Product Description

Whispers of twilight twist in the corners of your soul. Surreal images surprise your mind. Colors and curves delight your eyes. Bittersweet beauty stirs your heart. You change, grow wiser, and find that the world is complicated, but no less beautiful.

Publisher Review:

Honesty is imperative. You must know from the start: I love this deck. My heart was lost to it almost a year ago when I was in Italy working in the Lo Scarabeo offices. Riccardo Minetti, the editor there, pulled out Cristina’s original artwork and that was, as they say, that. Later, the little flame in my heart was fanned—again by Riccardo—into a bonfire when I was asked to write the dreaded Little White Booklet. If you think using those books is frustrating, try writing them! Luckily, Riccardo turned what could have been a wretched experience into a magical one. He knows that my "mental deck" is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. He knows that it is my wont to force all decks into that mold. So he instructed me to just sit with this art, one picture at a time and forget what card it is supposed to be and what the Rider-Waite-Smith version looks like. Just sit with the art and write down what it says. And so I did. And in doing so, [read more]

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149790 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Cards

Features

• ISBN13: 9780738718545
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Since 1987, Art Publisher Lo Scarabeo has published over 100 Tarot decks that have been acclaimed all over the world for originality and quality. Only the best Italian and International artists are selected for our new decks, and the result is that Lo Scarabeo's decks are all recognizable as an exceptional artistic value.

Tradition
One of Lo Scarabeo's goals is the preservation of traditional Tarot decks.

Development
New decks and ideas are continually gathered from all over the world. This allows Lo Scarabeo to produce some of the most innovative decks available today.

Quality
Lo Scarabeo is committed to ever increasing quality and beauty of their products.

Distribution
*Llewellyn is the exclusive distributor of Lo Scarabeo products in North America.

Customer Reviews

A Surrealistic Journey into the Twilight!
From samples over the internet, these cards "called" to me right away, but I didn't know why. After I quickly browsed through the cards in this deck it finally hit me, "Wow! Tim Burton meets Tarot." It's undeniable that the imagery in the Tarot of the Sweet Twilight seems to be taken out of movies like "The Night Before Christmas" and "Corpse Bride". However, this is not just a rehash of the Rider Tarot in the spirit of those movies, but an ingeniously designed deck by Christina Benintende.

The cards on this deck are bordered black, with a reversible back to behold. The imagery losely follows the Rider tradition in a surrealistic fashion. With muted but contrasting colors, each card sucessfully captures the environment at twilight. At times, a sun and a moon will be seen at opposite ends of a card. The characters are languish being of pale skin that at all times captivate your imagination with their hidden emotions. However, this is by no mean a depressing deck.

Each card on this deck is labeled top and bottom on six languages including English, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Dutch. The Major Arcana are numbered at the top with stylish purple roman numerals, starting at 0 with The Fool. No matter how much I try, I won't be able to make justice to these cards. Instead, I can say that my mind was full of wonder as I enjoyed them. Is there a scythe as the shadow of the skeletal figure in Death? Is that an effigy of Yoda at the bottom left corner of Strength?

The suits in the Minor Arcana (chalices, pentacles, wands and swords) are subtly integrated into the imagery. The pip cards are fully illustrated and numbered at the top. There are a lot of interesting cards in the Minor Arcana like Ace of Cup with a woman bathing in a cup, Nine of Pentacles with a Catwoman look a like in view, and Knave of Wands with a troubadour with a spanish guitar to mention a few.

The only disappointing part of this deck is perhaps the Little White Book that comes with it. If you wanted to know what inspired the designer, you won't find an answer there. However, the descriptions were to point of the imagery on the cards.

If you like surrealistic art and tarot, this is probably a good deck for you. I suspect this is a deck I will enjoy for a long while.

Lovely Redo for Tarot
This isn't a typical Rider-Waite clone deck. A fair number of the illustrations depart from the standard symbology, but not so much that the interpretaions are totally lost! You shouldn't have too much trouble adapting to the deck for doing readings from.

But that's not really why I dig this deck. It's the look. The colors are vivid, but not overly cheerful. I read a review where someone felt that it was the deck that Tim Burton never made, and I think that is an apt description. It's got some gloomy outlook amidst the more upbeat cards, and the drawings are rather charming. It's not as far out there as the Deviant Moon Deck either; it's stylised without departing from certain Tarot norms.

Additionally the card stock is a good wieght and the finish is not overly slick making them easy to handle. Lo Scarabo's boxes have a different fold at the bottom that doesn't roughen up the cards when you put them back in. The little white book is a bit on the sparse side, but that's standard. The meanings given in it do seem to vary a bit from what you learn elsewhere, but I found them to be relatively easy incorporated twists of other decks.

All in all, charming without being overly cheerful or theme interpretive.

Sweet Twilight
Simply put: This deck is amazing.
The cards are great quality with beautiful artwork. It's magical, depressing, emotional, artistic, but without being over done. It is what it is, the sweet sweet twilight.
I did a great deal of research before purchasing and I am beyond satisfied.