Damon and I were discussing this the other day - about how the Pagan and Witchy communities could definitely take a leaf out of the Christian community book and hire pagans when they need a service done or product made. I remember distinctly how the Christian churches I belonged to either worked within itself - need your computer fixed? Hire the Deacon who also has an IT business! - or they hired businesses that had "Christian values." 

Some pagans might feel that it is the purpose of the pagan community to be different from the christian community, however, my point here is there is a reason to christian community is larger and has more influence in our society. While we aren't necessarily competing with this community, we should consider our own growth, strengthening, and development.

Supporting other pagans should be something we do to better ourselves and our community. 
What do I mean by taking our business to other pagans? 
I don't just mean occult shops, tarot readers, and other metaphysical businesses. 

Witchvox had an article years ago Why Pagan Shops Fail and How Some Succeed. In the article, Pennanti explains that many occult industry businesses are failing not because Pagans don't want to buy from Pagan's but because there aren't Pagan Businesses that are meeting the needs of the community. "There’s a level of entitlement in the pleas to buy Pagan – that they deserve it just because they’re Pagan. Stores aren’t charity, though, and I shouldn’t feel obligated to toss money at people selling stuff I don’t need. What do I need? What do Pagans need? I would love to see, say, a hardware store that was Pagan owned. A craft supply store. A garden store."

I suggest that when we need any business done, we should consider local and we should consider pagan. If you need catering for an event, ask the kitchen witch with the catering business. If you need website design, ask the druid that is also a computer and graphic design wiz. Want to hire a baby sitter or tutor for your kids, consider the young witch that helped out at the pagan community park clean up. 

Now, I'm not saying that you should lower the bar for a Pagan Business - if they aren't as good as the Jewish, Christian, or Atheist business around the corner, then, by all means, go where you will get the best service. All we're saying is to make community part of your consideration. 

We also are active on Facebook Pagan Business communities: 
Pagan Business Network_
Pagan Business Networking

Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview! 
How long have you been reading tarot? What got you started?
I started reading tarot in 1996 when I was a newbie pagan. It was a period where I was trying out everything--tarot, herbs, crystals, totems, etc. My first deck was the Shapeshifter Tarot, because I liked the concept of being able to assume the forms of other animals, even if only in spirit, and the artwork was lovely. In 1999 I discovered Ted Andrews' Animal-Wise deck, and it was love at first sight. We worked out our own directional/elemental spread together, and it's been my main form of divination since, more from a totemic perspective than a strictly tarot-based one. 

Coming back to the tarot through the Tarot of Bones has been something of a homecoming for me. I'm older and more experienced, and I have a more nuanced and personal view of the cards and their symbolisms. Early on, I stuck mostly to the books; I was especially fond of P. Scott Hollander's "Tarot For Beginners". Now I'm reforming my own relationships with the tarot cards, and while I follow some of the common themes, there's a lot of personal interpretation. 

I love what you say on your website about your use of Bones, especially the part, I hope you don't mind if I quote, "Through bones we can speak with our evolutionary ancestors; through divination we create patterns that help us make sense of the world around us–and the worlds within." What started your wonderfully morbid hobby of collecting and creating art with bones?
I'm not sure I'd call it "morbid", though it certainly is wonderful! When I was a kid I was always bringing home little natural treasures--feathers, leaves, bones, etc. These were unfortunately lost when we moved from one place to another. However, in my late teens I found myself with a pickup truck and a small income, and so I was able to go to craft stores, antique shops and the like to pick up hide scraps, old fur coats, and so forth. In 1998 I began creating and selling artwork made from these remains, first small projects like pouches and necklaces, and then more elaborate costumes and other pieces. 

It's an intensely spiritual practice for me, always has been. I wanted these remains to have a better "afterlife" than being a trophy or status symbol, and I wanted to care for the spirits that were still within them, even if they were just haunts or impressions. So everything I create, even if it has a seemingly mundane purpose, is sacred. Everything gets a ritual purification with prayers once complete, and I make offerings through donations to nonprofit organizations that benefit wildlife and their habitats. These are our relatives, even if somewhat distant, and they deserve care and attention like our human ancestors.

They're also a constant reminder of the world beyond our human-centered habitats. We keep thinking in terms of "natural" and "artificial", when in actuality we are just human apes and everything we do is an extension of the big brains we evolved as a survival strategy. Yet we make decisions as though we are the only ones who matter. My hides and bones, especially my skull collection, help remind me otherwise; they're sort of a council that I consult. 

What other items besides bones are you drawn to as tarot and art mediums?
Honestly, I mostly stick to making art with animal remains and other natural and recycled materials. I have drawn on a wide set of skills in creating the Tarot of Bones assemblages--painting, sculpting, adhesives, design, etc. And I do use these skills in my more general artwork, but it's more along the lines of using acrylic paints to decorate a leather pouch or animal skull necklace, rather than creating an acrylic painting on a canvas as is more traditional. This is the first tarot deck I've designed, so I don't know what I'd use for a medium if I created another one, but I do have a few ideas on the back burner.

I use a lot of recycled and reclaimed materials. Every one of the backboards for the assemblages came from a thrift store as did many of the other materials, from paints to faux flowers. Even a lot of the hides I work with in my artwork are secondhand or salvaged. Most of the bones were bought new or found out in the great outdoors; a lot of that is because I was very particular about which ones I used, both with regards to species and condition. 

-so I've come up with some stock responses over the years, and I try to keep the conversation brief and civil since arguing is pretty pointless. It happens to everyone who makes hide and bone art, unfortunately, and too often the people who come in swinging aren't interested in hearing anything that doesn't toe their party line. So I try to keep the conflict to a minimum in situations where we aren't able to have a more constructive conversation.

My hide and bone art is part of how I am an environmentalist; it helps remind me and others that there is more than just the human-centered world we live in, and brings a more nature-centered energy to homes otherwise filled with drywall, furniture, computers and other human things. I reclaim a lot of materials in my art, and I make sure everything gets a use--even tiny scraps end up as pillow stuffing. I donate part of the money I make to environmental nonprofits, and because I have a flexible schedule I can do some volunteering locally, too. And a lot of the vegan alternatives to my materials are pretty bad for wildlife and their habitats; plastics are almost all made with petroleum, crystals and metals are often mined with very polluting methods, cotton and other plant fibers are grown in massive monocrops that destroy habitats and poison animals through pesticides and fertilizers. Never mind that everything you buy at, say, Michael's was made in China by underpaid, often abused labor, and was sent to the U.S. on ships that pollute the ocean with oil and other unpleasant things. I try to minimize my use of these supposedly "cruelty-free" materials, and buy them secondhand as often as I possibly can.

Without giving away your trade secrets of course, how do you purchase or find or gather your bones? 
I have a few different hide and bone dealers whose sources and methods I trust for legal and ethical reasons; Custom Cranium and Frozen Critters are two of the main ones, and for resin replicas I like Arctic Phoenix and Bone Clones. I used to have more access to wild land where I was able to collect bones on my own, but these days I have neither the resources nor the time. And since I share a small apartment with two other people and we have no yard, bone cleaning isn't really an option so I have to stick to pre-cleaned bones. But I'd rather be making art with them anyway, so it all works out--I get to support small businesses, and I have more time for what I really love doing. 

Why did you decide to create permanent pieces rather than ones that you could move around and change between photos for the tarot cards? I understand this decision raised the cost of creating the tarot deck for you?
First, I'm an assemblage artist, not a photographer, when it comes to the Tarot of Bones. So my primary art form involves putting the items together into a completed piece of artwork which will then be ritually purified and sent off to its new home. The photo is just what's necessary for translating that assemblage into an easily replicable format--tarot cards. And a lot of what I do to the materials in the process of putting together the assemblages permanently changes them, like painting them or adding a sculpting compound, so it wouldn't make sense to make them temporary anyway. 

with many of them appearing in more than one card's artwork, and saved a lot of money. But I had a grander, more elaborate vision than that, one that involved individual species and the symbolism of different bones in the vertebrate body. Since I needed to have a lot more bones for that purpose, why not just have bones for each unique assemblage?

Will you be selling any of the finished pieces? 
They will all be for sale once the Tarot of Bones is officially released, though I want to keep one or two for myself. I love having them around, but they take up a LOT of space; most of the free wall space in the apartment at this point is covered in them, and they need to do the equivalent of growing up, moving out and getting a job. Plus the money I've crowdfunded has all gone to materials, perks, and other costs. Selling the pieces will help me pay myself for the time and effort I put into designing the deck in the first place. I'm fully self-employed, after all, and every hour I put into the Tarot of Bones was an hour I wasn't able to put toward more immediate income to pay my rent and bills--but I had to have a place to live and food to eat all through the process anyway. So selling the pieces will help me get back my initial personal investment in the project.

You are currently ahead of schedule, if you stay that way can we expect edits to the current image releases or anything surprising before the release date?
Well, the pictures you see on the website right now are just quick snapshots saying "Hey, look what I made!" They're not the final photos for the card art. So after I have the assemblages done I'll be setting up a better photography studio in my home and taking the final pictures and then editing them with GIMP. I may go back and tweak a few of the assemblages before then, but the production schedule probably won't get moved up too much. The printing will take a while, and I want to hire a professional editor for the book and they'll need time, too.

Can you tell us a little about the companion book? Will it be a basic tarot cards defined or will it be just as unique as the cards themselves?
The Tarot of Bones companion book is not meant as holy writ or the final word on what each card means. But it'll give readers more of an idea of why I created each card as I did, why I chose specific animals, etc. It's a guide to the Tarot of Bones in specific, and while you can certainly use other books and your own interpretation when you use the deck, there's a lot of valuable information that may help you navigate the deck as its own individual entity. I won't be going into the basics of tarot; there are TONS of books that do that. But I will likely be including some unique spreads along with my card interpretations. 

Why did you choose crowdfunding for your tarot deck rather than the more traditional route of going through a major publisher?
Honestly? Creative control. I've published books with a couple different publishers, and while they've let me have a fair bit of control, this is a deeply and intensely personal project. It is the product of almost two decades of art and writing experience, and it draws together all of my skills into one Magnum Opus. I'm outsourcing very little with the Tarot of Bones; I hired Narumi of Lotus Lion, who has done several graphic design pieces for me, to create the back design for the cards, and again I'll have an editor for the book. But I'm doing everything else--the photography, layout, etc. 

Also, in doing a bit of research, it's harder to get a publisher for a photo deck; they tend to prefer other sorts of art. Since I wasn't willing to morph the photos of my assemblages into computer-generated designs, I just decided to do this on my own. It'll be my first major foray into self-publishing, so I'm drawing on my experience in the publishing industry to help me along. And I'll be getting some mentoring with some of the skills I'm less familiar with, like the photography.

Were there any surprises in the crowdfunding process?
Yes: the amount! The IndieGoGo campaign last spring met its initial goal in four days, and doubled the amount by the end of the six week campaign. I was incredibly surprised and honored that that many people wanted to back the Tarot of Bones. It just made me want to make even more sure that the final deck and book will be amazing. I also was wowed by the emotional support people gave throughout the project, all the cheering and high-fives I got. I mean, I have some of the best supporters and fans in the world, so the quality doesn't surprise me--but I was amazed by how many people came out to help! At this point I've pre-sold 250 deck and book sets just through that one campaign. And again--thank you to *everyone* who contributed.

What advice do you have for those out there thinking of creating their own tarot deck?
Do smaller projects first. This has been a HUGE investment of my time, skills and energy, to say nothing of money. If you've never undertaken a big art project or written a book before, I don't recommend this sort of thing as a starter project. Smaller projects will help you hone your skills to a finer degree so that you're more prepared physically and mentally when the time comes to get started on your tarot project.

Once you are ready, make sure you have a solid concept. You don't have to design all the cards at once; I went into most of these assemblages only sure of what card it was going to represent and what bones I was going to use. But those two factors--the bones and the meaning--were the common thread I had to work with throughout the entire project, and they helped to tie them all together. So make sure you, too, have at least one solid thread that binds your cards into one deck. 

Also, don't take my production schedule as something to measure yourself against. Remember I'm self-employed and I'm already in my studio almost every day. So I'm working on the assemblages and the book manuscript in between working on other projects throughout the day. I have the luxury of getting this put together relatively quickly because I've done this sort of thing before on a smaller scale, and I'm already immersed in a creative setting much of the time. 

Will there be a release party online or off that fans can attend? 
There will definitely be an in-person one in Portland, and likely some pieces in galleries after that as well. I'm not entirely sure how to pull off an online party, but I'm sure something can be arranged there, too. I want everyone to have the opportunity to celebrate with me, even if they can't be with me in person.

What amazing creative projects can we expect from you in the future? 
Wellll...a lot of them are currently secret projects under development. I don't like to announce things until I have a pretty solid plan, because I don't want to let people down. That and I am a VERY busy person, and unfortunately I just don't have the time to enact everything at once. So while I have several books bouncing around in my head, some other elaborate art projects on a similar scale, and some new avenues unrelated to anything I'm doing now, I need to maintain my focus on the Tarot of Bones until it's out and everyone's gotten their packages of goodies in the mail. 

That being said, I do have a new book coming out from Llewellyn in January, Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up: Connect With Totems in Your Ecosystem, which I'm really excited about as it talks about land-based, bioregional totemism in a lot of detail. You can always keep up on my progress with the Tarot of Bones and if you'd like to see what else I'm up to head on over to The Green Wolf.

This book is HUGE. I mean that literally. This is one of the biggest books in my library and not one that I would want to carry around with me very much. If it weren't for the modern cover and paper, the brightness of the art, and the slick design, this could easily resemble one of those ancient tomes in movies that the wizard drops down on the table before his apprentice (usually coughing from the cloud of dust lifted) and the table creaks under the weight of it. 

Illustrations in the book are sparse however, spattered across almost every page are stars, pentacles, and little wands in place of bullet points.This smattering of images is wonderfully whimsical, witchy, and much appreciated.

I've run into a lot of people who sneer at spell books sold at book stores and claiming that the readers and practitioners that buy these books fall into that derogatory category of "Fluffy Bunny." I encountered that harsh judgement in my own home with regards to this very book. Its a rather large book, as I said, and its colors, size, and title are very evident on my book shelf no matter where I've lived. A friend came over with an acquaintance of hers that is an IT expert, a practicing witch, and says he is a descendant of the Romany people. He saw my book shelf as he was working on my computer (I'm hopeless when it comes to tech stuff it seems) and pointed out that I had a spell book. His tone was derisive and he looked me over saying "You know those books don't work. They don't explain why magick actually works." 
I only smiled and asked how the computer work was going, unwilling to go into this conversation with a stranger that had a hold of my most expensive piece of property at the time. 

The thing is, I sort of agree with him...sort of. 
I don't usually buy spell books. Its not because I don't see their value but its like he said, they don't explain why this or that spell actually works (if it works at all). These are like books of recipes. Spell books tell you the tools you need (kitchen tools and ingredients), the words to say (turn you oven on 450), how to use the tools and dispose of the spell after (mixing, baking, how long, and clean up). They don't usually explain that the reason you are using citrine and cinnamon in your better business spell is because citrine is a strong manifestation stone and cinnamon draws in clients and money just like a recipe won't go into detail about why baking powder helps your cakes become fluffy and that the reason to use butter instead of margarine is flavor as well as moistness. 

Simply reading the first part of the book, with its essays on using magickal tools to key concepts of how spells work, shows that this is not a recipe book. The jist of this whole matter can be summed up in the opening of the second chapter - Key Concepts for Casting Magic Spells:

Judika does an excellent job at giving us those key concepts. 
Even though every spell might not go in depth as to the why-fores and where-bys, there is an explanation to be found for the reason the author recommends goats milk for beauty and Galangal root for gambling spells. If the current spell you are reading doesn't have the explanation, a quick check in the index and the other spells or listings in that category will quickly point you to an explanation. 

My favorite thing about this book isn't necessarily the spells however, its the recipes to make your own magickal ingredients. In the back of the book is a Formulary that has recipes for such spell ingredients as Florida Water, Crown of Success Oil, Dragons Blood Ink, and Kyphi. I love having recipes for these ingredients at hand with simple explanations of how to create it so that I don't have to rely solely on ordering off the internet for those items that I can't usually find around where I live. I also think its good practice for people to make their own magickal ingredients just as it is good for them to make their own magickal tools - not only does this add their own energies to the mix but it connects them to their spiritual heritage. 

Her recommendations for psychic enhancement such as the Oya Courage Spell, her dreama nd psychic vision incense recipes, and pretty much her whole chapter on the Evil Eye I love! Lately I've also been digging on her protection spells recorded for protecting children. Also, her recipe for Kyphi is one of the easier processes and certainly one of the best ones I've found so far when it comes to results. 

A little warning for those of you who practice a form of magickal craft and belief system that shuns any spell work that 1) controls the free will of others or 2) has a negative effect on another person - you stand a chance at being offended by some of the spells in this book. Judika has proven herself to be well-versed in Hoodoo and folk magick as well as having knowledge of modern Western magickal practices of Wiccans and newer faiths. She doesn't skimp on spells from one system or another in this book and magick of all sorts can be found here. 

I give Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells 5 stars!

My darling bestie and witchy sister Lady Aconita is riding along this bumpy journey that is the #30DayDivinationPic Challenge on her Tumblr blog. 
Be sure to check her out and send her some bloggy love! 

New to the #30DayDivinationPic Challenge? Check out some of the the previous pictures:
Day 17: Jewelry
Day 13: Death
Day 10: Tarot Collage
Day 9: 9 in Numerology
Day 7: Cards & a Cup
Day 5: Favorite Oracle Card/Deck
Day 4: Pendulum
Day 3: Candle with Divination Tools
Day 1: Selfie with Your Soul Card
Day 0: The 30 Day Divination Picture Challenge