The Shadow Tarot

The Shadow Tarot 

by Linda Falorio

Reader Edition — US$45 (soft Cover)                                                                                               Hardcover — US$75 (Printed Cover)                                                                                                          Special Leather Edition — US$120 (includes Altar Cloth + Colorful Plates )

First published in 1988 by Linda Falorio and Fred Fowler, The Shadow Tarot has become a distinctive work within modern occult practice, combining visionary art, psychological exploration, and the hidden symbolism of the Nightside into a system designed for direct inner experience. More than a conventional tarot deck, it was created as an instrument for entering those regions of the psyche that find their reflection in the Collective Unconscious and in the Archetypal Shadow, where forgotten impulses, instinctive forces, dream-images, fears, desires, and transformative powers gather beyond the limits of ordinary awareness. Through its strange and often unsettling imagery, the deck invites the practitioner to approach these hidden dimensions consciously, using each card as a symbolic doorway into aspects of the self that normally remain obscured.

The images of The Shadow Tarot represent the Nightside of consciousness in contrast with the familiar “dayside” reality through which everyday perception is organized. Here, the symbols operate less as fixed illustrations and more as living psychic forms, capable of awakening associations, memories, visions, and states of awareness that emerge from deeper levels of consciousness. Each card becomes a point of contact with an inner territory where personal experience intersects with archetypal patterns, allowing the reader to explore the shadow not merely as darkness, but as a reservoir of energy, knowledge, imagination, and transformation.

Through her art and writing, Linda Falorio seeks to create a direct outré experience in the viewer, one capable of disturbing habitual patterns of perception while opening the imagination toward unfamiliar states of self-awareness. The work functions as a map of inner geographies that remain largely unexplored, revealing the psyche as a vast and shifting landscape filled with gates, tunnels, figures, symbols, and forces that can be approached through contemplation, divination, meditation, and ritual practice. Rather than offering a simple path of interpretation, The Shadow Tarot encourages an intimate encounter with the images themselves, allowing their meanings to unfold through experience.

At the heart of the deck lies the image of the Inner Labyrinth, a psychic terrain whose twists and turns mirror the complexity of transformation itself. To move through this labyrinth is to encounter fragments of the hidden self, to recognize beauty within strangeness, and to discover power within those regions of consciousness that are usually avoided or misunderstood. In this sense, The Shadow Tarot remains both an occult grimoire and a visionary instrument, a system created to open Gates into the deeper architecture of the psyche and to guide the practitioner toward a more complete encounter with the mysteries of the Nightside.