By Molly Remer
I read my first book about Goddess herstory in 2001. I bought my first copy of the We’Moon datebook two years later, my first infant son slung across my chest in a baby sling. I picked this colorful, woman-honoring, 
goddess-worshipping, spiral-bound form out of the stacks of lesbian, feminist, witch, and anarchist literature piled in untidy heaps on a table in the small radical bookstore located below street level in the liberal college town where I’d attended graduate school. I felt as if I was doing something risky, forbidden, possibly even dangerous and I still remember how to felt to carry my datebook up to the dim counter to make my purchase, the smell of patchouli drifting in the air as I ascended the stairs back to street level, now with both hidden knowledge and a baby carried in my arms. Perhaps it was my upbringing within the subculture of religious fundamentalism—not my own family, we were agnostic—but the culture of my peers, which had taught me that to name the body as sacred, to explore one’s own wisdom and self-authority, to partake in magic, to embody and envision the divine as feminine, are all dangerous acts. In some way, somehow, I absorbed that these are the realms that are restricted and denied and with that datebook in my hands, I was daring to break beyond those rules and taste the unknown, the mysterious, the magical, the powerful. There was something here for me. Something that would last forever.
love. The illustrations for the Herbcrafter’s Tarot are exquisite and breathtaking. Even the precise detail of the illustration on the back of the deck as a whole is enchanting. It has become my favorite card-back illustration of all time, the little tincture bottles, butterflies, and sprigs of herbs prompting a sense of discovery and joy every time I touch one. Instead of immediately shuffling the deck and drawing a card, which is how I usually approach a new deck, I made the decision to approach The Herbcrafter’s Tarot card by card, day by day, even (mostly) resisting the urge to peek ahead at the cards to come. It is truly a deck to be savored and I knew from the third card that I could recommend it wholeheartedly to others.
(Wands), Water (Cups), and Earth (Pentacles). Each card contains a detailed colored pencil drawing in photorealistic style. Each card is alive with vibrant detail and thoughtful connection, most of the illustrations containing very subtle nods to the original major and minor arcana cards of traditional tarot decks. Depending on the suit and type of plant, some of the herbs are shown in the act of being prepared or harvested, in use in baths or teas, or in their native environment. The People cards for each suit, depicting the hands of women healers at work, have been titled according to the archetypes each woman embodies as she “matures into her craft from wonderer to warrior to midwife to teacher.” The skilled, creative, intuitive hands of Hijas (daughters), Adelitas (warriors), Madres (mothers), and Curanderas (healers) are represented in the People cards. Accustomed as I am to the faces and personalities of the people depicted in full in The Gaian Tarot, I did find myself sometimes missing that human component and wanting to see who is “behind the scenes” of the beautiful herbal layouts, nature mandalas, works in progress, and the gnarled hands at work in The Herbcrafter’s Tarot. The inclusion of scenes, plants, and hands rather than faces is intentional, however, because the primary perspective of the deck is from that of the plants.
