Witches Tarot

Witches Tarot was published by Llewellyn in 2012. Ellen Dugan developed the deck and wrote the companion book, while Mark Evans created the digital artwork from her script.

Right: The Empress progresses from a line sketch to finished digital artwork.

Before working on Witches Tarot, Dugan had taught herself tarot and used clairvoyant readings at local psychic fairs. Barbara Moore, Llewellyn’s tarot acquisitions editor, contacted Dugan to ask whether she would be interested in designing a deck for “witches” and writing the companion book. Dugan researched the subject and prepared a card-by-card script for Evans. Her instruction was simple: “Every card should tell a story.”^[1]

Evans studied at the High School of Art & Design and Pratt Institute. For this project, he worked from Dugan’s approved script, beginning with sketches and using posed photographic reference for some figures.

Dugan recalls that Evans’s first sample was the Queen of Cups.^[1] She asked him to make some court-card figures resemble members of her family. Pagan imagery recurs throughout the cards, including candles, chalices and pentacles. The World also shows the leafy Green Man, a folkloric nature figure adopted by modern Pagan traditions. The back card shows a gold triple moon against a star field.

Four Major Arcana titles differ from the Rider-Waite-Smith sequence:

The guidebook names three custom spreads built around the deck’s witchcraft themes: the Triple Goddess Spread, the Four Elements Spread and the Wheel of the Year Spread. They organise readings around the Maiden, Mother and Crone, the four elements, and the seasonal sabbats, respectively. Dugan pairs each with a short “spell verse” intended to focus the reader before a reading.^[2]

The pack later appeared as a mini edition, a satin tarot bag featuring Evans’s Moon artwork, and iOS and Android apps containing the card images, guidebook, spreads and journal, with separate lightbox links to the box and its back .