Your local bitch is obsessed with romulans again. Hardly a surprise. Anyways. Remember Pikhmit? Eh, probably not unless you watched Picard. I still think pixmit is a cooler spelling. Well. They introduced us a romulan tarot and hardly every released anything about it. They didn't even release it as a deck?? Those paramount assholes released some fuckass trading cards and that was it. And i want the goddamn romulan tarot. So i've set out on a mission with some multiple steps. Rip in pizza i guess.
Step one? Locate every card in the 32 card set. Now. I'm broke af and 5 usd a card is simply UNBUYABLE to my latam ass. I'm very thankful to all these guys and the card images here belong to the people in these links, i believe. Step two is finding names/the cultural references for these cards, and/or ways to interpret them. Not all of them are obvious, or told to us, so I'm improvising a lot here. Step three comes in the future, which is tracing all these images to clear it out for printing them tidily. I'd prefer to do that by hand, but not only would that be a nightmare, i intend to post them for anyone that wants to print their own deck. "But tarot and oracles aren't for real, vis!" Don't care, didn't ask. I think the only sources of show canon romulan mythos come from Narek's rant, and from This Post which is like. very dubiously canon as it hasn't showed up on screen (somewhy dude deleted it, so it's a link to waybackmachine). If anyone has any more material or input it's very welcome, invade my post.
RT01 & RT02
Well. This is gonna be a lot of stating the obvious so buckle up I guess. RT01 seems to be a man, and it pairs up with RT13, that mirrors it with a woman. The fire motif is present in both, so I will presume them to have been the first two gods cited on the story, RT01 being, possibly, Yon, the fire. I believe in a tarot reading this one may have a similar function to the Emperor card, taking, aside from its mythos reading, a role of representing a man within a situation, a male figure. RT02 doesn't seem to be one of the deities in the story. They seem to be a messenger, someone delivering a missive, and they sit on what seems to be one moon, with a second crescent as a pair of horns. I have absolute no idea how to read romulan, so if anyone does and can distinguish what's written on their message, that could add another possible meaning to this image.
RT03 & RT04
These two are pretty on the nose. RT03 is a sundial, a clock. Marks passage of time and/or represents a passage of time. RT04 is a sun. Again, we have more romulan glyphs I can't read, so.
RT05 & RT06
RT05 appears to be another deity, even more so with that skeletal arm and the headdress. Staff could mean they're a traveler of some sort. The vibes say 'trickster god' to me. They don't seem to be one from the stories either. RT06 looks like a moon. Pretty on the nose too.
RT07 & RT08
RT07 doesn't seem to reference anything specific, but it seems, in my little old opinion, an 'eye in the sky' in the same sense that the big brother is an eye in the sky. I think we found the tal shiar card, boys! Being something that's so present in their daily lives, the fear of being caught by the tal shiar, or what they might do to you, it seems appropriate they'd have a card referencing it in a tarot reading. Not necessarily a literal tal shiar card, but in a "someone's watching you" sense. RT08 also seems to be a deity, maybe Sa-Mekh or Zhuksu? I'm not sure. I'd bet on a god of the dead, though, or some cthonic kind of deity, for the look of that staff. It seems to reference the Djed? The one that represents the spine of Osiris? The third eye seems like another way to tell that this one sees more than the others.
RT09 & RT10
RT09 is. well. a skeleton. No getting more obvious than that. This one's the death alright. RT10 seems to be one of the brothers, Lerash'es or Falek, though i don't know if one in specific. The brothers are the second generation of gods, the sons of Yon and Shek-Tukh. They are bound by the lesser gods, as a way to stop their fight with one another. They are then trapped inside the earth, their only indication being that of the volcanoes atop their place of binding.
RT11 & RT12
Bird man and medusa! RT11 depicts a person, unclear if man or woman, inside a bird's nest. I'd bet on this one being a shapeshifter of some sort, either that, or someone just way out of their depth. RT12 depicts, again, a monster, demon, or other mythos figure. Unclear what exactly, and girly there seems ready to fight. On a doylist note, it is a reference to Medusa. On a watsonian one, this is someone that has power to hurt you, and seems ready to fight, but not to make the first move.
RT13 & RT14
RT13, like previously stated, seems to pair up with RT01, and may have been intended as Shek-Tukh. In a tarot, she's probably the equivalent to an Empress card, to pair up with dude up there. RT14 seems to be a similar kind of creature depicted in RT12, but it's two of them, hugging and with their tails around each other. It's either a type of lovers ish card, or a friends/siblings card. Either way, it's some sort of alliance/joining.
RT15 & RT16
Well. Fuck me up. RT15 seems to be a cyclops of some kind? I think? Thematically, there's not much addition, too. Unless I can find what it refers to, I'm gonna take it as a neutral, person card. Their meaning depends on what other cards are around it, I'd suppose. RT16 is an eye, again. It seems to be a more neutral version of an eye, more... personable? It's paired with an eyebrow, with an interesting frame around it. I'd take it to mean sight, seeing, not in the way the eye in the sky sees you, but in the way you see the world. A card of perspective, maybe?
RT17 & RT18
RT17 is a bird. Pretty simple one, I guess? That white dove of freedom, it reminds me. It's in ascending flight, at the very least. Taking off. RT18 sure is something. Looks like a mermaid of some kind? Whoever this one is, she is in a stand, either handing you something or receiving something.
RT19 & RT20
RT19 is. Fuck me, I have NO FUCKING CLUE on what the absolute fuck is this. The absurdity of it is alien to me, ironically. If it's a mythological creature, its story is lost on me. I shall treat it as a fool sort of card, perhaps a toy? Idk man, what even is this? RT20 is a pretty obvious reference to the greek Themis, unseeing justice armed with a sword and bearing a scale. Seems to be our Justice card, boys.
RT21 & RT22
RT21 IS! IS!! IS!!! A ROMULAN BIRD OF PREY OH MY GOD. THEEEEE BIRD OF PREY. I resent whoever changed the romulan bird of prey design. Those bird shaped bricks were the GOAT. RT22 seems to depict a man getting the tea from... a moon goddess? Perhaps? It's information of some sort, though the nature isn't obvious to me. Gossip from the gods card, I say.
RT23 & RT24
RT23 is... dancing? Love the headdress. Seems to be an artist or performer of some kind. Some interesting insight into what traditional romulan clothes look like. RT24 holds a scepter and a sash, and god, those sure are some horns. She's looking up, in prayer, maybe? I shall call this one "lord, give me patience for if you give me strenght i'll bust a motherfucker's ass".
RT25 & RT26
RT25 isssss fire. Just that. Good ole torch. Perhaps a symbol for the primordial fire stuff? RT26... well. Another egyptian reference? Is it Bastet? Mafdet? A maneless version of Sekhmet? Or maybe a female version of sorts of Anubis? She seems neutral and in instruction. She's trying to explain you something.
RT27 & RT28
RT27 is another confusing one. it seems to mirror/pair up with RT22, in which we now have another guy talking to, or being talked to, by a person on the sun, maybe a sun god. RT28 is an interesting one. With this, it's going back to that myth of the start and end of the world written up there on the wayback machine. These are the molten iron tears Shek-Tukh sheds after Yon looks at her regretting creation. They would fall into the Voroth sea, and plums of vapor would rise from their fall in the sea. From that vapor, would be born Seb-Cheneb and Seb-Natan, the first and last of a new kind of gods. Shek-Tukh's tears are what jumpstarts the end of the world, action and consequence. Direct causality.
RT29 & RT30
RT29 seems to be an eclipse, and we can only presume that, like us, the romulans would see an eclipse as an omen to something new, though if good or bad remains to be seen. RT30 is the beloved card from our shows, the shaipouin. It's a false front door on traditional romulan households, which would never be used, the real one being in the back. Could symbolize an action of deceit of one's enemies and unwanted people.
RT31 & RT32
These sure are the end of the deck! RT31 appears to be a planet exploding. Very end of the world, decidedly and with no fixing it. RT32, on the other hand, are the Dirge sisters, the daughters of Shek-Tukh, Seb-Cheneb, with the horn, and Seb-Natan, with the drum.
"And since they will have arisen from the whistling and hissing of vapor, they will sing and play music, the music of the end of the world. Seb-Natan will play the drum, and Seb-Cheneb the horn of the hellbeast Ganmadan. And the old gods will look upon the new with horror and fear, and cover their ears, and seek to destroy them. They will cause the death of Seb-Natan, but beautiful Seb-Cheneb will survive. She will raise her Hell-horn to her lips and blow a single piercing note of grief. And this will bring Ganmadan, the Day of Grief, the last of days. At the sounding of her horn all the gods’ hearts will break with sorrow, and people will cast themselves down on the ground in fear, and under the volcanoes at the east and west of the world, the Brothers will awaken once more. The note of Seb-Cheneb’s horn will snap their chains, and they will rise up and destroy the world: the gods, and the people, and the seas and mountains. And when they have destroyed the world they will turn upon each other, and resume their ancient combat until both lie dead on the Plains of Blood. And then Yon and Shek-Tukh will return themselves to Zul, and the primordial magma will flow smooth and bubbling over everything there is."
This is the full extent of their deck, and my sources are limited. I shall return with the result of my exploits once I have managed to trace the images into printable pngs, and made them into a deck of my own.
