What happens when the symbolic language of Freemasonry is taken off the tracing board and placed directly into your hands? This episode, I'm joined by Jonti Marks and Bridie Blaze, creators of the Masonic Wisdom Cards, A Deck for Daily Reflection, a 78-card illustrated deck exploring Masonic symbols, working tools, virtues, and sacred geometry as prompts for contemplation rather than divination.

We talk through Bridie's folk-art-inspired illustration process, built from a hand-chiselled, linocut-style technique that echoes the working tools themselves, and Jonti's approach to writing a companion booklet that invites quiet reflection rather than instruction. Given that the deck shares its 78-card count with a tarot deck, we spend real time on the comparison: where the two overlap as tools for memory and self-examination, and where the Masonic Wisdom Cards depart from tarot entirely, since there is no divination and no fortune telling built into the design.

The conversation also opens into the art of memory more broadly, how Freemasonry, Kabbalah, and tarot all draw on the same rhetorical memory tradition, and how a deck of cards can work as a modern entry point into lodge education and personal study. Jonti and Bridie close out talking about how the two of them came to collaborate, the year and a half it took to bring the deck from idea to print, and the early feedback coming in from the first backers.

Books mentioned in this episode

A Mosaic Palace, Freemasonry and the Art of Memory by Martin Faulks (Lewis Masonic, 2018).

The Masonic Wisdom Cards are distributed through Lewis Masonic. Find them at lewismasonic.co.uk.