.

Above: Six Market Obscura event posters by James Brothwell, in the red, black and cream palette also used for Lost Hollow Tarot.

These six posters show how the Major Arcana began. Brothwell designed each with a future tarot card in mind; the cards use the same images almost unchanged, replacing the event lettering with card titles.

The deck began as posters for Market Obscura, a Portland pop-up market for occult, gothic and nature-inspired goods. Brothwell says that “each one was designed to be a Tarot card eventually.”

Above: Lost Hollow’s Adjustment VIII (left) beside Thoth’s Adjustment VIII.

Lost Hollow Tarot includes an additional Adjustment VIII and Strength XI. They let readers use the Golden Dawn and Thoth order; the Rider-Waite-Smith order keeps Strength at VIII and Justice at XI.

At the time, Brothwell was researching the Thoth tradition for The Wayward Dark (his fourth successful Kickstarter, funded in 2019). For Lost Hollow, he combined Thoth symbolism and Golden Dawn material with Rider-Waite-Smith imagery. He says he wanted to “split out pieces that I liked from each, and then re-assemble them together into something new.” The numbered cards keep the people and backgrounds of Rider-Waite-Smith rather than the non-pictorial number cards of the Thoth deck. Their titles, symbols and astrological associations draw on Thoth and Golden Dawn material. In the guidebook, Brothwell calls each meaning “a considered mediation between its different sources.”

Lost Hollow Tarot includes the Rider-Waite-Smith arrangement of Strength VIII and Justice XI. Two additional cards, Adjustment VIII and Strength XI, allow the Golden Dawn and Thoth arrangement. Together, the alternatives bring the pack to 80 cards.

Brothwell describes the setting as “eerily arcane woodlands” and calls the artwork “grim elegance.” The same red, black and cream palette appears in the posters, cards and box, see the box . The cards place occult horror and antlered woodland figures alongside details of clubwear and streetwear. The woodland becomes a modern occult social scene, where nightlife, fashion and the uncanny coexist.

The guidebook asks readers to “read energy and themes” and gives the figures, including the courts, no fixed gender expression. It presents its meanings as “a helpful guide, not a dictator.”