The Archeo Personal Archetype Cards are very serious. One must be prepared to look deep into their souls to use these cards. Whimsey only happens by mistake, and if you do laugh, you must do it quietly. OK, so I’m joking, but when I first read the guidebook for this beautiful deck, I felt like I should be lighting candles and preparing for some serious navel gazing.
The Archeo was created by Nick Bantock, the creator of the wildly popular Griffin & Sabine books. Much like his books, this deck strikes a serious tone and encourages you to explore all aspects of your personality using character archetypes. Bantock offers 40 archetypical characters each with their own attributes, persona, and short tale describing the history of the character.
Bantock offers three layouts and spreads for readings and stresses the cards are not meant to predict the future like regular tarot cards but are “Designed to look into yourself and see what your better selves already perceive but cannot grasp.” Uh… if you say so. Readers can choose from the short spread (9 cards), medium spread (4″x5″ block) and the full spread using all of the cards. You are encouraged to look at the shapes and themes presented in the reading and explore your reactions. This would be a good deck to use for intuition exercises and is ideal for more advanced readers as it might confuse people who are new to reading cards.
I love the beautiful artwork, symbols, and imagery on each card and I really wanted to cut them up and put them in my journal. The Archeo is an excellent deck for meditation and journaling and the perfect “at work” deck to use when you want to put a card out on your desk, but not have people questioning it. My only quibble with the cards is that the people presented in the cards are mostly Caucasian and it lacks diversity…which is strange because this deck screams for a mix of genders and races.