Some tarot decks are planned years in advance, carefully sketched and mapped before the first card comes to life. Alien Tarot was not one of those decks. For its creator Constance Bankus, the project began as a series of accidents. A rewatch of The X-Files, a random tarot movie, and the sudden collapse of her online art shop combined to spark what would become a 78-card exploration of cosmic mystery. “I never thought it would become anything like this,” she says.
Alien Tarot is described as “for weirdos, witches, and survivors.” That description is not just clever branding but a reflection of Constance’s own journey. Twice a cancer survivor, she began drawing the deck while undergoing stage four breast cancer treatment. The process became a lifeline. “It was almost therapeutic and healing for me,” she explains. Each card is infused with the rawness of that period: grief, resilience, soul-searching, and the fragile light that surfaces in dark times.
The imagery glows with alien landscapes, strange beings, and nebula-like bursts of color that are both otherworldly and deeply human. Sci-fi nods ripple throughout the deck, from The Fifth Element and Mars Attacks! to subtle references to Dune. The result is a deck that feels dreamlike yet grounded, stitched together from pop-culture nostalgia, survival, and unflinching honesty.
What sets Alien Tarot apart is its refusal to promise easy answers. Constance had little knowledge of traditional tarot structures when she started, and instead let intuition and emotion shape each card. “I was just like, ‘What wild alien does this card name make me feel should exist?’” she says. The meanings grew organically from her own struggles with trauma, depression, and recovery. The cards don’t shy from discomfort but invite readers to pause, reflect, and even journal.
The deck’s ethos also reflects Constance’s quiet rebellion against convention. Her aliens are gender-neutral, weird as a baseline, and unconcerned with fitting into traditional molds. “Being conventional would be weird in this world,” she says. It’s a vision where strangeness is normalized, where everyone belongs by virtue of not belonging.
Some cards tested her patience more than others. The Ten of Emitters, meant to capture vapor-like imagery, proved especially elusive. Justice, on the other hand, came naturally. “I don’t know why, but I relate to that card the most,” she reflects.
Backers of the campaign have responded with an enthusiasm that surprised her. “Like some people might be like, ‘Why would you spend all this time drawing 78 aliens?’ and I think it just needed to be,” she says. That response has been affirming, making the time and effort worthwhile.
Alien Tarot is both divination tool and work of art, as much a poem as a practice. “Its meaning depends on who is reading it,” Constance explains. That openness reflects her own duality, the Gemini split between mysticism and science, seriousness and play.
And she’s far from finished. Already, she’s working on three new decks: a Treefolk deck of mystical old man trees, a whimsical 1930s Art Deco Halloween deck, and a Familiar Streets deck where raccoons and opossums thrive in discarded cityscapes.
When asked what she hopes readers feel when they draw their first card from Alien Tarot, her answer is immediate: “Excitement about the mystery that they are about to read. I want this to be different than anything they have ever experienced in tarot. It is about tolerance, acceptance, and healing.”
Support the project here from $75: Kickstarter and keep up with Constance’s latest projects here.
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