In Cat Suit, My Barbarian presents the first of four suits that will make up the Minor Arcana of their Tarot deck. We climb with them into the symbolic world of the cat and find it a strange and flaming mirror of our own. Here cats thread through the past and future, weaving together history, power, image, magic.
The strange puts on the cloak of the familiar, and the familiar (a witch’s black cat?) becomes a stranger once again. Feline divinities prowl the 1–10 arc of the Minor Arcana: a vaping Cheshire cat magician (the 1 of Cats) leads to the canopic jar of a futuristic pharaoh (4), a lion pride’s kill (5) resolves into the pantheon of animated cat superstars (10). In My Barbarian’s reinterpretations of the traditional royal cards (monarchy has no place in this cosmology), we see the glowing eyes of the Ur-Felid (“Ancestor”) and dive into the forest primeval.
