Page of Cups Replacement Card
The original Page of Cups card is being replaced as part of a process of accountability. The redesigned Page of Cups is pictured above.
If you purchased your deck from a shop or retailer or received it as a gift, you can sign up through the button below to receive a redesigned Page of Cups card in the mail for free.
If you bought your deck directly from me, through Kickstarter or pre-order, before November 30, 2020, you will receive a replacement automatically and do not need to sign up unless your address has changed since I mailed your deck.
If you've purchased a deck from me since December 1, 2020, your deck already has the new Page of Cups included and you do not need a replacement.
The process of mailing out cards is underway, but it's going to take a long time due to the number of cards I need to send! I'm only one person with almost 1000 cards to mail and other daily work and responsibilities, so I appreciate your patience and understanding.
I'm hoping to finish mailing in March 2021.
A version of the below statement was posted on Instagram on November 13, 2020, and is reposted here for transparency and accountability. Read the original here.
I messed up. I set out to create a Tarot deck that included people, but I harmed a group of people in the process.
It recently came to my attention that my depiction of the Page of Cups, which showed a Muslim woman wearing a hijab, was harmful to many Muslims, as Tarot is forbidden by Islam. While no religion or culture is a monolith, I put a person of color from a marginalized group on a card without understanding this very important aspect of their identity as it applies to Tarot. That is my error and my responsibility, and it’s my responsibility to acknowledge what happened and act to change it.
First, I deeply apologize for the harm I’ve caused to the person who contacted me about this and to others in the Muslim community who I’ve disrespected with my card image. I am deeply sorry for using your identity in this manner, and for doing so without understanding this aspect of your faith.
I also understand that not all Muslims believe that tarot is forbidden, and some Muslims use tarot for themselves. The fact still stands that I made an uninformed decision and that Muslim people deserve to be represented with more awareness and nuance than I was able to provide.
Taking all of this into consideration, I will be redesigning the Page of Cups and printing replacement cards for every deck. I won’t be putting the remaining decks up for sale on my website until those cards come in and are replaced. I've spoken with my printer and expect to have replacement cards in the beginning of December, at which point I will mail replacement cards to everyone who has bought the deck from me or from a retailer so far.
When I made this deck, I did my very best to be inclusive while making sure I wasn’t appropriative or harmful. My efforts included assembling a group of people to vet the card images, and they did find issue with a different card, which I changed before the Kickstarter. But there was no one in that group, to my knowledge, who was Muslim or who came from a Muslim background, and that was my oversight. Sometimes we try our very best and still get it wrong. And when we get it wrong, we take responsibility and take action to be accountable.
The intention of Fifth Spirit Tarot was for it to do good in the world, and I’m hopeful this process will help it continue to do that moving forward. I also hope that this can be an invitation to all of us in the Tarot community, as practitioners and as deck creators, to think even harder about the representation in our decks, to do more research, to have more conversations, and to do better. Always to do better.
Sincerely,
Charlie Claire