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Life is full of ups and downs and you have to cope with the bad times.

Could there be a better or more simplistic way to way to describe the tarot than the ups and downs of life? Contained within is a genuine Mexican use of the word Avatar.

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Tarot Avatara was not my earliest choice of name for the deck. The working title was The Blue House Tarot named for La Casa Azul which was the home of Frida and Diego. It was a pretty, soft sounding name, but a nagging feeling remained that it was not dramatic enough to capture Frida’s energy.

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Not sure of the exact time I came up with Avatara, I do remember not jumping on it immediately. Firstly the word is in some ways invented, cobbled together from a couple of appropriated sources with an A popped on the end to create Avatara which has the vibe that she was perhaps a real goddess, just one you never before encountered

Here is how I got there.

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Firstly an Avatar is a Hindu manifestation of Deity or a soul released in bodily form upon the earth, an incarnated teacher. The other contemporary use of the word avatar has us creating a gaming or online character though which we are freed of our physical entity to embody a digital extraction.

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Frida as Avatara becomes the vehicle for the transmission of her own tarot deck. She brings all we might feel about her to everything we have discovered of tarot, and every way both may change us as a result of their synthesis. Frida was physical, she lived bled and died, she is remembered for her life, glorified in her art. Since then she has transmuted to a new form one created by those who can never meet her, but seek to know her…so why not Avatara?

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There are other ways to examine the word Avatara. It may be broken into two ladies names . Ava, from Avis meaning like a bird, her nickname was the Dove and to delve even deeper and we find the Sanscrit word, Chava meaning life or lives on. We then move onto Tara, a diminutive of Astara meaning a star. So in Ava-tara –  A star lives on. In Tarot Avatara our TAROT Star is reborn!