MEDI 236: About the Tarot deck used.

The Manga Tarot deck draws heavy inspiration from the east and keys into the "fantastic oriental imagination, particularly Japanese, as depicted in the artwork of the comics of the land of the rising sun, called manga." 

It is a very pictoral deck based on the waite deck but expanded with adding symbology and meaning. 

Taken from the deck's instruction booklet:

The Deck's Structure

"The deck has 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, divided into 40 numbered cards and 16 Court cards. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits, Swords, Pentacles, Wands and Chalices. Each card has two sturctural characterisitcs a dominant colour and a glyph.

The dominant colour indicates a suit of the Minor Arcana and an aspect of human nature, of our surrounding world or the how "with what eyes" we veiw others ourselves and things. It therefore represents the card's internal theme. This brief summary can be of help

Blue = Swords, Air, interllect

Green = Pentacles, Earth, Nature

Red = Wands, Fire, Personality

Yellow = Chalices, Water, Feelings

Each glyph indicates a season: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. the four season's refer to the temporal and cyclic element of the cards.

Spring = Birth, Beginning, Sunrise, Adolescence

Summer = Growth, Culmination, Moon, Maturity

Autumn = Decline, Stagnation, Sunset, Old age

Winter = Death, Minimum, Night, Silence

Spring naturally follows Winter.

Some card's are an execption to this basic structure. The Fool does not have a dominant colour or a glyph ( the fool cannot be forced into a structure). The Wheel contains all four glyphs, representing the cyclic  passing of time. The World does not have a dominant colour because it represents completeness and therefore is the sum of all four of the elements. The Ace's contain all four of the season's (the ace represents potential and the potential for the entire journey is therefore within each Ace) The Ten's contain three glyph's. Attention must be placed on the missing glyph before those that are present. In this sense The ten's must be interpreted as the absence of the fourth gylph (for example the absence of Spring)

A final consideration regards the Type of the characters represnted. The traditional inconography was inverted in this deck, representing as men those normally appearing as women and as women those were depicted as men.   The names of the Court card's were therefore modified. The Queen changes places with The King, Whereas The Knight becomes The Princess and The Knave becomes The Prince. This is also useful for making the internal relationships of the Court card's more obvious and intuitive: Mother, Father, Daughter, Son."

Hopefully this explains a little more about the deck that the reader used in my photos.