Hermes plays with the Baroque Bohemian Cats

 

Hermes sneaked his way into this deck entirely by chance and due to what I took as a last-minute whim of mine. This now strikes me as an oddly appropriate way for us to have found ourselves including a card named for the god of tricksters and the unexpected. The story is that just as we were going to go to print with the cards  – the book already having been printed (it’s the easier part of the job for a printer and they often like to begin with that) I decided that after working on the deck for the best part of a year full-time, I couldn’t bear to leave one card as a boring blank. As you may know, decks are printed with 80 cards, which leaves one for a title card and one extra. So… as we had several images that we had either not managed to include in the deck, or that were destined for our picture book, I grabbed one that I was very fond of and made it into the Hermes card. Imagining that people would simply take it out and use it as a decorative extra, a bookmark, or as a card to give away – or something I honestly didn’t think much more about it. I was just happy that the lovely image of Hermes and the cat in the green dress were in there.

 

However, what I hadn’t quite foreseen (although oddly enough my first reading with the deck did warn me) is that Hermes had obviously decided not simply to get into the deck, but into readings done with it. Time and again I’ve been told that Hermes has come up in readings. I now accept that the card is here to stay and that many people like to leave it in the deck as a working element. So here are some thoughts on reading with it.

 

In tarot, The Magician card is often directly associated with Hermes the god, and our Hermes card can be regarded as fairly similar to The Magician. However, it has its own unique sense of luck, chance and the mad gamble as well as creativity and sudden insight. Hermes is wilder and more risky than The Magician, and while this card indicates a wonderful ability to invent, take risks and innovate, it also tells you not to rely on the outcome.

 

Keywords for Hermes.

Chance, probability, the unexpected.

Wild games that may lead to disappointment or - if luck's on your side - to delight and surprise.

New opportunities and skills – these will feel both sudden and "heaven-sent".

 

A final thought. Rachel Pollack has written a wonderful and appropriate Invocation to Hermes (this of course has no direct reference to our deck, and was written before we published it). Read it if you would really like to go further with thinking about the range of meanings of the Hermes card. It’s a provocative and enjoyable piece: http://www.rachelpollack.com/writing/index.html