Liz - as Lady Vala - will be joining with the pagan members of the First Unitarian Church of Toledo (on Glendale Avenue across from the entrance to MUO) to offer a the first pagan ritual-service to the entire congregation on August 1, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. The sabbat of Lughnassadh focuses on the abundance of the first harvest sabbat, and sharing the wealth of the earth with all.

Lady Vala, Dark Moon Lotus and Crone Serena Ashling (Toledo’s first official crone!) will lead the co-celebrant pagans and the congregation through the circle casting, chants, and prayers for Earth’s health. The ritual-service will feature wonderful music provided by the church’s popular and multi-talented music group, The Gathering. Liz’s original song “Garden of Love” will be premiered with the group.

Everyone is welcome to join us in this sabbat celebration of ritual and music. The doors are open, attendance is free. Donations are welcome.

Liz will be giving this lecture at the Lighthouse Center on August 8, 2010, 2-4:30 pm. NCGR members - $8; non-members - $10.

Chiron is a planetoid, possibly a rogue meteor that visited our solar system and took up an orbit between Saturn and Uranus. Astrologically, Chiron is generally consider the “wounded healer.” But there’s so much more meaning to be found! This lecture will give details on the many important but neglected or never-before discovered implications of this asteroid, and how it can be interpreted in natal charts.

Liz is giving classes in Pagan Pathways. Students are guided through a broad survey of rituals, techniques, beliefs, and history. If you’re curious or a beginner who wants to know more before joining a group or coven, this is a great option to help you find your path with confidence.

The modest class fee includes supplies for projects we’ll be making in class. Some of the projects we’re made students include patens, dream pillow, a witch’s ladder, a mailbox charm, and a safety-in-travels talisman, and a personal quest talisman.

Class topics include (but are not limited to): branches of paganism, moon rituals, spellcasting basics; rites of passage, initiations and true names; occult sciences and divination overview; karma and reincarnation. The course includes particupation in rituals, including full moon esbats and seasonal sabbats. Merry Meet!

Contact Liz via this website for more information.

BC: Please tell us about the development of your divinatory meanings, and how you would suggest that the reader work with them?

EH: I started reading in public in 1982, although I had been studying and reading privately long before that. Doing psychic fairs and tarot parties is a trial-by-fire situation. People want to know about their lives, about love, health, family, money, and their careers, and they don’t care diddly-squat about esoteric meanings or attributions.

The divinatory meanings in the “Whispering Tarot” book are things you can tell a client that they’ll understand and be able to apply to their own lives. These DMs come from working in the trenches for over twenty-five years.

Read the full interview here!

TR: Did you spend a lot of time planning the card designs, or was it a more spontaneous process?

LH: My first wild sketching spree was completely spontaneous. I had a pencil and a pad of newsprint, and drew the ideas that were pouring into my head as fast as my hand could move. More thinking was necessary before committing to final pen-and-ink drawings. Decks with consistent motifs feel more harmonious. In the WT, the wands have dragons, and big horizons with sunrises and sunsets. The Cups have water faeries, water sylphs, and wizards. The same idea applies to color palettes.

Straying from the RWS and antique tarot templates required some deep decision-making, although some choices were easy. The handsome Devil was a no-brainer; who is tempted by an ugly devil?

These deliberate departures were inspired by 30-odd years of working with the tarot. I designed images that I wanted to see after using tons of other artists’ decks over the years, and I hope that other readers find the revamped imagery entertaining and evocative.

Read the full interview here!

Reviewed by Leah Samul

This deck and book/CD set is excellent for a number of reasons. Let me, as the poet said, count the ways. The author/designer has a very engaging writing style, which makes the text feel like she’s right there talking to you. At the same time, the writing is succinct and doesn’t go off on tangents that would lose the reader. This is especially helpful in her sections on astrology.

Elizabeth Hazel includes some of the back-story of tarot-astrology in the interpretation of her deck. She notes astrological attributes in the book/CD, but made a point of not putting them in the artwork on the cards themselves. This allows tarotist-astrologers to differ from her approach, should they so desire. She also provides a clearly written essay titled “Essential Dignities for Tarotists” at the end of the book, and includes a chart on Ptolomey’s Dignities and Debilities of the planets.

The artwork on the cards is light and playful. This is a deck you can take to the company picnic and feel secure it won’t scare off the suit and tie types. The colors are bright and the pictures engaging and easy to see. Also absent in the artwork is visual reference to obscure mystical systems. In other words, you don’t have to know Kabbalah or the Celtic Tree alphabet to read with this deck.

In another innovation,  Hazel gets past the usual “upright” and “reversed” meanings by using “Divinatory Meaning” and “Ill Dignified.” The phrase “ill-dignified” comes from astrology but it demonstrates its usefulness here in tarot. Hazel uses it to good advantage in situations where a card that is essentially positive comes up in a layout position that indicates negative problems. For example, a layout may have a position in the spread that indicates forces working against the querent. If a generally positive card, like Justice, appears upright in such a position, the ill-dignified interpretation Hazel provides gives the reader a sensible way to interpret the card. Each card has a short description of the picture, followed by the meanings. Both the regular meaning and the ill-dignified one get about a paragraph each.

Generally, the deck follows the usual major arcana template. One difference comes in trump XVIII (The Moon), which this deck calls “The Eclipse.” The precedent for this was set in the original Waite-Smith deck, which shows an eclipse on the Moon card. Hazel’s view of the card is that unlike the moon, which is a normal, nightly phenomenon, an eclipse represents bizarre, abnormal occurrences. The minor arcana follows the W-S format of wands, cups, swords and pentacles. Wands have an especially organic. Most of them feature white birch trees rooted in the earth, as opposed to movable staves. Only the Knight and the King differ; the Knight carries a birch branch while the King holds a birch staff. The court cards follow the Thoth tradition of Princesses, Knights, Queens and Kings.

One of this deck´s most salient strengths comes from the down-to-earth advice Hazel dispenses in the cards’ interpretations. Not that she ignores deeper philosophical insights; there are many. But as both professional and amateur tarot readers know, common sense and practical information means as much to clients as deep spiritual wisdom. This practicality shines through both in the regular and ill-dignified meanings. As examples: Temperance could indicate (among other things) “Recycling things to protect the environment; recycling ideas into new applications.” The Ace of Cups could mean “the heart is open and cleansed of past hurts, and ready to love again.” The eight of Wands, when ill-dignified, might symbolize a common workplace issue: “Too many deadlines all at once.” Or, it might mean “Messages are not received, or do not have the intended impact.” The ill-dignified Lovers (trump VI) could be interpreted as “A past failed love relationship that blocks or destroys current/future relationships, or makes a person skeptical about love.” The entire text on the deck is filled with these kinds of insights, and this makes the deck especially useful.

Hazel has designed 4 innovative spreads, The Vala Celtic Cross (13 cards) The Finger of God (8 cards), Athena’s Spear (10 cards) and The Laughing Turtle (7 cards.) All the spreads are practical and easy to remember.

The cards are “poker sized,” which is a smaller sized than usual for a tarot deck. This will be helpful for those whose arthritis makes large sized cards hard to shuffle, and also for people of smaller stature, whose hands are proportionately smaller. The book is available in two formats:  hard copy bound book, or on CD, which can be viewed on the computer and printed on any standard printer. 

I recommend this deck for its playful artwork, straightforward style, ease of use, and practical application. Both novices and experienced tarot readers will enjoy reading with it.

     Limited first edition decks are very collectable and highly prized by Tarot collectors. This guarantees the deck’s rarity and ownership is restricted to the savvy chosen few. (Italcards, an Italian publisher, is a good example of a company that specializes in numbered, limited first editions.)

    A numbered, signed first edition is pure icing on the proverbial collector’s cake.  Elizabeth Hazel, author of the innovative and well received Tarot Decoded (Weiser Books, 2004) and editor of this very journal, has created such a cake. Ms. Hazel’s Whispering Tarot is a signed edition limited to a first printing of 1,000 numbered copies.  This deck will be available July 1st, 2008 directly through her or her website

      Of the artwork, the oft times rapier-witted Ms. Hazel has offered an interpretation of a “…cross between Mad Magazine and Hello Kitty”.  When pressed for more details, she had this to say: “The artwork is stylized line drawings. It’s a modern, mannered illustration style, pure Liz.”  Sounds like one of these signed and numbered decks is going to be pure mine! I personally have an emissary picking up a copy for me in Great Britain during the TABI (Tarot Association of the British Isles) Convention in July at which Ms. Hazel is a guest speaker.

     The cards are smoothly finished, poker-sized and packaged in a custom two part box with a list price of $25.00. A PDF entitled The Whispering Tarot: Softly Spoken Secrets will be sold through the website separately.

     Ms. Hazel’s cards are attribute-free; the reader is free to construe his or her own interpretation. The list price of $25.00 renders this deck an excellent bargain for the collector, making The Whispering Tarot a highly attainable and recommended collectable investment.

The Living Tarot MeetUp offers various reviews as well as some additional product information.

Note: August 14, 2008 entry (full text, next page)

Though the cards are small, the wonderful detail of her pen drawings, in which she subtly uses various thicknesses of line and shows a mastery of shading and dot textures, is seen. I think the choice of the framing black borders also helps lead ones eye into the image and intensifies the contrast. The colours are intense but sensitively applied and she does not feel forced to colour every square millimetre of each drawing with colour, and instead allows the strength of the drawing and shading in some areas to stand on their own. Her imagery is creative and she finds new ways of representing to us many of the arcana. [. . .] The artwork and creative input into this deck is really astounding.

Read the full review here!

I must say that this whimsical deck not only whispers but giggles. The brightly-colored and boisterous images convey meanings that are far less rigid than other decks such as the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith or the more heavy-handed Thoth deck. For example, the normally staid Heirophant is given a new visual: “A guru levitates onto a sunbeam. Beneath him is the scene of a Middle-Eastern city, with onion-domed towers. A temple rises in the foreground…” Hazel uses pen and ink drawing that feel alive.

Read the full review here!