Pagan Cats Tarot — 78-Card Standard Deck by Messina & Airaghi

Short description:

Pagan Cats Tarot — 78 beautifully illustrated cards by Lo Scarabeo artists Messina and Airaghi, featuring cats in enchanting pagan scenes. Each card blends classic RWS symbolism with playful feline energy, making readings feel fresh and intimate. Ideal for cat lovers, beginners, and experienced readers who appreciate gentle, story-rich imagery. Standard tarot card size with full-color illustrated booklet included.

Description:

Quick Specs

• Brand: Lo Scarabeo
• Type: 78-card standard-size Rider-Waite-based tarot deck
• Size/Quantity: 78 cards at 4.8 inches x 2.7 inches with multilingual guidebook
• Best for: Cat lovers, daily readers, pagan practitioners, anyone who wants a readable working deck that rewards close attention to the art

A Working Deck at Full Reading Size

The Pagan Cats Tarot by Magdelina Messina and artist Lola Airaghi is a standard-size working deck at 4.8" x 2.7", and that distinction from the pocket mini version matters more than it might initially seem. At full size, Airaghi's feline illustrations carry a level of compositional detail that reads clearly across a spread laid on a table. The symbolic choices embedded in each card, a cauldron appearing on multiple cards as a recurring pagan emblem, elemental weapons drawn in the triangular symbolic forms throughout the Minor Arcana, the absent Christian imagery deliberately replaced with pagan equivalents, all of this is visible and interpretable at standard card scale in a way that the mini version simply cannot reproduce. This is my primary recommendation for any reader who wants the Pagan Cats experience as a daily reading practice rather than a travel tool.

The cat-familiar tradition runs deep in tarot history, and Messina's deck takes it seriously rather than treating it as a novelty premise. Cats in this deck behave as cats. They're not anthropomorphized into standing humans holding implements. The Knight of Wands rides a fox instead of a horse. The Queen of Cups keeps a goldfish in a bowl beside her. The suit of Pentacles imagines what material wealth means to a cat: fish, milk, and bells rather than gold coins. This translation of the familiar RWS symbolism into genuinely feline terms produces a deck that reads with recognizable tarot logic while constantly surfacing unexpected interpretive angles that keep readings from running on autopilot.

Pagan Symbolism Without the Sermon

The pagan dimension of this deck is woven into the background details rather than announced. The little white book's preface notes, with some humor, that all cats are pagans by their very nature, and that affiliation shows in the card-by-card choices: stained glass windows showing elemental weapons instead of Christian saints, the Hierophant replaced by an implied guardian rather than a religious figure, angels removed from the Lovers and from Temperance. The Death card shows a cat leaving the comforts of home to follow a starry call through the night rather than a skeletal horseman. These changes are deliberate and coherent, producing a deck with genuine pagan sensibility that doesn't require the reader to share that worldview to use it effectively.

Card stock and print quality meet Lo Scarabeo's standard, which is reliable at this price range. The cards shuffle with notable ease due to a slightly slick surface that some readers love and others prefer to break in with extended use. The deck comes with a multilingual booklet in six languages. The backs feature a sphinx cat against a triple moon symbol in purple, fully reversible so reversed card practice is practical from the start.

How to Use Pagan Cats Tarot

The Tarot Fellow Standard

I stock both the standard and mini versions of the Pagan Cats Tarot, and I want to be clear about why they're different products. The mini is a travel and portability deck. This standard version at 4.8" x 2.7" is the daily practice deck, the one you spread across a full reading surface and work with over time. Airaghi's art has genuine depth that rewards extended familiarity, and that depth only pays off at standard scale. For cat lovers, pagan practitioners, or anyone whose reading life benefits from a consistent familiar companion, this is the version to commit to. I've shelved it alongside my ritual supplies because pagan readers naturally shop both categories, and this deck belongs in that context.

Frequently Asked Questions