Osaín, the orisha of medicinal plants, depicted on the Ace of Disks from the Orisha Tarot.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to interview my friend and fellow Llewellyn author, Andrew McGregor, about his new deck, The Orisha Tarot. Before receiving the deck, I knew little to nothing about Lucumí, Orisha tradition, or the wider world of ATR (African traditional religion.) But from my first Orisha Tarot card of the day pull - the Ace of Disks - I was drawn into the complex web of a faith where divination, magic, belief, deity, and community commingle in ways I at least had never before experienced.
Because I wanted to know so much more about Lucumí spirituality and Andrew’s journey with it, the interview ended up being a long one - an hour and 45 minutes. If you would like to skip right to our conversation about the deck, that starts around minute 25:00. If you would like to skip to my one-card reading for Andrew using the Orisha Tarot, that’s at 1h38:00.
I ended up using the deck for a solid week, and I found it both visually stunning and easy to read. I highly recommend it to any Orisha practitioner interested in tarot, or any tarot reader interested in Orisha. It really does form a bridge between both traditions.