Jim Davis

The deck features delightful artwork by Matteo Farinella and a pleasing color scheme, and is also well intended but choosing a divination deck like the Waite-Smith as a model of tarot may actually reinforce stereotypes and would also likely encourage belief in pseudosciences. The deck unfortunately uses the nomenclature of the Waite-Smith deck and its ranking of Strength and Justice although some of the illustrations appear to be at least partly inspired by Marseilles style tarots. One-sided depictions of tarot as an occult practice or divinatory art common in English language media can be harmful to cultural diversity. Tarot cards are used for trick-taking games and these games are sometimes falsely associated with the occult because of such media representations. Gender stereotypes may also be perpetuated by the association of women scientists with superstition and divinatory practices. It would be better to decouple tarot from its now common association with divination which tends to stigmatize tarot and educate people on how the cards were intended for trick-taking games, a practice which continues today. A tarot purely for card play such as the French Tarot Nouveau, the Industrie und Glück Tarock, or the Tarocco Piemontese would make for a more suitable and less problematic model for science education. Although Massive Science and MIT Press label this divinatory tarot a "card game" in their promotional literature, the cards are not well designed for card play. The corner indices indicating the rank and suit of each plain suit card are on the opposite sides of each other and the tarot trumps entirely lack this feature. I also could not rate this very well as a divination deck as the back design is not entirely symmetrical which spoils the reading of reversed cards. I do find the idea, though, of relying mainly on the plain suit cards instead of the tarot trumps to present specifically the theme of women in science to be a clever workaround to circumvent some of the limitations imposed by the Waite-Smith divination model.