No one embodies the dark feminine mystical archetype quite like Christina Ricci. She is a legend in the goth community due to her roles in The Addams Family, Sleepy Hollow, Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, The Gathering, Monstrous, and many many more. And so, it probably comes as no surprise that she is the perfect author to capture the mystery of Tarot.
Her new Cat Full of Spiders Tarot Deck and Guidebook (Insight Editions) is a beautifully crafted collectors’ item for all who love the actress and are interested in divination. With illustrations by by Felipe Flores, the book offers a transporting journey, interweaving the story of a complex fantasy world filled with witches, warlocks, magic spells, and danger, derived from the diverse characters she has embodied over her impressive career. The images, which feature Ricci, are based on aspects of the actress’s own personality. On the “star” card you see Ricci looking like her glamorous character Zelda Fitzgerald, on the “cups” card she looks like a version of Alice in Wonderland, and on the “knight of cups” card she looks like her character Wednesday Addams. Yet all the different versions of Christina blend together, showing the light and the dark, the fierce and the meek.
I spoke with Ricci while she was filming the highly anticipated third season of Yellowjackets for Showtime. She explained how she discovered tarot at the age of 14 on the set of the film Now and Then. “In one scene, my character and her friends went to see a psychic for a tarot reading,” she explains in the guidebook accompanying the deck. She tells me how she was immediately drawn to the cards and the questions derived from each reading. Each card can have many different meanings dependent upon your own unique personality. The questions derived are ones of self-reflection and how we view our own fate.
The unusual and very visual name for the deck came from a phrase Ricci would deploy when she was younger. “I never really knew what the phrase meant except that when I would act crazy or feel anxious, I would say it was the spiders going nuts inside of me,” she explains. “Years later, I realized it was a metaphor. In a way everybody is a cat full of spiders. Along the way, the spiders represent all of the experiences you have, the trauma, the happy moments, all the things that shape you and influence your future,” she tells me.
At different times in her life, she has returned to the tarot as a means of self-reflection and guidance. She felt the time was right to come out with this deck because, “It ticked all the boxes for the kind of things I want to put out there as an artist that focuses on the idea of identity, the individual, and that each person is so interesting, valuable and worthwhile, beyond what you see on the surface” she states. “All the characters that were created for the deck have backgrounds; they all have stories, and worlds they live in,” says Ricci.
