The Great Tarobox Excavation of ’23
You know how it is. You hit a wall. Not a small bump, but a massive, crumbling, structural-integrity-issue kind of wall. For me, that wall showed up a couple of years ago when the whole “hustle culture” thing finally decided to kick my butt right out of my own life. I was toast. Burnt to a crisp, sleeping maybe four hours a night, staring at spreadsheets that weren’t even mine, just… numb.
So, I quit. Not just the job—I quit the whole routine. I decided I needed to strip everything back down to the bare wood. And that meant the great purge. You know, getting rid of all the stuff you accumulated when you were trying to be someone else. I pulled everything out of the giant Rubbermaid tote where I just threw things I bought when I had “disposable income” and “zero sense of self.”
That’s where I found it. Right at the bottom, underneath a broken guitar pedal and three pairs of mismatched headphones, was a beat-up box. The Shining Tribe Tarot. I stared at that thing for a good five minutes. I completely forgot I even owned it. I must have grabbed it like ten years ago during that New Age bookstore phase, probably because it looked “different” or “authentic.”
The Initial Punch to the Gut
I unsealed the plastic wrapper—yes, it was still sealed. It had been sitting there, waiting for its moment for a decade. I slid the cards out. And then I got the first shock. These are not your grandmother’s pleasant little pictures. No kings and queens sitting nicely. It’s all primal, messy, stick-figure-y, cave-painting-looking stuff. It looked like someone found a box of crayons and let loose on some card stock.
I tried to do a simple “past, present, future” pull. I shuffled, I cut, I laid the three cards out.
- The first card was just a huge, awkward Stone with what looked like a snake eating its own tail.
- The second card was a bunch of naked folks dancing around a fire with a big stick in the middle.
- The third card was a person climbing out of a little basket.
I looked at the cards. I looked at the little white book. I looked back at the cards. I thought, “What in the actual heck is this telling me?” My immediate reaction was: “This deck is useless.” I chucked it back on my desk, ready to put it straight into the donation pile. It felt like too much work for a simple answer.
The Reversal: I Wasn’t Letting It Win
But that’s where the story takes the turn, right? The whole reason I was purging was to face the hard things. That sealed box and those confusing cards symbolized everything I usually ran away from: complexity, things that didn’t provide instant gratification, and stuff that made me feel stupid. I decided, right then and there, I was going to beat this deck. I wasn’t putting it away until I understood what the artist was getting at.
The real practice started the next day. I forced myself to read the companion book, not just skim it. And this is key: I realized the basic tarot structure is there, but the names and the focus are completely different. The four suits aren’t Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentacles—they are Sticks (Fire), Pipes (Air), Baskets (Water), and Stones (Earth). And the courts are not ‘Page’ or ‘King’—they are figures like ‘Child,’ ‘Lover,’ and ‘Elder.’ This shifted everything.
I spent the next two months doing a daily one-card pull. I stopped looking at the book immediately. I looked at the image and wrote down what the primal art made me feel. I wrote about the tension of the figure, the shape of the Basket, the weight of the Stone. I ignored the traditional meanings entirely at first.
And slowly, it started to click. The readings weren’t subtle. They didn’t talk about career promotions or gentle romance. They talked about survival, community, where my energy was leaking, and what ritual I had abandoned. They were raw. When a card hit, it was a solid, uncomfortable slap in the face, not a gentle encouragement.
The Verdict: Is It Worth the Money (and Effort)?
So, after all that work, this is what I concluded. My answer is not a simple yes or no. You have to ask yourself why you want it.
If you want:
- A deck to learn the basics.
- Something you can use right out of the box with a simple RWS spread.
- Pretty, gentle art that makes you feel immediately calm.
Then absolutely, 100% NO. Do not touch this deck. Go buy something else. This deck will mess up your flow, and you will get frustrated and put it in a box for ten years, just like I did.
However, if you are:
- Feeling stuck in your current tarot practice.
- Looking for a foundational, primal, and often uncomfortable truth.
- Ready to put in the time to learn a whole new, unique system.
- Willing to be told directly that you are out of balance with your community or your own essential needs.
Then YES. It is worth buying right now. It is a deck that demands you slow down, demands you look past the standard symbolism, and rewards the pure, sustained effort of self-inquiry. It broke my old reading habits, and I came out the other side with a tool that cuts right to the chase. It’s hard work, but I kept that ragged old box, and it’s no longer sitting at the bottom of the clutter tote. That, my friends, is the real review.
