THE HILDEGARD DECK:  Marsel Reddick

Marsel Reddick’s THE HILDEGARD DECK is a 78 card tarot deck with an accompanying publication that aims to aid the user in practicing a self-guided method of tarot interpretation. The images in the cards are a synthesis of historical symbols, but in this deck familiar symbol sets are made strange and refuse to settle into stable objects or clear interpretive outcomes. As the symbolic within the tarot are doorways to evoke active immaterial forces, AI has been used by Reddick to generate images within the cards which, like the ready-made, circumvents the subjectivities and aesthetic dispositions of a singular author, drawing indiscriminately from a pool of images concurrently archetypical and banal. This inhuman otherness of these AI images analogously remind the reader of the limits of human consciousness and, in turn, the expansive possibilities of the esoteric terrain that begin at the thresholds of our perception.

The accompanying publication includes a brief introduction to numerology, it touches on the queer imagery that Pamela Colman Smith embedded into the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, and provides experimental interpretations of the Major Arcana cards into which an improvisational musical score is embedded. In THE HILDEGARD DECK there are no fully resolved beings: all are dynamic, inchoate, and shifting, defying any traditional fixed symbolic systems or direct translation.

Marsel Reddick is an artist and writer based between Montreal, QC and Calgary, AB, Canada. Through a variety of media he works to examine the ongoing and shifting entanglements between self and other to consider how identities are constructed, perceived, and transformed.

Hildegard Press Special Edition, 2025 | 78 card tarot deck, in box, with instructional pamphlet (36pp) 
Box: 7 x11.5 x3 cm | Cards: 6.5 x 11 cm