Temple Tarot

Temple Tarot is an illustrated tarot deck that reimagines traditional archetypes through the history, beliefs, and cultural tensions of Second Temple-era Judaism. Rather than simply placing Jewish imagery onto familiar cards, each design begins with the meaning behind the original archetype and searches for a historical, theological, or symbolic counterpart within the period.

The deck uses a deliberately limited language of faceless figures, repeated eyes, halos, radiant forms, religious references, and distressed textures with a limited color palette representing the 12 tribes. These motifs create a cohesive world across the deck while leaving enough ambiguity for the imagery to feel symbolic rather than illustrative.

The project became an exercise in visual worldbuilding, historical research, and symbolic design; using one established system of meaning to reinterpret another, and exploring what changes when familiar archetypes are viewed through a completely different cultural lens.