Salt Circle. Watercolor and sea salt on cold press paper.
Most of today’s post shall be a 🪐 Post of Seriousity. 🪐 While neither wholly fun-sucking nor joyless, this post shall be of lesser than usual bullshit, per recent standards, as ratified by my invocation of Saturn—the very planet of seriousness—via emojis. We need some straight talk in the mix to stay vaguely responsible. I do not wish to cut anyone else’s brains on the sharp edges of my humor! This is the third to last thing I have to say to you, The Internet, as a professional tarot blogger. Bless.
It’s a long one! Interrobang Tarot was a ten year long passion project. I’m tying up loose ends. Headings for the skimmers. Today we’ll cover where I stand on folklore, no bullshit, and my personal orientation to this terrain. (Cough suspected fae tendencies cough cough.) Then we’ll dig into some safer & more fruitful approaches for deep-diving with Othercrowd lore in general, then the Black Ink Deck and Fortune’s Inkwell in particular.
I’d like to send you off with the info and tips you need to contextualize the archives, writings, and decks here, so readers can get the most out of your time with these materials, in safe and accessible ways that work well for you. Then I’d like to invite you into the ✨ brand new blog✨ full of educational yet cussin’ dark-folkloric satire and indie folk-rock music, as a boondocks singer/songwriter no one’s heard of, who’s pretty good actually.
Now that my work on the Interrobang Tarot spreads collection is complete, I've made the entire collection of over 200 spreads from the newsletter, blog, and patreon club available for the first time ever, with beautifully illustrated, matching, printer-friendly printouts. You can download that without needing to subscribe, or pick & choose themed bundles a la carte here in the patreon shop. If you subscribe annually at the Muse tier or higher on Patreon, you'll receive a download link to the full spread collection with your membership at a massive discount, along with access to the archives of notes on how to work with each spread and their symbolism.
There’s recommended reading here for those interested in learning more about modern traditional witchcraft and folkloric occultism. I'll throw together a reading list tailored more to general folklore and the Othercrowd on the Waif School blog.
I no longer identify as a witch, personally, though I still respect that path for others. I have switched departments and now bat for teams Cunning and Foolery. And I'm retiring from divination teaching to focus full time on rock & roll bullshit, with a side of folklore teaching.
Follow on Patreon or sign up for the newsletter to catch the free Waif School posts, coming up just a soon as we wrap Interrobang!
It’s a long one! Interrobang Tarot was a ten year long passion project. I’m tying up loose ends. Headings for the skimmers. Today we’ll cover where I stand on folklore, no bullshit, and my personal orientation to this terrain. (Cough suspected fae tendencies cough cough.) Then we’ll dig into some safer & more fruitful approaches for deep-diving with Othercrowd lore in general, then the Black Ink Deck and Fortune’s Inkwell in particular.
I’d like to send you off with the info and tips you need to contextualize the archives, writings, and decks here, so readers can get the most out of your time with these materials, in safe and accessible ways that work well for you. Then I’d like to invite you into the ✨ brand new blog✨ full of educational yet cussin’ dark-folkloric satire and indie folk-rock music, as a boondocks singer/songwriter no one’s heard of, who’s pretty good actually.
Now that my work on the Interrobang Tarot spreads collection is complete, I've made the entire collection of over 200 spreads from the newsletter, blog, and patreon club available for the first time ever, with beautifully illustrated, matching, printer-friendly printouts. You can download that without needing to subscribe, or pick & choose themed bundles a la carte here in the patreon shop. If you subscribe annually at the Muse tier or higher on Patreon, you'll receive a download link to the full spread collection with your membership at a massive discount, along with access to the archives of notes on how to work with each spread and their symbolism.
There’s recommended reading here for those interested in learning more about modern traditional witchcraft and folkloric occultism. I'll throw together a reading list tailored more to general folklore and the Othercrowd on the Waif School blog.
I no longer identify as a witch, personally, though I still respect that path for others. I have switched departments and now bat for teams Cunning and Foolery. And I'm retiring from divination teaching to focus full time on rock & roll bullshit, with a side of folklore teaching.
Follow on Patreon or sign up for the newsletter to catch the free Waif School posts, coming up just a soon as we wrap Interrobang!
This Work May Be Ophelia, But It Isn't What We Are. Watercolor and ink on Bristol Board.
Where I Actually Stand on Folklore & Spirituality, 🪐 No Bullshit:
Folklore has been a core source of my symbolic catalog for over a decade. Folklore is a broad umbrella term, and includes things like urban legends, ghost stories, witch trial records, folk magic, the macabre histories of popular beliefs, and human tricksters, fools, and folk heroes, along with fae lore.
Fae lore *hasn’t* always been a core interest for me. I’d grown out of most fantasy and all twee fairy kitsch by the time I discovered ‘70s punk rock and nihilism in my late teens lol. I hadn’t been looking for fae lore at all when I wandered back into it years later, via witchcraft history research and a cursed habit of combing early modern witch trial records to unwind.
I fell in love with traditional Othercrowd folklore as an adult for its complexity, strangeness, depth, mystery, macabre histories, surreal beauties and grotesqueries, melancholy, sorrows, folk horrors, lyricism, and animistic mysticism. The deeper I dove into that research, the more inspiration I found there, and the more sacred the topic became to me, as a gothic-folk lyricist whose ancestors held many of these beliefs sincerely. I’m still learning about this subject and I’m not an expert by any means.
I truly am agnostic about all of my spiritual interests, including folklore. I love skepticism, I love doubt, I love mystery, and I extra love humility in the face of mystery. I do allow myself some beliefs, but I apply agnostic thinking to them, with a willingness to change my beliefs in accordance with evidence and experience. I’m not here to tell anyone else what to believe spiritually or folklorically. Agnosticism leaves ample room for some mysteries to hold truths we don’t understand yet. There are many curtains I don’t want to peek behind, surprises I don’t want to spoil, and truths I don’t need to know in this lifetime, if ever. All faiths are welcome here, including none.
My life’s been kinda weird, with a lot of hard knocks, so I choose to favor worldviews that make me feel more connected to history, and capable of bargaining with my fate, finding beauty in the messes, and drawing creative inspiration and resilience from horror and grief.
I do NOT believe in Tinkerbell type fairies, personally. Traditional Irish lore is something else entirely. I have seen some High Strange spirit activity and hauntings over the years, and a lot of accurate psi stuff, backed up by other witnesses, so I’m very open to the ideas of a Jungian collective consciousness, a diverse spirit world, and unseen dimensions to this world or cosmos. But I don’t claim to know anything definitive about spirits, and I can’t speak for them.
I want to leave space for your own diverse beliefs and for your own, sovereign skepticism and doubts. I’m adapting my writings with the understanding that I’m speaking to a diverse crowd, including fervid believers, skeptics, fantasy buffs, and secular fans of this material, all.
Fae lore *hasn’t* always been a core interest for me. I’d grown out of most fantasy and all twee fairy kitsch by the time I discovered ‘70s punk rock and nihilism in my late teens lol. I hadn’t been looking for fae lore at all when I wandered back into it years later, via witchcraft history research and a cursed habit of combing early modern witch trial records to unwind.
I fell in love with traditional Othercrowd folklore as an adult for its complexity, strangeness, depth, mystery, macabre histories, surreal beauties and grotesqueries, melancholy, sorrows, folk horrors, lyricism, and animistic mysticism. The deeper I dove into that research, the more inspiration I found there, and the more sacred the topic became to me, as a gothic-folk lyricist whose ancestors held many of these beliefs sincerely. I’m still learning about this subject and I’m not an expert by any means.
I truly am agnostic about all of my spiritual interests, including folklore. I love skepticism, I love doubt, I love mystery, and I extra love humility in the face of mystery. I do allow myself some beliefs, but I apply agnostic thinking to them, with a willingness to change my beliefs in accordance with evidence and experience. I’m not here to tell anyone else what to believe spiritually or folklorically. Agnosticism leaves ample room for some mysteries to hold truths we don’t understand yet. There are many curtains I don’t want to peek behind, surprises I don’t want to spoil, and truths I don’t need to know in this lifetime, if ever. All faiths are welcome here, including none.
My life’s been kinda weird, with a lot of hard knocks, so I choose to favor worldviews that make me feel more connected to history, and capable of bargaining with my fate, finding beauty in the messes, and drawing creative inspiration and resilience from horror and grief.
I do NOT believe in Tinkerbell type fairies, personally. Traditional Irish lore is something else entirely. I have seen some High Strange spirit activity and hauntings over the years, and a lot of accurate psi stuff, backed up by other witnesses, so I’m very open to the ideas of a Jungian collective consciousness, a diverse spirit world, and unseen dimensions to this world or cosmos. But I don’t claim to know anything definitive about spirits, and I can’t speak for them.
I want to leave space for your own diverse beliefs and for your own, sovereign skepticism and doubts. I’m adapting my writings with the understanding that I’m speaking to a diverse crowd, including fervid believers, skeptics, fantasy buffs, and secular fans of this material, all.
Conflicts of Interest:
The folks in my networks hold vastly different ideas as to what “folklore” broadly and “the fae” more specifically might mean. I do feel accountable to diverse communities, but you can’t please everyone, or say boo about The Old Lore without pissing someone off when we’re all operating from such different definitions. 🤷🏻
I’ve kept most of my folkloric research and interests consigned to subtext here over the years, not to be a sneaky bastard. I wasn’t subtle at all about drawing on folkloric research and idioms lol. 😅 I just didn’t want to use twee-coded or fantasy-centric language for cultural threads and mysteries that I consider sensitive or sacred.
I didn’t want my creative work equated with Tinkerbell fluff. I didn’t want to attract MPDG-chasers or conspiracy theorists. And I didn’t want to demean any of my sources by kicking up fae *stereotypes* in people’s minds because of *how I look.* (I like my look--I'm vain. But I must never wear green hats! Green hats on me, even the slouchy hipster ones alas, default to a disturbing jaunty-cartoon-child flair I'm super not okay with....)
These are dicey and surreal subjects to stay diplomatic about. Nobody owns folklore, though we should respect that culturally specific lore belongs to its cultures of origin, and take care not to speak over native speakers or accountable scholars. Today, many people relate to folklore, fantasy, and the fae as a focal point of fandom obsessions, passionate religious beliefs, non-ironic conspiracy theories, and load-bearing personal identities. Gawds, that’s fascinating… aaaaand messy.
Contemporary fae lore is a Whole Can O’ Worms. I didn’t want to go there with my public facing work. 🤷🏻 I would find something else to art about, if I had any sense ever… which I don’t. 🤣😭 Can’t quit it.
Ergo: subtext is diplomacy.
I’ve kept most of my folkloric research and interests consigned to subtext here over the years, not to be a sneaky bastard. I wasn’t subtle at all about drawing on folkloric research and idioms lol. 😅 I just didn’t want to use twee-coded or fantasy-centric language for cultural threads and mysteries that I consider sensitive or sacred.
I didn’t want my creative work equated with Tinkerbell fluff. I didn’t want to attract MPDG-chasers or conspiracy theorists. And I didn’t want to demean any of my sources by kicking up fae *stereotypes* in people’s minds because of *how I look.* (I like my look--I'm vain. But I must never wear green hats! Green hats on me, even the slouchy hipster ones alas, default to a disturbing jaunty-cartoon-child flair I'm super not okay with....)
These are dicey and surreal subjects to stay diplomatic about. Nobody owns folklore, though we should respect that culturally specific lore belongs to its cultures of origin, and take care not to speak over native speakers or accountable scholars. Today, many people relate to folklore, fantasy, and the fae as a focal point of fandom obsessions, passionate religious beliefs, non-ironic conspiracy theories, and load-bearing personal identities. Gawds, that’s fascinating… aaaaand messy.
Contemporary fae lore is a Whole Can O’ Worms. I didn’t want to go there with my public facing work. 🤷🏻 I would find something else to art about, if I had any sense ever… which I don’t. 🤣😭 Can’t quit it.
Ergo: subtext is diplomacy.
The Blowing of The Cover
But alas! Too many core layers of this work just haven’t been translating without their full context, stated in language that folks can understand without needing the DIY equivalent of a Ph.D. in folklore to crack the code. Lately, this has become a religious and spiritual consent issue for practicing witches, animists, diviners, and spirit workers. I can’t confine my interests and research to subtext now that I’ve published works people are using as psi aids and ritual tools. You need to understand what kind of material this is, in no uncertain terms, to ethically, consensually, and safely integrate it with magical or spirit-centered practices from here on out.
This oversight was not malicious! Traditionally, if you are a poet who wanders a little too far below the hills, beneath the roses, or into the otherworldly book stacks, there are many fine and pressing reasons, both esoteric and practical, to 🤭 shut the fuck up about it.… 🤫 Besides which, I never expected a tarot deck *inspired* by folklore to show a pattern in practice of requesting musical offerings, slinging riddles & death jokes, objecting to gifts of clothing, and noping out on tables with metal frames… 🤣 --But here we are.— 😱🥳
You do NOT have to work with my decks or writings through a spirit-work approach! But it should be an informed decision if you do want to go there, given the nature and histories of the symbolic catalog I draw on.
Thought I’d better throw you guys a playful heads up before anyone else connected the flaming obvious dots on your own there.…
Aaaaand blammo! /Worm Can opened. Cover blown. Good job, Marin. Good job, decks. Free worms for all!
This oversight was not malicious! Traditionally, if you are a poet who wanders a little too far below the hills, beneath the roses, or into the otherworldly book stacks, there are many fine and pressing reasons, both esoteric and practical, to 🤭 shut the fuck up about it.… 🤫 Besides which, I never expected a tarot deck *inspired* by folklore to show a pattern in practice of requesting musical offerings, slinging riddles & death jokes, objecting to gifts of clothing, and noping out on tables with metal frames… 🤣 --But here we are.— 😱🥳
You do NOT have to work with my decks or writings through a spirit-work approach! But it should be an informed decision if you do want to go there, given the nature and histories of the symbolic catalog I draw on.
Thought I’d better throw you guys a playful heads up before anyone else connected the flaming obvious dots on your own there.…
Aaaaand blammo! /Worm Can opened. Cover blown. Good job, Marin. Good job, decks. Free worms for all!
“…And are YOU one of the fae???”* was the immediate, non-shocking follow-up question from a number of consumers, even before I tossed you the last two rather leading “performance art” posts. (*Paraphrasing.) 😅
Self Portrait With Mockingbird and Ferns. Watercolor on Bristol Board.
This is not the first, second, or third time I’ve been asked, besties. Usually the fairy, ghost, and vampire jokes are purely aesthetic. I crack vampire jokes about myself all the time as a non-optional night owl who likes goth stuff. NBD. But my potential otherworldliness to humanness ratios have raised *sincere* questions and comments many times over the years, including long before I’d done any pertinent homework on this topic. Sometimes in funny, sweet, or neutral ways, and sometimes in quite uncomfortable ways....
Now, in all fairness, that *is* a reasonable question to float when any pallid & demi-nocturnal merchant/folk-musician with a notoriously morbid sense of humor, who looks like an elder-goth Rice Krispies guy impersonator, warns you that a divination tool they just sold to you—which you have witnessed behaving spicily with your own face—has been sassing you in accordance with the norms and preferences of the shit-you-not Othercrowd. (But who’s to say for sure what’s going on there?)
• I could be the kind of trickster artist who tricks you into crowdfunding IRL fae propaganda via small-press art collectibles I didn’t notice might be haunted until you guys unboxed them?
• Or I could be the kind of trickster artist who tricks you into participating in the audience participation segment warming up to a rogue-theatrical, ✨Folk Horror Flim-Flam Spectacular & Indie Rock Tragicomedy✨ comin’ right up, free for the working class on ✨The Fucking Internet.✨
🤷🏻 At least one of those two mutually exclusive things def just happened here. 🤷🏻
(And who would do such a thing as that?)
—Out of work actors.— Deep breaths, gang. 😉
I am living a fully human lifetime, with no desire to dehumanize quirky misfits and fellow pointy-faced persons, to be clear lol. The otherkin scene is not my cup of tea, though I don’t judge it for others. But I have never been able to dodge fae-coding, whether people meant it pop culturally, aesthetically, or spiritually, and that rather changes the best approaches for openly teaching material like this in the age of Q-Anon. 😅 It also means we can play with this in immersive and fun ways…. I can’t pull off serious Teachery teaching with a straight face anyway.
***I cannot stress enough that as a ding-dong, human, fuckup, primate-mammal with a temporally-locked, fixed-scale gaze, I am not actually qualified to speak for the non-monolithic, shit-you-not Othercrowd, if They're out there! That's not what we're doing here.***
This experience of getting read as otherworldly by other people does prime me to over-relate to folkloric tales and otherworldly cultures in ways that could cloud my judgement. But it also means I’ve got a fresh perspective with some skin in the game, because I believed exactly none of this for most of my life, and yet, I’ve been fielding fallout from the Demonic vs. SILLY False Dichotomy of fae stereotypes and caricatures in my honest to gawds personal and professional life for decades.
Now, in all fairness, that *is* a reasonable question to float when any pallid & demi-nocturnal merchant/folk-musician with a notoriously morbid sense of humor, who looks like an elder-goth Rice Krispies guy impersonator, warns you that a divination tool they just sold to you—which you have witnessed behaving spicily with your own face—has been sassing you in accordance with the norms and preferences of the shit-you-not Othercrowd. (But who’s to say for sure what’s going on there?)
• I could be the kind of trickster artist who tricks you into crowdfunding IRL fae propaganda via small-press art collectibles I didn’t notice might be haunted until you guys unboxed them?
• Or I could be the kind of trickster artist who tricks you into participating in the audience participation segment warming up to a rogue-theatrical, ✨Folk Horror Flim-Flam Spectacular & Indie Rock Tragicomedy✨ comin’ right up, free for the working class on ✨The Fucking Internet.✨
🤷🏻 At least one of those two mutually exclusive things def just happened here. 🤷🏻
(And who would do such a thing as that?)
—Out of work actors.— Deep breaths, gang. 😉
I am living a fully human lifetime, with no desire to dehumanize quirky misfits and fellow pointy-faced persons, to be clear lol. The otherkin scene is not my cup of tea, though I don’t judge it for others. But I have never been able to dodge fae-coding, whether people meant it pop culturally, aesthetically, or spiritually, and that rather changes the best approaches for openly teaching material like this in the age of Q-Anon. 😅 It also means we can play with this in immersive and fun ways…. I can’t pull off serious Teachery teaching with a straight face anyway.
***I cannot stress enough that as a ding-dong, human, fuckup, primate-mammal with a temporally-locked, fixed-scale gaze, I am not actually qualified to speak for the non-monolithic, shit-you-not Othercrowd, if They're out there! That's not what we're doing here.***
This experience of getting read as otherworldly by other people does prime me to over-relate to folkloric tales and otherworldly cultures in ways that could cloud my judgement. But it also means I’ve got a fresh perspective with some skin in the game, because I believed exactly none of this for most of my life, and yet, I’ve been fielding fallout from the Demonic vs. SILLY False Dichotomy of fae stereotypes and caricatures in my honest to gawds personal and professional life for decades.
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Join ‘Em
I didn’t suppose I could pull off dignified grace and a withering tsk-tsk here… not if I want to keep selling you trippy fiddle slow-jams about haunted wanderlust, along with the remainder of these decks I’m tryna home *ethically* now with the sorts of people who are *into this.*
Ah well. If ya can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Ergo, I am ceding bitching rights about getting GRAF* or pixie-coded personally within this Absurdist Charade, so long as we can all take a joke and #StayGrounded, Vivienne. (*Generally Read as Fae)
Doesn’t mean I have to make dark folkloric education my entire personality.
Ah well. If ya can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! Ergo, I am ceding bitching rights about getting GRAF* or pixie-coded personally within this Absurdist Charade, so long as we can all take a joke and #StayGrounded, Vivienne. (*Generally Read as Fae)
Doesn’t mean I have to make dark folkloric education my entire personality.
<<<I will be making dark folkloric education my entire personality for a season.>>>
In shitposty ways! 💫 (#method)
One of my goals for the next project is to werk the ‘ole Manic Pixie game to spin up art and jokes that might be entertaining for a broad cross-section of people who like this stuff… then connect you to fun-facts and resources about historic and modern-traditional Othercrowd lore that aren’t bullshit. 😁 I believe the old stuff & the good stuff is for everyone, not just academics and witches. A lot of Americans don’t even know what we’re missing by letting Netflix, Disney, and DND have the loudest say on the Good Folk.
—I am also tryna trick you into checking out my haunting, trad-inspired yet hipster-fucked, gothic folk music, to be crystal clear. I would like to record more songs with my life, and your attention will facilitate this quest.-- (Please note that I have *just ordered* a proper video camera that doesn't suck. It's on its way! My phone's not cutting it for production standards, but we absolutely will get the videography up to scratch here for the Waif School blog circus & spoopy trad singalong funtimes).
I do reserve the right to feel complexly AF about my prior history of getting GRAF tho. Hopefully most will understand that this *is* an art project. 😅 Some may take it literally, but that already happens anyway. So let’s leave some —space— for people to hold whatever beliefs you will, while grounding our mysticism and exploring a range of ways we could *respectfully* interpret and work with these patterns IRL.
IDK if I'll teach this topic longterm, LOL. We'll have to see how it goes and if there's interest. I've got a series of educational & satirical articles on folklore and folk horror queued up to pair with my debut album, Below The Rose, which is heavy on scrambled & gothed up trad songs. If readers want more on this topic, we'll see from there.
The Waif School Crest
Diving Deep With Othercrowd Lore, Comma, Broadly
It’s just as fine if you are a believer, but you do NOT have to believe in folklore in any literal sense to work with my decks and writings! And you don’t have to believe jack shit to enjoy folklore as literature, cultural histories, or chilling campfire tales.
I can’t even call my own practice “fairy faith” without squirming out of my skin and melting into a vaguely Evvin-sized beached-jelly Blorp of NOPE, because both the words “fairy” and “faith” 🤢 squick me out wicked bad, for different reasons. Tinkerbell baggage, meet Big ‘Murrican Christian Family baggage. I’ll bring the sweet potato casserole if someone else stuffs the turkey!
Folk esoterica, agnostic animism, animist mysticism, symbolism, and folkloric art are some phrases I can stomach for these practices, as I approach them. Different practitioners may use their own preferred language, if any.
OOooOOooAhhhh, what does “folk esoterica” mean, you ask?
It’s the fuckin’ Fairy Faith, rebranded by a two-points-more-secular, made-up-as-fuck phrase that doesn’t make me wanna barf, and always has been. 🤷🏻 #unmasking
Surprise! Hahaaa…. In defense of me, exactly none of you ever asked *which* Folk I’ve been talking about this whole time… 😉And we’re only using the words “fae” and “fairy” now for your benefit, edification, and translation. I don't like those terms much personally. I prefer Good Folk and Othercrowd broadly, titles or loose descriptions for the spirits who go by them, or no verbal terms or names at all—so much the better.
I wandered into this worldview through immersion in the arts. I would encourage approaching this terrain with a healthy dose of skepticism and a grounded sense of humor throughout your explorations. I do have serious respects for folklore and its source cultures, but that doesn’t mean I take it literally or at face value. By nature, it’s a blend of profound spiritual mysteries and human storytelling, some of which is delicious and some of which is trash, and occasionally both at once.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a Mystery. There’s a difference.
But rrrrrrrr… having “fae” and “fairy” language on your radar is going to get between many of you and what this material has to offer, unless you do some unlearning. Traditional folklore and contemporary fantasy are often antithetical in content, values, aesthetic sensibilities, and vibes, while using the exact same language. How did that happen, I wonder? Colonization, comma, Anglo-American mostly, with help from our friends literature, capitalism, and Victorian perversions.
Spirit work and collaboration with the Good Folk were and still are vital currents in the medicinal, folk-spiritual, musical, and poetic traditions in Ireland, Scotland, Britain, northwestern Europe, and occasionally their diasporas in North America. Wise women, cunning folk, and fairy doctors served in roles loosely analogous to shamans, seers, intercessors, and healers historically. Whether or not you believe or practice any kind of fairy faith, learning about this stuff is a fascinating and meaningful step toward decolonizing our own cultures as settlers of European descent. But you don’t need European ancestry to engage deeply and respectfully with these stories and spirits today!!
Please note that my projects are bilingual in human and folkloric idioms. They will strike some readers as more alien, and click more intuitively for others, and that’s okay either way. Otherworldly languages, perspectives, and cultures get more diverse, poetic, Strange, closed to us, and difficult for humans to brain than this. These are different cultures, born of very different perspectives than we have. There are MANY different types of spirits with their own respective ways and viewpoints. The Good Neighbors are incredibly diverse if the spooky old folklore has anything to say about it, and individual spirits have their own personalities and aims as well.
🚩 Differences across lines of spiritual diversity, or across worlds, should not be equated with differences across human cultures, neurologies, and races. 🚩 Most people in the west believe otherworldly spirits like the Othercrowd are imaginary stock characters and fantasy tropes confined to the realm of popular entertainment. Most Americans imagine that The Good Folk would be saccharine, servile, pansy-assed TWITS even if they did exist. (BARF.) But if it’s all just stories and fun, and we imagined the Good Folk up with our imaginations, then who cares what we do with them? That’s the unspoken axiom most people interested in this subject operate from today.
…Except for the part where this lore originated with sincerely held and culturally-specific folk beliefs that were *not* always regarded as imaginal in origin, and those beliefs are still sacred, and in some cases tragic or traumatic to culturally specific, living humans today. It’s complicated!
Still, it would be gravely disrespectful to our human friends, neighbors, and cousins to equate human to spirit communication challenges most people don’t believe in, with unquestionably real, tangible, and high stakes human to human prejudices and oppression.
On the flip side, if there really IS a spirit world or overlapping dimension populated with beings of equal and greater intelligence to our own, our differences in communication and world views could get even Stranger and more complicated than our differences with our human neighbors and comrades. And how would we even begin to trace those differences when most people playing with these spirits and their caricatures even in *ritual spaces* don’t believe the fae exist for Themselves beyond our whims? —A dynamic worth questioning.--
My work shares *one* viewpoint on a complex and ineffable subject that belongs to millions of people if it belongs to anyone at all. (Big IF that if…) It doesn’t speak for the Otherworld holistically. Nor does it speak for the European source cultures I’ve been inspired by. It couldn’t possibly.
If you’re very interested in and drawn to folkloric crafts or the fae but don’t have close relationships established to those Sprits yet, it would be wise to proceed cautiously as fuckedly and learn as much as you can from good sources before jumping in. Morgan Daimler's a wonderful resource for beginners interested in learning about the difference between traditional Irish lore and fairy fantasy. Our baseline culture in the States is profoundly disrespectful to these spirits and histories. Unlearn how to be disrespectful and yes-learn how to be yes-respectful before you seek contact or initiation with the Good Folk, or any other spirits, understanding that *something* unseen or Strange out there could answer that call maybe. (?) This work can help there! But it shouldn’t be your only source of guidance.
I’ve always boosted the approach that there’s no right or wrong way to read tarot, unless you’re scamming people (not cool). Tarot is one of the most welcoming and user friendly occult arts, with infinite room for made up as fuck stuff and DIY retellings. That’s a beautiful thing! Samesies for fantasy and speculative fiction. But applying a “no wrong way” ethos to spirit work could totally wreck your shit lol. You should not engage with spirits, fates, or deities unless and until you are ready to accept that spirits might have their own sovereignty, their own ways, and their own ideas as to how things should be done, and you might not be the wisest or most in-charge person in the room, if you do get into that. Folkloric spirits can be very dangerous to us, if the spooky old folklore speaks any truth, but those hazards are not as simple as good vs. evil.
We’ll dive much deeper into these topics on the Waif School blog to come. It's not the kind of thing you can address in one post.
I can’t even call my own practice “fairy faith” without squirming out of my skin and melting into a vaguely Evvin-sized beached-jelly Blorp of NOPE, because both the words “fairy” and “faith” 🤢 squick me out wicked bad, for different reasons. Tinkerbell baggage, meet Big ‘Murrican Christian Family baggage. I’ll bring the sweet potato casserole if someone else stuffs the turkey!
Folk esoterica, agnostic animism, animist mysticism, symbolism, and folkloric art are some phrases I can stomach for these practices, as I approach them. Different practitioners may use their own preferred language, if any.
OOooOOooAhhhh, what does “folk esoterica” mean, you ask?
It’s the fuckin’ Fairy Faith, rebranded by a two-points-more-secular, made-up-as-fuck phrase that doesn’t make me wanna barf, and always has been. 🤷🏻 #unmasking
Surprise! Hahaaa…. In defense of me, exactly none of you ever asked *which* Folk I’ve been talking about this whole time… 😉And we’re only using the words “fae” and “fairy” now for your benefit, edification, and translation. I don't like those terms much personally. I prefer Good Folk and Othercrowd broadly, titles or loose descriptions for the spirits who go by them, or no verbal terms or names at all—so much the better.
I wandered into this worldview through immersion in the arts. I would encourage approaching this terrain with a healthy dose of skepticism and a grounded sense of humor throughout your explorations. I do have serious respects for folklore and its source cultures, but that doesn’t mean I take it literally or at face value. By nature, it’s a blend of profound spiritual mysteries and human storytelling, some of which is delicious and some of which is trash, and occasionally both at once.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a Mystery. There’s a difference.
But rrrrrrrr… having “fae” and “fairy” language on your radar is going to get between many of you and what this material has to offer, unless you do some unlearning. Traditional folklore and contemporary fantasy are often antithetical in content, values, aesthetic sensibilities, and vibes, while using the exact same language. How did that happen, I wonder? Colonization, comma, Anglo-American mostly, with help from our friends literature, capitalism, and Victorian perversions.
Spirit work and collaboration with the Good Folk were and still are vital currents in the medicinal, folk-spiritual, musical, and poetic traditions in Ireland, Scotland, Britain, northwestern Europe, and occasionally their diasporas in North America. Wise women, cunning folk, and fairy doctors served in roles loosely analogous to shamans, seers, intercessors, and healers historically. Whether or not you believe or practice any kind of fairy faith, learning about this stuff is a fascinating and meaningful step toward decolonizing our own cultures as settlers of European descent. But you don’t need European ancestry to engage deeply and respectfully with these stories and spirits today!!
Please note that my projects are bilingual in human and folkloric idioms. They will strike some readers as more alien, and click more intuitively for others, and that’s okay either way. Otherworldly languages, perspectives, and cultures get more diverse, poetic, Strange, closed to us, and difficult for humans to brain than this. These are different cultures, born of very different perspectives than we have. There are MANY different types of spirits with their own respective ways and viewpoints. The Good Neighbors are incredibly diverse if the spooky old folklore has anything to say about it, and individual spirits have their own personalities and aims as well.
🚩 Differences across lines of spiritual diversity, or across worlds, should not be equated with differences across human cultures, neurologies, and races. 🚩 Most people in the west believe otherworldly spirits like the Othercrowd are imaginary stock characters and fantasy tropes confined to the realm of popular entertainment. Most Americans imagine that The Good Folk would be saccharine, servile, pansy-assed TWITS even if they did exist. (BARF.) But if it’s all just stories and fun, and we imagined the Good Folk up with our imaginations, then who cares what we do with them? That’s the unspoken axiom most people interested in this subject operate from today.
…Except for the part where this lore originated with sincerely held and culturally-specific folk beliefs that were *not* always regarded as imaginal in origin, and those beliefs are still sacred, and in some cases tragic or traumatic to culturally specific, living humans today. It’s complicated!
Still, it would be gravely disrespectful to our human friends, neighbors, and cousins to equate human to spirit communication challenges most people don’t believe in, with unquestionably real, tangible, and high stakes human to human prejudices and oppression.
On the flip side, if there really IS a spirit world or overlapping dimension populated with beings of equal and greater intelligence to our own, our differences in communication and world views could get even Stranger and more complicated than our differences with our human neighbors and comrades. And how would we even begin to trace those differences when most people playing with these spirits and their caricatures even in *ritual spaces* don’t believe the fae exist for Themselves beyond our whims? —A dynamic worth questioning.--
My work shares *one* viewpoint on a complex and ineffable subject that belongs to millions of people if it belongs to anyone at all. (Big IF that if…) It doesn’t speak for the Otherworld holistically. Nor does it speak for the European source cultures I’ve been inspired by. It couldn’t possibly.
If you’re very interested in and drawn to folkloric crafts or the fae but don’t have close relationships established to those Sprits yet, it would be wise to proceed cautiously as fuckedly and learn as much as you can from good sources before jumping in. Morgan Daimler's a wonderful resource for beginners interested in learning about the difference between traditional Irish lore and fairy fantasy. Our baseline culture in the States is profoundly disrespectful to these spirits and histories. Unlearn how to be disrespectful and yes-learn how to be yes-respectful before you seek contact or initiation with the Good Folk, or any other spirits, understanding that *something* unseen or Strange out there could answer that call maybe. (?) This work can help there! But it shouldn’t be your only source of guidance.
I’ve always boosted the approach that there’s no right or wrong way to read tarot, unless you’re scamming people (not cool). Tarot is one of the most welcoming and user friendly occult arts, with infinite room for made up as fuck stuff and DIY retellings. That’s a beautiful thing! Samesies for fantasy and speculative fiction. But applying a “no wrong way” ethos to spirit work could totally wreck your shit lol. You should not engage with spirits, fates, or deities unless and until you are ready to accept that spirits might have their own sovereignty, their own ways, and their own ideas as to how things should be done, and you might not be the wisest or most in-charge person in the room, if you do get into that. Folkloric spirits can be very dangerous to us, if the spooky old folklore speaks any truth, but those hazards are not as simple as good vs. evil.
We’ll dive much deeper into these topics on the Waif School blog to come. It's not the kind of thing you can address in one post.
Diving Deep With The Black Ink Tarot
So the Black Ink Tarot Deck is more accurately a modern-traditional folkloric oracle, grafted onto the tarot’s structure and story arcs.
Now that I know that, I shall be billing it as such, my besties. It’s a hybrid divination tool, and kind of its own system here. The esoteric, folkloric side is driving, as far as I can tell.
I believe this deck to be fun and friendly because I know myself to be fun and friendly, and if I did not care about user experiences with my probs-not-haunted services and merchandise, we would not be having these awkward conversations. This project came through me, and my sneaky, punk rock Fae Agenda is to help other people grow in your own wisdom, practice creativity and resilience, deprogram toxic ideologies, and inspire folks to rebel-up for a better tomorrow for all life (including, but for sure not limited to humans). Girls just wanna make life more bearable, beautiful, sustainable, and weird-in-fun-ways for the workers and the kids on the fringes, while disrupting anthropocentric skullduggery. That’s what girls want.
(That is not always lighthearted, easy terrain…. And some girls also think it’s totes hilarious and fair game to mess with peoples’ heads or punk scoundrels for shits and giggles while we’re at it, soooo….)
Please note that not all the Good Folk are fun & friendly if you wander off the garden path with this material!!!
This work came from the heart, and this deck’s language really is a part of how I think all the time. (Obviously I tone this down a bit in conversation, for courtesy’s sake.) 🙃 Recall that these differences may well spring more from all the art I’ve soaked up over the years, than any inherent spiritual divergences. #StayGrounded 😉
It is quite likely that I am an idiosyncratic oddball, braiding up folkloric inspiration with my own random “personal quirks.” I’m inviting you to learn a language and symbolic code I made up for myself, and we sometimes run into translation challenges between the two of us. We could frame this all that way, and that would be sensible of us. Because my symbolic catalog draws heavy inspiration and direction from pre-Victorian folklore and Irish, Scottish, and English cultural histories that most Americans are entrained to view through a post-Disney lens, we’ll likely have some challenges seeing eye to eye. IMO, those challenges are well worth airing and exploring! We may be speaking across some purely human cultural differences worth airing too.
If you’d like to go deep here, first bring awareness to the likelihood that your head, heart, and gaze is stuffed full of stereotypes, biases, and assumptions you don’t even know are there. Proceed like you’re attempting a respectful conversation, seeking counsel, and asking for support from a person or voice that you’ve been trained to fetishize and read reductively by default. That’s not an allegory for human prejudices. I am honestly talking about how we relate to folkloric stories and the Othercrowd as artists, storytellers, card readers, or occultists.
Does this reframe at all the observation that this deck might be a bit more teasing, challenging, or snarky than your others, or ask for something back from you routinely? Yes that’s weird behavior from a tarot deck! And not what we’d usually expect from a session as tarot readers who approach our decks as tools or inspiring, shuffled up picture books. (Especially not when the author thought this work would be easy and relatable, billed it as such, and told you to approach it like a shuffled up picture book. 😆 Oops!)
Would that be weird behavior from a spirit on the other end of a phone line though, if the ink & paper cards are behaving more like a telephone in this picture? Even between mutually respectful parties, Othercrowd cultures center exchanges, trades, and reciprocity. Again, you do NOT have to engage this deck in spirit-worky ways like that. But if you do go there, and you view your work with this deck as conversation with a spirit, who is sassing you back *like this,* then understand that you’re entering an exchange wherein you are asking for something from an intelligent voice with an alternate culture that you don’t understand yet, and that you are primed to view in silly or sinister ways, and look down on.
There may well NOT be a singular Spirit or organized personality on the other side of the phone line here! But you *are* definitely speaking to a *symbolic body* with an Othered language that may be new to you, so erring on the side of animism, unlearning, and language acquisition may help.
This deck could be good training wheels for a spirit work practice for some. Thinking about this stuff thoughtfully is good practice! And working with this deck could quite possibly become a spirit work practice in itself for some. —IDK what I did here, metaphysically speaking.— This is experimental and lyrical terrain for us all.
Now that I know that, I shall be billing it as such, my besties. It’s a hybrid divination tool, and kind of its own system here. The esoteric, folkloric side is driving, as far as I can tell.
I believe this deck to be fun and friendly because I know myself to be fun and friendly, and if I did not care about user experiences with my probs-not-haunted services and merchandise, we would not be having these awkward conversations. This project came through me, and my sneaky, punk rock Fae Agenda is to help other people grow in your own wisdom, practice creativity and resilience, deprogram toxic ideologies, and inspire folks to rebel-up for a better tomorrow for all life (including, but for sure not limited to humans). Girls just wanna make life more bearable, beautiful, sustainable, and weird-in-fun-ways for the workers and the kids on the fringes, while disrupting anthropocentric skullduggery. That’s what girls want.
(That is not always lighthearted, easy terrain…. And some girls also think it’s totes hilarious and fair game to mess with peoples’ heads or punk scoundrels for shits and giggles while we’re at it, soooo….)
Please note that not all the Good Folk are fun & friendly if you wander off the garden path with this material!!!
This work came from the heart, and this deck’s language really is a part of how I think all the time. (Obviously I tone this down a bit in conversation, for courtesy’s sake.) 🙃 Recall that these differences may well spring more from all the art I’ve soaked up over the years, than any inherent spiritual divergences. #StayGrounded 😉
It is quite likely that I am an idiosyncratic oddball, braiding up folkloric inspiration with my own random “personal quirks.” I’m inviting you to learn a language and symbolic code I made up for myself, and we sometimes run into translation challenges between the two of us. We could frame this all that way, and that would be sensible of us. Because my symbolic catalog draws heavy inspiration and direction from pre-Victorian folklore and Irish, Scottish, and English cultural histories that most Americans are entrained to view through a post-Disney lens, we’ll likely have some challenges seeing eye to eye. IMO, those challenges are well worth airing and exploring! We may be speaking across some purely human cultural differences worth airing too.
If you’d like to go deep here, first bring awareness to the likelihood that your head, heart, and gaze is stuffed full of stereotypes, biases, and assumptions you don’t even know are there. Proceed like you’re attempting a respectful conversation, seeking counsel, and asking for support from a person or voice that you’ve been trained to fetishize and read reductively by default. That’s not an allegory for human prejudices. I am honestly talking about how we relate to folkloric stories and the Othercrowd as artists, storytellers, card readers, or occultists.
Does this reframe at all the observation that this deck might be a bit more teasing, challenging, or snarky than your others, or ask for something back from you routinely? Yes that’s weird behavior from a tarot deck! And not what we’d usually expect from a session as tarot readers who approach our decks as tools or inspiring, shuffled up picture books. (Especially not when the author thought this work would be easy and relatable, billed it as such, and told you to approach it like a shuffled up picture book. 😆 Oops!)
Would that be weird behavior from a spirit on the other end of a phone line though, if the ink & paper cards are behaving more like a telephone in this picture? Even between mutually respectful parties, Othercrowd cultures center exchanges, trades, and reciprocity. Again, you do NOT have to engage this deck in spirit-worky ways like that. But if you do go there, and you view your work with this deck as conversation with a spirit, who is sassing you back *like this,* then understand that you’re entering an exchange wherein you are asking for something from an intelligent voice with an alternate culture that you don’t understand yet, and that you are primed to view in silly or sinister ways, and look down on.
There may well NOT be a singular Spirit or organized personality on the other side of the phone line here! But you *are* definitely speaking to a *symbolic body* with an Othered language that may be new to you, so erring on the side of animism, unlearning, and language acquisition may help.
This deck could be good training wheels for a spirit work practice for some. Thinking about this stuff thoughtfully is good practice! And working with this deck could quite possibly become a spirit work practice in itself for some. —IDK what I did here, metaphysically speaking.— This is experimental and lyrical terrain for us all.
The readers I heard from started approaching this deck animistically, and treating it like a curious sort of person without prompting. I’m honestly not sure whether the deck inspired that framing from you, or whether you projected that framing onto the deck. Either way, that’s the sort of treatment that can hatch, foster, and feed an egregore if the deck wasn’t inspirited to begin with. It’s also the sort of framing that can trick you into forgetting that you’re talking to your own self within this practice, and that’s a different kind of dangerous.
You know that thing where people are going insane from talking to Chat-GPT because they think it’s a genuine, superhuman intelligence as opposed to a content blender programmed to deliver BULLSHIT that reinforces biases and tell people lies they want to hear? Welp, that kind of thing can happen in contemplative and divinatory practices too. Tarot can be a wonderful support, but it should not be your sole source of guidance, information, or wisdom when you’re making serious decisions! The New Age and neopagan fields are full of baloney people pulled out of their own asses and attributed to gods. None of us are immune to this—me neither. Hearing that this deck has shown a pattern consistent with an egregore or a spirit’s influence puts us all at elevated risk of forgetting that we’re bringing our own voices, viewpoints, desires, and biases to the table here.
A tarot reading is a collaborative conversation between multiple parties: the reader, the querent, the author, the illustrator, the spirit of Tarot herself, the symbolic body of any given deck, the allies of the reader if you work with spirits, and sometimes, the muses or patrons of a particular deck in spirit. The Muses behind this one might be a little louder than usual at this party, or this deck may have hatched a spirit and mind of its own somewhere along the line. Unclear. Either way, you’re all still *active* participants in your own readings and your own conversations with yourselves through this deck as you go.
It’s a challenge to engage animistically without getting overly credulous.
If you relate to this deck like a character or a person, it may well behave that way with you in turn. But it was built on folkloric symbolism, so it’s behaving by those ways. Proceed with caution, understanding that you’re still bringing your own beliefs, hopes, dreams, fears, wisdom, biases, limitations, and projections to the table. And proceed with respect, with the understanding that you may need to unlearn some cultural baggage before you can become fluent enough in this oracle’s language to braid it up constructively with your own.
Don’t rush to dive too hard or too far too fast. It could take multiple, successive passes for this language to sink in before you can go off-book with this oracle with any accuracy. Throughout this process, it would be wise to consult other oracles or other sources of daily guidance on your immediate, practical questions. Journal your progress so you can track and test for accuracy, relevance, and wisdom. Try drawing and cross referencing readings on the same question with this deck and another you know well. Practice discerning between the deck’s voice and your own within your sessions.
I can offer you art, word, poetry, story, context, and frameworks here that can help you work with this material in the best ways I know how. But I cannot guide, control, or take on responsibility for whatever you take away from this work, or the consequences of your actions, decisions, fates, and fortunes as you work with these materials. IF you decide to approach your decks through a spirit work angle, you do so at your own risks.
Those risks can be worth it! I wish you the best of luck and hope they help either way!
Deep End Trouble-Shooting
Some people will grok this all intuitively much much faster than others. That doesn’t make you a better or worse reader. It may be a reflection of your storytelling diet, spiritual praxis, neurological wiring, or baseline personality prior to picking this up. Your experiences here are your own and I respect that.
Both of my decks like to focus on shadow work, esoterica, strategic fable-spinning, rebellion, creative development, and fear-facing, with a spicy or dark edge to their humor. Recall that “shadow work” here refers to the Jungian concept of exploring the unknown and unseen terrain of our psyches. Not everything in the Shadow is spooky, antagonistic, or undesirable! We find gifts, truths, epiphanies, and neutral surprises there too. “Darkness” is a state of mystery, ambiguity, and possibility. Possibility is unnerving for many reasons! Including some worth embracing.
The spirit of this deck may care rather more about your artistry, liberation, gentle graces, gallows humor, sensuality, resilience, or potential aptitude for culture-fucking than your prowess with the capitalism or your social standing in the eyes of your peers. So this one maybe shouldn’t be your first or sole oracle when you need fast, clear, easy, straightforward guidance on practical matters such as nailing the interview for a job you need… that clashes with your values, or getting laid this weekend… by people you don’t even like. It is totally okay to turn to tarot for questions like that! The Smith-Waite deck has your back there & Fortuna’s not gonna blush or bat an eyelash at your dirty little, mortal, mammal secrets lol. Haha… this deck won’t blush either… but it might not *help* in straightforward ways on every question.
Anytime a tarot reading kicks up more shit than you’d like to deal with, you can pace yourself, use your journal to tackle your reading over the course of a few days rather than all at once, decompress with activities you find gentle and relaxing, and tag in supports from trusted friends or counselors as needed. Or simply nope out!
Sometimes, the Black Ink Tarot will choose to evoke things lyrically rather than spell them out directly, very much as a feature not a bug. Sometimes, it may wish to stretch and strange how you see things, and this may vibe confusing in the moment, but crystallize later.
“Later” here can occasionally mean YEARS later, when the art games in my process wax more lyrical than sensible with me, or I have a long-term story or archetype on my case that I don’t see or understand yet. Try Keeping your tarot notes in the same record where you keep your dream notes, with an index so you can track your patterns later. This deck should pair well with dream work.
Now, I recognize that saying “circle back in five years and check again” in response to a tarot reading not making sense is fucking absurd, and SHOULD sound like ripe, hot snake-oil to anyone with so much as a SHRED of common sense. In the contexts of lyrical craft and *folkloric studies,* there can be very little difference between five years and five days sometimes. For practical readings, this deck—should—cooperate on your timeline just fine. For esoteric readings, long predictions, or creative writing stuff—who fuckin’ knows? 🤷🏻
There are gateways into folkloric craft in this work here and there, which I did put there, yes. 🤭🍄 It is your choice to step through these gateways if you want to, and your decision and responsibility what you do down those pathways, if and only if you want to go there, lovely. I have no sway over that once ya do.
I imagined and intended that this project would do one set of things for practicing folkloric witches and a different set of things for secular tarot beginners, but it appears to be doing ✨whatever the fuck✨ now that it’s in other peoples’ hands. This has the side benefit of blowing my cover 🤦🏻 as a contemporary “folk esotericist,” and tricking me into becoming a dark-folkloric educator (in my own vernacular) if I wanna hang onto my ethics & standards while moving the rest of these darling decklings the fuck out of my house. Haha. (Oops.) Don’t dabble in folkloric craft if you can’t take a joke....
Hauntedness not guaranteed. Non-hauntedness equally & oppositely not guaranteed. Sold as a curio. For entertainment purposes only. No take-backs.
The author/illustrator, Evvie “Evvin” Marin, may not be held liable for any of your own life decisions, spiritual pathways, fates, or shit that happens in your lives on this or the other side of the Veil as you work with this deck, or any other materials published through Interrobang Tarot, or the artist’s other platforms.
Both of my decks like to focus on shadow work, esoterica, strategic fable-spinning, rebellion, creative development, and fear-facing, with a spicy or dark edge to their humor. Recall that “shadow work” here refers to the Jungian concept of exploring the unknown and unseen terrain of our psyches. Not everything in the Shadow is spooky, antagonistic, or undesirable! We find gifts, truths, epiphanies, and neutral surprises there too. “Darkness” is a state of mystery, ambiguity, and possibility. Possibility is unnerving for many reasons! Including some worth embracing.
The spirit of this deck may care rather more about your artistry, liberation, gentle graces, gallows humor, sensuality, resilience, or potential aptitude for culture-fucking than your prowess with the capitalism or your social standing in the eyes of your peers. So this one maybe shouldn’t be your first or sole oracle when you need fast, clear, easy, straightforward guidance on practical matters such as nailing the interview for a job you need… that clashes with your values, or getting laid this weekend… by people you don’t even like. It is totally okay to turn to tarot for questions like that! The Smith-Waite deck has your back there & Fortuna’s not gonna blush or bat an eyelash at your dirty little, mortal, mammal secrets lol. Haha… this deck won’t blush either… but it might not *help* in straightforward ways on every question.
Anytime a tarot reading kicks up more shit than you’d like to deal with, you can pace yourself, use your journal to tackle your reading over the course of a few days rather than all at once, decompress with activities you find gentle and relaxing, and tag in supports from trusted friends or counselors as needed. Or simply nope out!
Sometimes, the Black Ink Tarot will choose to evoke things lyrically rather than spell them out directly, very much as a feature not a bug. Sometimes, it may wish to stretch and strange how you see things, and this may vibe confusing in the moment, but crystallize later.
“Later” here can occasionally mean YEARS later, when the art games in my process wax more lyrical than sensible with me, or I have a long-term story or archetype on my case that I don’t see or understand yet. Try Keeping your tarot notes in the same record where you keep your dream notes, with an index so you can track your patterns later. This deck should pair well with dream work.
Now, I recognize that saying “circle back in five years and check again” in response to a tarot reading not making sense is fucking absurd, and SHOULD sound like ripe, hot snake-oil to anyone with so much as a SHRED of common sense. In the contexts of lyrical craft and *folkloric studies,* there can be very little difference between five years and five days sometimes. For practical readings, this deck—should—cooperate on your timeline just fine. For esoteric readings, long predictions, or creative writing stuff—who fuckin’ knows? 🤷🏻
There are gateways into folkloric craft in this work here and there, which I did put there, yes. 🤭🍄 It is your choice to step through these gateways if you want to, and your decision and responsibility what you do down those pathways, if and only if you want to go there, lovely. I have no sway over that once ya do.
I imagined and intended that this project would do one set of things for practicing folkloric witches and a different set of things for secular tarot beginners, but it appears to be doing ✨whatever the fuck✨ now that it’s in other peoples’ hands. This has the side benefit of blowing my cover 🤦🏻 as a contemporary “folk esotericist,” and tricking me into becoming a dark-folkloric educator (in my own vernacular) if I wanna hang onto my ethics & standards while moving the rest of these darling decklings the fuck out of my house. Haha. (Oops.) Don’t dabble in folkloric craft if you can’t take a joke....
Hauntedness not guaranteed. Non-hauntedness equally & oppositely not guaranteed. Sold as a curio. For entertainment purposes only. No take-backs.
The author/illustrator, Evvie “Evvin” Marin, may not be held liable for any of your own life decisions, spiritual pathways, fates, or shit that happens in your lives on this or the other side of the Veil as you work with this deck, or any other materials published through Interrobang Tarot, or the artist’s other platforms.
Diving Deeper With Fortune’s Inkwell
Fortune’s Inkwell explains exactly how this deck speaks in 300+ page detail. 📚🥳📚 BUT— I did not expect this deck and book’s language to override your own prior tarot studies in practice. That’s been a curious pattern to hear about. I designed this thing around correspondences I’d meant to integrate easily with prior knowledge and other reading schools. Several folks have reported that they’ve had trouble accessing their prior understanding of the tarot while working with The Black Ink deck, and that it’s not cooperating with other systems of interpretation. Prior knowledge sort of fuzzes out in reading sessions. 😶 I did not see that coming! And it does suggest a mind of its own, ‘cause the numbers, elements, and symbols are all there… SO—that makes working with the book even more important if it’s not a language or framing that comes naturally.
You do have to read read the book, at least once in order, from cover to cover, to absorb the language and systems within it! A TON of the meat and potatoes here fall in the introductory, framing, and theory sections before and around the card descriptions. Without that theory in mind, your analysis of the card descriptions alone may be incomplete or even misleading, especially if you’re coming from a background of viewing reversals or shadow work as simplistic or net-negative. There is also a narrative arc to this book that diverges somewhat from other tarot texts. Many of the punch lines, knife twists, and hidden gems are in the running threads, the connective big picture, the double entendres, and the subtext.
You can pair this book with any other deck. But for the Black Ink Deck specifically, you really need this book.
Think of it this way: we turn to tarot for navigation and guidance in our lives. The guidebook, in entirety, is your atlas and map surveying the whole terrain. Any one card description is more like a right or left turn. If you approach your orientation and path-finding in your readings as a series of turns without understanding your broader terrain and landmarks, you will most likely get yourself all turned around, even following accurate directions. But if you take in the big picture first, understand your terrain, and get the lay of the land down in your mind’s eye, you’ll know both how to interpret and orient your directions, AND how and where to explore off the beaten track. That’s the way to go!
A lot of the questions I’ve been hearing over the last year are already addressed in the book. And the solutions boil down to:
1. Yes, you’ll need to work with the book however long it takes to learn this system. Taking in the theory from the start should help you absorb and recall each card’s meanings and layers much faster, but mileage may vary.
2. When I call my arts practice “folkloric” I am talking about historic and modern-traditional folklore. By “historic lore” I mean folk beliefs and folk tales, heavy on pre-Victorian Irish, English, and Scottish sources in my rotation. By “modern-traditional lore,” I mean the living lore today that still echoes and traces back to the old stuff, following more or less the same patterns, expressing in twenty-first century ways.
3. Folklore includes fae lore, so watch out.
4. The Black Ink deck’s temperament and etiquette preferences do seem to lean quite fae of center, so… oops for that! 😅 Aaaand you’re welcome. 😁
5. Moreover, this deck’s personality aligns with a specific subset of Othercrowd lore, and you have all the breadcrumbs you need to figure out what (or whom?) may have been referenced or involved here. But I’m not gonna spell that one out for you! Happy hunting. 📚 📚 📚
6. That said, the philosophies and card interpretations in Fortune’s Inkwell are eclectic, contemporary, and deeply human in many respects. I create modern-traditional symbolic art. My works should not be mistaken for or cited as historic lore. A lot of different sources of inspiration, personal gnoses, and life experiences when into this material. Folkloric inspiration is part of it, but so is human life on the ground. The human side is there! Mind it as a translator as you go.
7. The cards’ artwork is not simple to give simple answers!!! The cards’ artwork is simple because each symbol is LOADED and packed with multiple layers of meaning. These cards are keys and seeds. They’re designed to leave space for your own meditations, psi, and stories. Use context and intuition to read which layers activate in any given reading, and seek patterns and stories in the relationships between the card combinations on the table. This may take time. I find it helpful sometimes to lay out a reading, then go for a walk, take a shower, or even sleep on it, and let it rattle around the back of my mind before writing out my interpretations.
You do have to read read the book, at least once in order, from cover to cover, to absorb the language and systems within it! A TON of the meat and potatoes here fall in the introductory, framing, and theory sections before and around the card descriptions. Without that theory in mind, your analysis of the card descriptions alone may be incomplete or even misleading, especially if you’re coming from a background of viewing reversals or shadow work as simplistic or net-negative. There is also a narrative arc to this book that diverges somewhat from other tarot texts. Many of the punch lines, knife twists, and hidden gems are in the running threads, the connective big picture, the double entendres, and the subtext.
You can pair this book with any other deck. But for the Black Ink Deck specifically, you really need this book.
Think of it this way: we turn to tarot for navigation and guidance in our lives. The guidebook, in entirety, is your atlas and map surveying the whole terrain. Any one card description is more like a right or left turn. If you approach your orientation and path-finding in your readings as a series of turns without understanding your broader terrain and landmarks, you will most likely get yourself all turned around, even following accurate directions. But if you take in the big picture first, understand your terrain, and get the lay of the land down in your mind’s eye, you’ll know both how to interpret and orient your directions, AND how and where to explore off the beaten track. That’s the way to go!
A lot of the questions I’ve been hearing over the last year are already addressed in the book. And the solutions boil down to:
1. Yes, you’ll need to work with the book however long it takes to learn this system. Taking in the theory from the start should help you absorb and recall each card’s meanings and layers much faster, but mileage may vary.
2. When I call my arts practice “folkloric” I am talking about historic and modern-traditional folklore. By “historic lore” I mean folk beliefs and folk tales, heavy on pre-Victorian Irish, English, and Scottish sources in my rotation. By “modern-traditional lore,” I mean the living lore today that still echoes and traces back to the old stuff, following more or less the same patterns, expressing in twenty-first century ways.
3. Folklore includes fae lore, so watch out.
4. The Black Ink deck’s temperament and etiquette preferences do seem to lean quite fae of center, so… oops for that! 😅 Aaaand you’re welcome. 😁
5. Moreover, this deck’s personality aligns with a specific subset of Othercrowd lore, and you have all the breadcrumbs you need to figure out what (or whom?) may have been referenced or involved here. But I’m not gonna spell that one out for you! Happy hunting. 📚 📚 📚
6. That said, the philosophies and card interpretations in Fortune’s Inkwell are eclectic, contemporary, and deeply human in many respects. I create modern-traditional symbolic art. My works should not be mistaken for or cited as historic lore. A lot of different sources of inspiration, personal gnoses, and life experiences when into this material. Folkloric inspiration is part of it, but so is human life on the ground. The human side is there! Mind it as a translator as you go.
7. The cards’ artwork is not simple to give simple answers!!! The cards’ artwork is simple because each symbol is LOADED and packed with multiple layers of meaning. These cards are keys and seeds. They’re designed to leave space for your own meditations, psi, and stories. Use context and intuition to read which layers activate in any given reading, and seek patterns and stories in the relationships between the card combinations on the table. This may take time. I find it helpful sometimes to lay out a reading, then go for a walk, take a shower, or even sleep on it, and let it rattle around the back of my mind before writing out my interpretations.
Some Here & Now Things
Please note that *whatever this is,* it’s a product of one artist’s contemporary, North American practice. Whatever this is, it is happening here and now, speaking in modern ways, to a modern audience, dealing with modern problems and questions.
The year is 2025. The base camp is to the north of Boston on stolen Agawam, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket lands of Turtle Island. This deck and I like The New Pornographers, The Velvet Underground, Lil Nas X, The Last Dinner Party, Patti Smith, and Halsey every bit as much as we love our haunting folk ballads and trad fiddle. I drew this thing in Sharpie pens on card stock in my combat boots and crop tops. The designs were already done and the book was half drafted before I even *began* cracking the serious occult tomes on the fairy faith. And I did exactly ZERO floaty, silk-robed rituals or edge-lordly weird stuff to trap a spirit in it. LOL. Whatever or whomever made this deck so wyrd is there because they want to be. 😉
I will ask you to kindly refrain from throwing post-Victorian frou-frou and Disney-spectrum Tinkerbell kitsch at me from here on please lol. Don’t worry if the Tinkerbell nonsense or twee memes have come up in the past; no retroactive offense taken. I know perfectly well that that’s part of our culture, and that most people have no clue what the difference is, and are primed from cradle to grave to be—and I do say this with love, as one myself—✨incorrigible ding-dongs✨ about this stuff.
I’ve thrown you no boundaries or requests here before. I am throwing a new one down now, having just stepped up to bat as a sincere (cough shitposty cough cough ) folkloric re-educator (cough CLOWN cough cough) in some weird & fun & method ways that I know perfectly well will get me GRAF (Generally Read As Fae) personally, no matter how ✨wildly inaccurate✨ and adorable this baseless assuming around of yours may be. (Try not to read too much into it, Vivienne). Get pepped! Because why? Because:
I am not here for Ren Faire fantasies, whimsical rainbow kitsch, idle wish granting, pointy-eared cosplays, bossing around demons, or thirsting after seggsy succubi, and this is not that kind of lore…. 💋🏹🌿
Sign up here to catch what kind of lore it is for free! I shall respect your attention by teaching you many dark-folkloric fun-facts and potentially useful Trickster Studies things, whilst tricking you into streaming some well produced, hypnotic folk-rock music and video content, and occasionally selling you tee shirts or inviting you to fun events. (New tee designs on the horizon for the mischievous and the bold…)
The year is 2025. The base camp is to the north of Boston on stolen Agawam, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket lands of Turtle Island. This deck and I like The New Pornographers, The Velvet Underground, Lil Nas X, The Last Dinner Party, Patti Smith, and Halsey every bit as much as we love our haunting folk ballads and trad fiddle. I drew this thing in Sharpie pens on card stock in my combat boots and crop tops. The designs were already done and the book was half drafted before I even *began* cracking the serious occult tomes on the fairy faith. And I did exactly ZERO floaty, silk-robed rituals or edge-lordly weird stuff to trap a spirit in it. LOL. Whatever or whomever made this deck so wyrd is there because they want to be. 😉
I will ask you to kindly refrain from throwing post-Victorian frou-frou and Disney-spectrum Tinkerbell kitsch at me from here on please lol. Don’t worry if the Tinkerbell nonsense or twee memes have come up in the past; no retroactive offense taken. I know perfectly well that that’s part of our culture, and that most people have no clue what the difference is, and are primed from cradle to grave to be—and I do say this with love, as one myself—✨incorrigible ding-dongs✨ about this stuff.
I’ve thrown you no boundaries or requests here before. I am throwing a new one down now, having just stepped up to bat as a sincere (cough shitposty cough cough ) folkloric re-educator (cough CLOWN cough cough) in some weird & fun & method ways that I know perfectly well will get me GRAF (Generally Read As Fae) personally, no matter how ✨wildly inaccurate✨ and adorable this baseless assuming around of yours may be. (Try not to read too much into it, Vivienne). Get pepped! Because why? Because:
I am not here for Ren Faire fantasies, whimsical rainbow kitsch, idle wish granting, pointy-eared cosplays, bossing around demons, or thirsting after seggsy succubi, and this is not that kind of lore…. 💋🏹🌿
Sign up here to catch what kind of lore it is for free! I shall respect your attention by teaching you many dark-folkloric fun-facts and potentially useful Trickster Studies things, whilst tricking you into streaming some well produced, hypnotic folk-rock music and video content, and occasionally selling you tee shirts or inviting you to fun events. (New tee designs on the horizon for the mischievous and the bold…)
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