Brotherhood Tarot
Reviews from a variety of sources are available at Oak Grove Oracle's web site as well as several Tarot web sites, including Aeclectic Tarot, The Crystal Gate, World Tarot Network, and The Meta Arts.    Here are some of the comments from men and women who have purchased the deck that have been sent to the Oak Grove:    ...What can I say? the deck and its photos are beyond my greatest hopes, and mine were rather high. In summary, they are marvelous. Each one is stunning, and several immediately called to me. ...    ...I received my cards yesterday and was more that pleased. The art is great and I am sure that these cards will rapidly become my favorite...    ...We may be the first Faerie community to use the deck in Heart Circles and other spiritual functions. Thanks for your good spirit!... (from a community space for Faeries in the desert)    ...My deck arrived and after carefully examining each card in the deck, I shuffled them and pulled my first card--the Universe which I took as a very good sign...    ...I am sending one of my four decks to my old Jungian professor, whose special interest is the Tarot and its use in getting in touch with the Collective. He was quite the man for using Tarot as a good source of highly concentrated symbolic knowledge useful to look into the mind... (from a psychologist)    ...The deck has proved really powerful to read with and I was able to gain quite a powerful clarification for an ongoing situation on my life at present. Thanks for creating something really special - it wouldn't have been as easy to see the truth if I'd used another deck... (from a theologian)    If you decided to get a copy of Brotherhood Tarot for yourself, we hope that you will find the cards as fun, exciting, and useful. --Oak Grove OracleVery often in life you find it s a case of feast or famine. I d often wondered about working with a tarot deck that comprised of specifically gay themed images. When I came to search for one however, all I could turn up was an out of print, esoteric and ultra sexually explicit tarot that was going to prove very difficult to get hold of. I have no objections to the explicit bit, but the Golden Dawn thing really didn't do it for me, let alone the fact that I d end up paying a fortune for such a rare deck!   To my joy therefore, two really excellent gay decks have appeared on the market within the space of six months of each other. The first of these was the Gay Tarot by Lee Bursten and Antonella Platano, published by Lo Scarabeo. Now we have Patric Stillman s wonderful Brotherhood Tarot published by Oak Grove Oracle.     I find myself liking and working with both decks for different reasons. Lee s deck employs standard illustration and seeks to depict gay men in various everyday life settings. By contrast, and to my joy, Patric s wonderful new deck is more spirituality based and connects to a different aspect of my life as a gay man.   To deal with practicalities first, the deck has been printed for Oak Grove Oracle by U.S. Games Systems Inc and as such it is of the highest quality. The card stock is suitably substantial and has a glorious silk finish that feels good to handle and allows for easy shuffling. The cards themselves are as tall as the more standard decks but somewhat wider, giving them an imposing feel. They could be potentially difficult to handle for those with smaller hands but as the majority of people employing this deck are likely to be male, this is not likely to be a problem. There are eighty cards the standard seventy-eight card deck plus title and biography cards. The tasteful design of the packaging is representative of the overall high standard of the deck.     The artwork itself represents Patric s passion for gay history, myth and legend. It also speaks strongly of the Radical Faerie movement that means so much to him. Hence, scenes from myth and history sit comfortably alongside images of everyday life, such as the motorcycle rider in the Chariot card. All of this is couched within a celebration of the West Coast landscape. What results is a set of images that somehow insinuate themselves into your heart and touch you in an affectionate but also deeply transcendent manner.   I find it difficult to fully articulate the effect this deck has had on me. It has only been in my hands for several days at the time of writing this and I have only performed several readings with it as yet. Despite this, it has become a constant companion and I find myself continually leafing through the cards and losing myself in the world that they portray. In this world my sexuality and spirituality are celebrated as one and I am allowed to connect with nature in a profound and mysterious way. What I really love is the absence of the kind of body fascism that has always been evident in the gay community but is particularly potent in the present day. This deck utterly rejects it and we are presented with men of all shapes, sizes and ages standing along side each other and celebrating that they are equally beautiful. The world of pornography and the wider world of advertising would teach us that to be beautiful we must be muscled, square jawed and under forty. That is not the case here; rather we see real men and to be perfectly honest, it s far sexier and much more meaningful.     Anyone with a working knowledge of the Rider Waite System will adapt easily to this deck as Patric has used that system as his foundation. ... I love this deck. --Christopher Butler - Son TarotThe Brotherhood Tarot is an independently published Tarot deck focusing on the alternative gay lifestyle. This deck is a work of art - and heart - for Patric Stillman - aka Pipa. It is the product of his personal journey to find the sacred in his life. Pipa (this seems the right form of address, and no lack of respect is meant to Mr. Stillman) comes from the background of Radical Faeries, which is something that I had not even known existed until I heard about this deck. There are several things that are focused on here - that the Radical Faerie world is one that holds a deep connection to mother nature and the outdoors, that this deck act as a visual storytelling device for gay history and mythology, and that the gay spirit be explored beyond the conceptual boundaries that currently exist in the western world.    Pipa made some core decisions (and choices) when he chose to put his energy into this project.    ...The next part of Pipa's journey was indeed a physical journey throughout the state of California - photographing scenes ranging from the ancient Red Wood forests to the Mojave and Anza Borrego Deserts. He then gathered friends together, and they put together the objects and costumes that we see in these cards.    Here is a good place to note that Pipa stuck to the traditional structure of the Tarot, and that his cards reflect the energy of the Tarot archetypes simply through another lens - that of the gay men's lifestyle. He has taken each of the suits and made a story within a story - as Tarot always is. For instance, the storyline of the suit of Cups is that of Zeus' lust for the mortal Ganymede, while the storyline of the suit of Swords is that of what Pipa refers to as the cut sleeve incident from 6 BC, which to this day acts as a euphemism for homosexuality in Chinese literature.    ... I feel that this is a well done deck, and that it has a place in the Tarot world. It can be a gateway to understanding some of the difference amongst people. Pipa will be coming out with a companion book to this deck, which will go into much greater depth about what the cards are to him, and the process of his creating them. I look forward to reading the book - it will be the gateway through which the Tarot world will be best able to access the knowledge, history, and mythology that this deck represents. --Bonnie Cehovet - The Crystal Gate