The Cathar Tarot

The Cathar Tarot takes the ancient spiritual system of Gnosticism, as expressed through the beliefs of the Cathar movement of medieval southern France, and builds a tarot system from it. Author John Matthews and artist Wil Kinghan structure the deck as an initiatory progression from Postulant to Parfait, from believer to one who has achieved a kind of spiritual completion, guided by archetypes drawn from Cathar theology and Grail symbolism.

Rather than adapting existing tarot imagery to a new theme, this deck creates its own symbolic language rooted in the actual beliefs and practices of the historical Cathar order. The result is a deck that offers readers a genuinely different way to think about the tarot's underlying questions of purification, duality, and the nature of the soul.