
Carmen Cassandra Sorrenti
Carmen was born in Positano, Italy, where she grew up with an Australian mother and a group of international artists who taught her to draw at an early age. After training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London and undergoing a Noh Theatre apprenticeship in Japan with Naohiko Umewaka, she worked as an actress in various theatre companies, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York and with John Turturro in Secret Passage. Due to profound dream experiences and transformative practices with the Jodorowskys, she turned to painting and writing in order to explore co-creating with the dreaming dimension. Studies at Liz Greene’s Centre for Psychological Astrology (CPA), with its mythic lens, supported this inquiry. After a first exhibit in Rome entitled Magus, Daily Alchemy, exhibitions followed in Florence, Positano, Genova, Pescara, London, Vienna, New Mexico, Boston and Salem. Carmen created a deck based on dream incubation, the Pholarchos Tarot, which has an international following. The Moon painting from the Pholarchos won the Premio Giorgione for alchemical art. She was the featured artist in the 2023 Fall issue of Quadrant: The Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology. She has illustrated several book covers and her paintings have featured in magazines such as The Cartomancer, IASD’s DreamTime and Oltre Confine. She is one of the pioneer graduates of the MA in Art, Psyche and the Creative Imagination at LSAD, where she is now a PhD candidate with Mathew Mather as supervisor. Her research involves devising Sounding the Dreaming, a creative practice that involves collaborating with dreaming for a language of re-enchantment.

Photo bu Anne-Marie Killeen
ALCHEMY & THE ETERNAL BODY
“The Pholarchos Tarot is one of the most exciting, and profound, new decks I have seen in years.”
“This deck is a work of art and a vehicle for the imagination to go wild. The only way to experience it is to plunge in and work with it yourself. It is a deck which works on very many levels, but most of all Carmen encourages each of us to follow our dreams and as the Sun card instructs, “Whatever you do in this life, find your essence and be true to it.”
“I bought this deck, and I absolutely love the artwork, rich symbolism, and deep thought that went into it. The cards are beautiful and evocative and dreamlike. Highly recommended.”
“Pholarchos deck powerfully moves us into depths unknown!”
“Pholarchos has really taken our whole house by storm. I am a tarot scholar who wrote a thesis on tarot hermeneutics and this is definitely one of the most amazing decks I have seen of the 100+ I’ve collected or else witnessed in person”
THE TOWER CARD FROM THE PHOLARCHOS TAROT
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”