Ms. Joyce Tarot

The Gentle Thrills Tarot is a delightful 78- card deck by artist Isa Beniston published in 2022 by Hay House. Beniston hand-painted the first draft of this deck in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown using gouache, according to the guidebook.

Gentle Thrills is also the name of Beniston’s Los Angeles business established in 2015, which offers a retail line of novelty goods featuring the artist’s drawings. More information can be found at Beniston’s website at https://gentlethrills.com.

The images on the Gentle Thrills Tarot cards are brightly colored and instantly iconic. Each drawing feels highly personal. Indeed, they were created as a “daily meditation and internal conversation that provided clarity, structure, and purpose at a time when all three were in scarce supply,” the guidebook says.

The images on the cards are interpretive rather than strict recreations of the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot cards. The guidebook gives the astrological correspondence for each card, as well as single keywords for both the upright and reversed meanings. These keywords may be helpful to those who are just learning Tarot, as the images don’t necessarily imply the traditional RWS meanings.

Yet with any deck, you are not bound to rely on traditional interpretations, as Beniston says in the guidebook. There is always room for the reader to intuitively discover what the cards mean by relating what you see to how it makes you feel. That is the beauty of working with a variety of different decks, as I have said many times in my Tarot deck reviews. Taking inspiration from decks other than the RWS allows you to broaden your perspective and expand the limits of your imagination.

I was drawn to this beautiful deck because of the brilliant use of color and the deck creator’s distinctive style. Once again, I am shown how universal concepts are also personal and specific.