Isidore Tarot Cards Revealed
Browse the verified Isidore Tarot card gallery in canonical reading order. Use the official-group filters, then tap any card to open a larger carousel view.
A note from Aurica
Isidore feels like drawing back an old theatre curtain and finding our private thoughts waiting on the stage. I do not begin with keywords. I notice who turns away, who leans closer, what the animals guard, and where a flash of colour pulls my eye. The cards speak through mood before meaning.
I reach for it with relationships, creative crossroads, life changes, and tender questions that are hard to ask plainly. It can be playful, but it also has a lovely way of finding the feeling everyone has been walking around.
What I love most is the way beauty and strangeness sit together. A card can make me smile, then softly reveal the feeling underneath. I use this deck to open a door and give words to what the heart already knows, not for a cold yes or no. For health or money concerns, reflection supports professional care but never replaces it.
May Isidore’s curious creatures help you meet your own story with courage, tenderness, and a bright little spark of possibility.
Isidore Tarot review: Grandville’s creatures enter the Rider-Waite-Smith stage
Orica’s quick take: Isidore Tarot is a character-rich collage deck that translates the Rider-Waite-Smith system into a whimsical nineteenth-century theatre. Bethalynne Bajema combines J. J. Grandville’s anthropomorphic figures with other Victorian illustrations, pen work, and light tinting. The result is playful at first glance, but the deck can turn satirical, melancholic, or psychologically sharp within the same scene.
Its greatest strength is continuity. The familiar sequence, suit structure, and courts remain usable, while the figures behave like actors with status, appetite, posture, and motive. Rather than decorating a conventional meaning, each collage asks who is performing, who is watching, and what social story is unfolding.
Deck details at a glance
- Creator: Bethalynne Bajema, artist, writer, and cartomancer.
- Visual source: public-domain J. J. Grandville illustrations, especially material from Les Métamorphoses du jour, combined with Victorian-era images and new ink detailing.
- System: Rider-Waite-Smith-based tarot.
- Major Arcana: the standard Fool-through-World sequence.
- Minor Arcana: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins.
- Courts: Page, Knight, Queen, and King.
- Debut: autumn 2013, as the first deck published by the creator’s family art studio.
- Current standard design discussed here: the borderless Third Edition introduced in 2018, with a removable Happy Squirrel bonus card.
- Best for: visual storytelling, character readings, journaling, and readers who want a recognizable system with an unusual voice.
From “An Autumn with Isidore” to a complete deck
The project began as An Autumn with Isidore, a personal series made from Grandville’s black-and-white illustrations. Bajema has described it as a playful departure from her usual work—something created in spare time before followers encouraged her to rework some collages into a Major Arcana. The Fool came first, and the larger tarot grew from there.
The name Isidore reaches back to Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville himself. The creator’s account quotes Alexandre Dumas describing Grandville through a mixture of intelligence, satire, generosity, and melancholy. Those qualities are useful reading keys: the deck often smiles while making a serious observation about status, desire, fear, or human absurdity.
Deck-specific card study
The Fool: innocence carries luggage
A white rabbit-headed traveler in ornate red, cream, and gold clothes walks forward with a suitcase in one hand and a small flower-bearing figure raised in the other. A doglike companion sits nearby while a huge watchful face fills the sunlit upper corner. The theatrical costume makes the card comic, but the luggage gives departure real weight.
In a reading, notice the coexistence of preparation and openness. This Fool is not empty-handed; experience, identity, and companionship come along for the journey. Ask which baggage is useful, which is merely familiar, and whether curiosity is leading the next step or disguising avoidance.
Grandville, Max Ernst, and the logic of collage
Bajema identifies Grandville’s Les Métamorphoses du jour as a central image source and Max Ernst’s collage novel Une semaine de bonté as an influence on the method. That combination matters. Grandville’s animal-headed society offers instant personality and social satire; Ernst’s collage logic makes unrelated fragments feel as if they belong to one unstable dream.
Isidore softens that instability with a unified palette. Rich crimson and pale gold dominate the Major Arcana, while the suits are tinted according to their elements. Repeated architecture, costume, gaze, and gesture create enough visual rhythm that the deck feels coherent even when a scene is delightfully strange.
Card moment: social masks and authority
Who performs power—and who sees through it?
These figures let you compare formal authority, inherited rules, emotional command, and material stewardship. Read the costume and posture first: the deck is especially good at revealing the difference between a role someone occupies and the character they bring to it.
How Isidore Tarot reads in practice
Start by treating every card as a stage. Identify the central character, then note who or what shares the scene. Look at eye lines, clothing, tools, furniture, and physical distance. A character who appears ridiculous may still hold real power; a dignified figure may be trapped by ceremony. This makes Isidore especially articulate around relationships and group dynamics.
After the scene, return to structure. Card number, suit, court rank, and Major Arcana position keep the interpretation accountable. A useful four-step method is: name the visible action, describe the emotional tone, connect it to the traditional card, and turn the difference into a direct answer for the question.
Deck-specific card study
The Moon: instinct meets its own reflection
A large red crescent overlaps a star-scattered lunar disk between two ornate towers. Below, two strange human-animal figures face each other closely while a small armored creature emerges from water at the side. The composition is symmetrical above but awkward and intimate below.
The traditional themes of uncertainty, instinct, dream, and projection remain available. Here the lower pair makes relationship central: one fear may be answering another fear. Ask what is being mirrored, what is only half seen, and which reaction belongs to the present rather than to an older story.
The four suits and their color paths
Wands carries action, appetite, enterprise, and visible momentum. Cups explores feeling, attachment, memory, and the social rituals around intimacy. Swords handles thought, conflict, separation, and the stories people tell to justify a decision. Coins attends to work, resources, shelter, exchange, and embodied security.
Because the deck retains standard suit and court names, experienced readers need little translation. The character-driven scenes add a second layer: a Page can look tentative or eager, a Knight can be brave or absurdly committed, and a Queen or King can either embody a suit or overidentify with its authority.
Card moment: four elemental beginnings
How each suit announces a new possibility
Set the four Aces side by side and compare movement, color, scale, and implied invitation. They provide the cleanest entry into the palette: desire begins differently from feeling, insight, or material opportunity even when every Ace promises a start.
Is Isidore Tarot beginner-friendly?
Yes, with one important condition: beginners should describe before decoding. The Rider-Waite-Smith backbone makes guidebook study transferable, and the scenes have enough action to support intuitive reading. But the collage fragments can tempt a new reader to assign a permanent meaning to every unusual object.
Keep a journal with three short notes per draw: what literally happens, what the traditional card contributes, and what proved relevant later. That habit lets personal associations grow without turning them into unsupported rules. The separate companion book offers brief descriptions and notes on ways the deck modifies traditional symbolism.
Reading prompts that suit this deck
Easy: “Which character am I playing today?” Draw one card and describe role, costume, posture, and motive before naming a keyword.
Medium: “What is being said, and what is being performed?” Draw one card for the stated position and one for the social performance around it.
Challenging: “Which old script is directing this relationship?” Use three cards for the inherited role, the current interaction, and the behavior that would interrupt the pattern.
Deck-specific card study
Ten of Coins: security can become an enclosure
Ten dark coin forms surround an elaborate domed cage or pavilion. Inside, an animal figure occupies a furnished domestic space; outside, a formally dressed owl stands with folded wings. The image is materially rich yet visually confined, making comfort and containment difficult to separate.
This is a productive version of the card for questions about inheritance, property, family systems, and established success. Ask what the structure protects, who is inside or outside it, and whether continuity is supporting life or preserving a cage because it is valuable.
A close-reading method for collage cards
Collage invites the eye to jump between fragments, so give the card a clear order of attention. First identify the largest form and the direction it faces. Next locate the smallest active detail: a hand, tool, animal, doorway, or distant watcher. Finally, notice the seam between those elements. The seam is where an inherited illustration becomes Bajema’s new scene, and it often carries the card’s most revealing tension.
For a multi-card spread, assign every character a verb before you interpret the nouns. One figure waits, another bargains, another escapes, another displays. Verbs expose movement and relationship more quickly than a catalogue of symbols. Then compare scale: who looks enormous, who is reduced, and what object occupies more room than expected? Collage can make psychological importance visible by changing proportion.
Color is the final pass rather than the first. The crimson and pale-gold Major Arcana often feels ceremonial, while suit palettes create distinct emotional weather. Use those shifts to track energy across a reading. A spread that moves from muted or enclosed scenes toward brighter open space can show a practical change in orientation even before individual meanings are combined.
Working with the optional Happy Squirrel
The Third Edition includes a novelty Happy Squirrel card with its own meanings. It is an intentional bonus, not part of the standard tarot sequence shown in this review’s canonical gallery. You can remove it and work with the usual structure, or establish a clear role for it before shuffling.
If included, treat it consistently. For example, it can mark surprise, absurdity, comic disruption, or the moment a serious narrative becomes overmanaged. Avoid letting one unusual card dominate every spread simply because it is memorable. The useful question is not “What does the squirrel always mean?” but “What does this interruption reveal here?”
Strengths and limitations
The deck is strongest when a reading benefits from personality, irony, or social context. Its figures make motives easy to discuss without flattening them into good and bad. It also rewards comparison: repeated costumes, colors, objects, and architectural forms become more meaningful across a spread.
Readers who want minimalist symbols, photorealistic people, or immediate modern settings may need time to enter its world. The vintage source material also carries the assumptions of its period, so historical costume and social roles should be read critically rather than treated as timeless norms.
Card moment: moving through uncertainty
Loss, pressure, hope, and renewed clarity
This sequence shows the range of the deck’s emotional register. Read it as a transition rather than four isolated meanings: grief narrows attention, pressure intensifies the inner story, hope restores orientation, and clarity makes participation possible again.
Edition and buying guidance
The Isidore Tarot has appeared in numbered, special, seasonal, and small-format editions. The Third Edition described by the creator arrived after the Second Edition retired in late 2017. It removed the white borders, placed the King and Queen of Cups at the center of the packaging, and introduced a watchful moon back plus the optional Happy Squirrel card.
Availability is not as simple as clicking the first marketplace result. Creator-run sales are intermittent, and several Amazon results are explicitly companion books rather than a deck-and-book set. The buttons in this review therefore go to the creator’s official Attic Cartomancy page, where edition history and current availability can be checked without implying that a book-only listing includes cards.
Orica’s golden rule for Isidore Tarot
Read the role before judging the character. A grand costume can hide insecurity, an absurd figure can speak the plainest truth, and a charming scene can expose a rigid social bargain. Ask what part each figure is playing—and whether the role still serves the story.
Final thoughts
Isidore Tarot succeeds because its collage method is more than a decorative filter. Grandville’s creatures, Bajema’s additions, and the Rider-Waite-Smith structure form a coherent theatre of human behavior. The cards are witty without being shallow and nostalgic without becoming passive.
Use the gallery as a real compatibility test. Move from the Major Arcana into one suit at a time and notice whether the characters invite questions. If their gestures, costumes, and strange encounters make you want to narrate before you memorize, this deck’s reading language is likely to feel natural.
Isidore Tarot FAQ
Who created Isidore Tarot?
Artist and writer Bethalynne Bajema created the deck. She built its scenes from public-domain illustrations by J. J. Grandville, additional Victorian-era material, pen-and-ink work, and restrained tinting.
Does Isidore Tarot follow Rider-Waite-Smith?
Yes. The standard Major Arcana, four suits, and Page–Knight–Queen–King courts remain recognizable. The images recreate that framework through a distinct neo-Victorian collage language.
What are the suits called?
The four suits are Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins. Coins fills the material and practical role often labeled Pentacles in other decks.
What is special about the Third Edition?
The creator describes the Third Edition as the first borderless standard edition. Its packaging centers the King and Queen of Cups, its back uses a watchful moon composition, and it adds a removable Happy Squirrel bonus card.
Is Isidore Tarot good for beginners?
It can be. Readers who already know Rider-Waite-Smith will recognize the structure quickly, while new readers get narrative scenes with strong characters and color coding. The collage details reward slow observation.
Where can I buy Isidore Tarot?
Availability is intermittent and creator-run sales can be time sensitive. Use the official Attic Cartomancy page linked in this review to check the current edition and shop status; Amazon listings for companion books should not be assumed to include the deck.
