A Tarot of the Weather

(Major Arcana)

Weathered Women Walking

The Tarot of the Weather (Weathered Women Walking) was produced as part of the British Academy funded project, Wet Ontologies – a 2-year exploration of living with the weather as a lens through which to understand kinship. Boxed decks can be purchased using the QR code above.

This pack is held in the collections of the Wellcome Trust (London) and the Warburg Institute (London). Examples of the cards are also held in various UK universities thanks to its inclusion in CAMP Writers’ KIN Artist’s Book Project: The State We’re In (2024) a limited edition of 24 boxed sets of artists’ books, the outcome of a collaborative project between eleven members of CAMP Writers’ KIN. The cards are now in various special collections including UWE, University of Plymouth, Arts University Plymouth, UAL, Falmouth University and both KARST and Terre Verte galleries.

The deck was used as a tool for generating conversations around climate change at Narratives for Ecological and Sustainable Transition(s) workshops May, 2025 at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and at The End, a book arts fair at The Exchange, Penzance, Cornwall, May 2025.

About the deck

This pack has been designed with the weather in mind. A card reading can seem random and beyond our control; we cannot decide which cards fall where. Similarly, the weather can seem random and beyond our control. However, some might say that we get the readings, and the weather, that we deserve. In the context of climate chaos this rings especially true.
The feminist philosopher Astrida Neimanis describes (our) weather-bodies as archives of climate and makers of climate time. This pack has been designed for weather-bodies and busy-bodies whose capacity for play makes them curious about their past, their present and their future. This pack is for the weather-feelers who recognise that our bodies are sensory data collectors, who understand that each reading is not necessarily a forecast, despite the weather. But whilst forecasts are simply informed guesses, they can remind us that our bodies hold the collective memories of previous generations, and that these memories can guide us through uncertain futures.

The pack includes some Scottish words for different sorts of weathers. The cards form part of a wider project called Weathered Women Walking, which explored how speculative fictions (visual and textual) might help to uncover different ways of understanding women’s histories that remain invisible in conventional archives, and that connecting with these lost stories is an act of kinship. The project grew out of such research, undertaken in the Outer Hebrides (Scotland). The images are from a collection of polaroid photographs taken on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. They have been physically manipulated during development, bearing marks that echo the layers of experience that our bodies acquire through life, and evoking the traces within landscapes that allude to thousands of years of multi-species interactions.

The Tarot of the Weather includes some new, wild cards. In this way this pack breaks from tradition to offer more ways to connect with yourself and with the world around you through acts of kinship. Kinship suggests reciprocal relationships. Therefore knowing yourself a little better helps you to give a little more of yourself to the world. The cards are circular – another break with tradition, and an homage to the renowned Motherpeace deck (co-creation of Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble 1978). Rectangular cards give binary readings. Life, like relationships, like kinship, and like the weather is not binary. Circular cards offer more nuance to a reading; sometimes life is a little bit more, a little bit less.

Suggestions for using the deck in a collective context

This unique tarot pack can be used for individual readings and for collective conversations. There are many well known spreads that can be found for individual readings. However, a group reading is a little different.

To use these cards to animate collective conversations, one strategy is to assign a dealer, who shuffles the cards and deals out 3 to each player. Any cards left over remain stacked face down. Turn over the top card – this is The Present. Use the booklet (available in each boxed deck) to explore the meaning of this card. Allow conversations to go where they will. Next, each player looks at their 3 cards and decides which represent The Past (experience), The Present (action) and the Future (hopes and desires). Each player selects one of their cards to discuss in more detail, ascribing it to either past, present or future. They take a turn reading out its meaning from the booklet, to provoke discussion. Of course, challenging its ascribed meaning will sometimes be necessary! If everyone is enjoying themselves and all agree, the whole deck can be explored in this way.