Tarot Emblemata: Interview with Nitasia Roland
About this episode
Cyndera Quackenbush interviews Nitasia Roland about her tarot deck inspired by Renaissance emblem books.
Step into a world where knights, mottos, mythic beasts, and phoenixes rise again—and discover how Renaissance symbolism can illuminate your readings in entirely new ways with Tarot Emblemata: Decoding Magical Symbolism. On this episode of the Archetypal Tarot Podcast, Host Cyndera welcomes artist and deck creator Nitasia Roland for an enchanting conversation about (one of her) latest decks. Drawing from 16th-century French and Italian emblem books—particularly the 1551 collection curated by Claude Paradin—Rowland reimagines Renaissance “devices” (symbolic images paired with mottos) as a fully realized tarot system. These historic emblems, originally engraved by Bernard Salomon, explored themes of love, war, faith, philosophy, politics, and morality during the height of the Renaissance. Now, centuries later, they re-emerge as living archetypes. The conversation also explores the Renaissance world that birthed these emblems—a time of religious upheaval, artistic revolution, and humanist revival—and reflects on what this symbolic medicine offers us today. As Roland beautifully suggests, reviving these images is almost a calling: a way of bringing buried wisdom back into contemporary…
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