The Outsider Tarot by Bobby Abate

A Tarot deck conceptually related to modern life, inclusion and multiculturalism.

Bobby Abate (1973, Sagittarius) is an Italian artist, filmmaker and esotericist living in Brooklyn (United States of America), and has designed a very singular Tarot deck: The Outsider Tarot.

Some of the cards are inspired by people who influenced him throughout his life, like Rachel Pollack and Eden Gray, and also by people known by everyone whom had lived beyond social conventions, like Nina Simone, Mark LaPore, Shirley Chisholm and Jackie Shane. The spirit of the deck is to honor them, as well as all the outsiders. As Bobby says, it's about "reclaiming the Tarot for ourselves".

Cards were painted in watercolour and gouache. With black outlines full of colored fields, Bobby got inspired by ancient decks' styles such as those by Marixu Güller (The Great Esoteric Tarot) and Pamela Coleman Smith (Rider-Waite) to increase sensibility, fuse with colors and get psychically stimulated during readings.

The deck is based on a complex esoteric system which, however, can be read intuitively. And each card is radically reformulated according to present time lifestyles. Basically, you'll see three radical and original changes:

Royalty

Bobby consciously decided to remove the names Empress, Emperor, Hierophant, King, Queen, Knight and Page. Using royals is contrary to the idea of being an outsider, which is the main subject of the deck: how could an outsider have a king or a queen? Finding terms to replace them was difficult, so the artist associated them to elementals! Now:

• Pages are Sparks,
• Knights are Billows,
• Queens are Fathoms,
• Kings are Roots .

Natural elements

Bobby also associated classic minor cards' elements to daily life objects:

• Lights represent Fire (wands),
• Bottles represent Water (cups),
• Eyes represent Air (swords),
• and Roses represent Earth (coins).

Mixing elementals

And even more! Along with the new combinations, then each elemental card gathers two elements, so we'll see:

Page of Rows = Spark of Lights

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Fire + Fire

fire meets fire, very motivated and enthusiastic to explore

Page of Cups = Spark of Bottles

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Water + Fire

fire meets water, there's a battle of elements

Guidebook with meditations

Major cards are like scenes with stage direction, something like a theatre play. They don't include human figures but props, customs and/or sets. Readers may meditate on them, visualizing themselves as actors inside of scenes. They're also associated to a sign of the Western zodiac.

The deck and guidebook were designed and written by Bobby, and are super original. They were launched by crowdfunding on Kickstarter, back on February 2021.

Visit The Outsider Tarot and contact Bobby on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

Next, an almost half an hour video introducing the deck. We did it in September 2020, preannouncing the release: