Page 309 Whether the emotions are planted in an abstract picture or a realistic picture, it doesn't really matter, they are there. This took quite a while for me to accomplish; it happened after I left school. Now I was free to just think about things, and they would naturally just come out. What I thought about were themes related to Paganism--erotic themes, joyful themes, and beauty. Not the ethereal joy of ascending to heaven but the earthy joys of being with a woman here on the earth, the joys of a sunset, the joys of walking among trees and the shading that you get in the area between the forest and the field. The feeling that you get being between the light and the shadow. These are marvelous, subtle things. These are to my mind very much Pagan-related themes because they involve the earth and the mind and the feelings and emotions, not on an intellectual level but rather on an emotional and gut-feeling level.

How has being a Pagan affected the mundane aspects of your life? One way it has affected my life is that a long time ago I made a deliberate decision to remain childlike in my outlook on life. Not childish, childlike. It's a somewhat simple outlook, somewhat naive, but it enables me to look at things clearly for the art; it goes into the art and affects it. My friend Oberon G'Zell is very childlike in his outlook on the world. This is a very Pagan way of being, in the sense that we can find wonder and joy in what we see. A lot of the themes in the art work are Pagan themes--for example, there is a piece called Welcome to the Wood, which shows the Horned God, Cernunnos, the antlered God of the forest who dies every winter and is reborn in the spring. We naturally find ourselves discussing these topics with the customers who buy our artwork. Some people come up to us at the Renaissance fair, and when they see a horned God they say, "Ooh! The Devil!" They want to know why we have painted a picture of the Devil.

You can see that they have been misled by the Judeo-Christian thought that anybody with horns is a representation of Satan. So we tell them that it's not the Devil or Satan; it's a God from a different mythology than theirs. Our personal lives are going to be affected when the Tarot deck comes out. A long time ago a man named Bruce Peltz, a big science fiction fan, decided that he would get a whole bunch of science fiction artists and have each of them do a part in a Tarot deck. I was one of the people he approached, and I did a card of the Three of Swords. This was just about the time I had learned to read Tarot. I began thinking that I should do a deck of my own. The Tarot is full of Jungian archetypes and other marvelous things, and no artist, in my opinion, can look at the deck for any length of time without thinking how they would do this or that card.