Here is the full text of the Threadbare Tarot promotional video, which defines the philosophy behind it:
“My name is Carolyn Griffin and I am the creator of the Threadbare Tarot Deck. The Threadbare Tarot Deck celebrates our divinity. It’s about our soulfulness really, which we shred on our human experience.
Our divine light is always shining through our soul, which is like a threadbare veil. In this deck, the tarot keeps passing through that veil pointing us back to divine light and picking up threads of human soul along the way.
I drew these images over 18 months while awaiting my turn to sing at open mics. In my original music I also express the threadbare. The music gets called raw, delicate, soulful, haunting, but really it just expresses the same idea of divinity persisting in human experience, and of our soul being shredded and tattered by living, erring, thriving and learning as we keep pointing back to the light of our divinity.
Our soulfulness, the threadbare veil, is what happens when the light of divinity meets human experience. It’s that threadbare veil that we have to pass through to connect with our higher self, our true self so that we can live our gifts, so that we can live life to the fullest.
One of the greatest triumphs of the tarot, as a method for reflecting on life, is to be always be directing us back through the threadbare veil to our original divine light, and so, in this deck, every energy of the tarot wears some evidence of that fraying veil it has passed through to connect with us.
While I was designing this deck I was a reader of tarot, my job being to work with the guiding energies of the tarot to always be connecting the querent back to their own divine light.
There’s no better framework for meditating on human experience, while remaining directed toward our own divinity, than the tarot. The tarot guides us while we work with the equipment of life, the equipment of emotions, mental activity, resources, and our own fluctuating energy,—our own mojo.
Each tarot energy is expressed here with the threadbare swirling around it, or within it, or in the case of the high priestess for example, who represents being purely connected to the divine through intuition, as the threadbare itself, pictured here in wild celebration of the human soul in all its glory.
I think that its a beautiful notion to me. The energies of the tarot explain what moves us in life. I’ve created a tarot deck whereby the evidence of our humanity is shown leaving its mark upon the tarot.
Thank you for your time and attention, for your curiosity about the threadbare tarot deck project.”