Building a Tarot library: Nine essential books to collect and study

Eliphas Levi once claimed that the archetypal power of the Tarot was so great that a person in prison alone with only a tarot deck could eventually reconstruct all of human knowledge and wisdom and attain adepthood. That may be true, but if I were the one locked in that room, these are the nine books I would want to have by my side.

The little white book.  Affectionately known to collectors as the LWB, this is the stapled booklet that comes nestled in the box with the tarot deck itself.  Some tarotists will sneer at the brief and sometimes trite meanings given in the LWB. But I will stand up for the poor derided booklet because, let's face it, everyone has to start somewhere.  And even learning basic, one-phrase meanings for all 78 cards can seem daunting when you're just getting started with the Tarot.  (Not only that, the LWB usually contains helpful notes from the artist and/or deck creator, allowing the reader to unlock the symbolism encoded in that particular deck.) If I were to get amnesia and forget everything I've ever learned about the Tarot, I would be most grateful for the LWB, condensing all that wisdom handily into one ounce of paper.

Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom.  Considered instant classics when they were published around thirty years ago, Pollack's treatises on the Major and Minor Arcana (now combined in a single volume) have held up remarkably well.  I might not agree with all her opinions on the cards, but her imagination and insight are unparalleled.  There's not much I can say about this book that hasn't already been said.  Everyone who's even casually interested in Tarot should read it.  If you want to understand more about the Hebrew mysticism that permeates the Tarot, then add her excellent Kabalah Tree as a companion volume.

Paul Foster Case, The Tarot.  Another foundational text.  Case, who knew more about the Tarot than possibly anyone else ever, was a pivotal figure in the revival of Hermeticism.  He founded the Builders of the Adytum, the oldest and largest organization dedicated to tarot education.  So much wisdom.  So much scholarship.  It's a shame this book isn't better known.

Mary K. Greer, 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card. After you learn the basics of the cards, Greer's expansive view will open you up to their possibilities. Her blog is also how I keep up with publications, conferences, and other happenings in the world of Tarot.

Mary K. Greer, Tarot Reversals.  Mary Greer gets another mention. Ostensibly a niche title about reading reversals, this book is actually a comprehensive dictionary of all the card meanings, reversed and upright. Learning to interpret reversed cards can bring a new level of accuracy and nuance to your readings, and this book will show you that it's not as difficult as it seems.  Even if you're not into reversals, this belongs on your bookshelf.  Her interpretations of the cards are the most astute and accurate ones that I've found. 

Alan Moore, et al. Promethea.  Available in a series of five trade paperbacks, or a three-volume deluxe edition.  This is artist/mage/megagenius Alan Moore's superhero comic cum occult manifesto, lavishly illustrated by the great J. H. Williams III.  The title character's winding trek through the Tree of Life and the Tarot, which left some comics fans squirming, is just pure ambrosia for tarot nerds.  I can't wait for the movie. (Ha ha.  Like that will happen.)

Janina Renee, Tarot: Your Everyday Guide.  Ever stared down a tarot card and thought, "Yes, but what does that mean for me?" This unique book focuses on learning to read each tarot card for practical guidance. It's fun and fluffy, but with more substance than your average book of pep talks.  I use it help interpreting cards in the "advice" position of any spread.  Also great for the practice of a daily one-card draw for inspiration and affirmation. One gripe: I wish I could tear out the card illustrations, which seem ill-chosen and don't really add anything to the text.

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians.  Certainly not for beginners, but essential for the serious student.  The Book of Thoth (and the accompanying vast and visionary deck) came about in Crowley's old age, the distillation of a lifetime of Tarot study.  Crowley's density can be frustrating, his pomposity infuriating.  But there's no denying the immensity of the man's intellect, and the beauty of those strange, seductive cards.

Lon Milo Duquette, Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot.  Conceived as a companion volume to The Book of Thoth, Duquette's explication of Crowley is a towering work in its own right.  Each card gets its own illuminating discussion, alongside a handy list of its attributions and correspondences. The book breaks down the Qabalistic and astrological foundations for the deck's structure, which might be beyond my grasp if not for Duquette's patient tutelage.  I also love Duquette's, Book of Ordinary Oracles, which weds hard-hitting divination theory with whimsy and a sense of fun.

Honorable mentions: If you still have money and space on your bookshelf, here's a few more titles to round out your collection.

Robert Place, Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.  This book narrowly missed making the first tier, due to a somewhat stern tone, and a final section of card meanings that feels a bit padded.  Place engages in some grade-A myth-busting, taking a hard look at the Tarot's true historical origins and all the misinformation that has circulated over the years.  As a bonus, it's peppered with his distinctive woodcut-style illustrations, as seen in the Alchemical Tarot and the new Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery.

Paul Foster Case, The Book of Tokens.  A strange little volume, out of print but worth seeking out.  Akin to a prayer book, Book of Tokens presents the BOTA versions of the Major Arcana (which differ slightly from the Rider-Waite) alongside devotional poems informed by Case's knowledge of Hebrew esotericism.  Even if you're (like me) slightly allergic to gematria, it's hard not to be impressed with the insight and intensity contained in this slim book.

Chic and Tabitha Cicero, Skrying on the Tree of Life.  For the confirmed Qabalah-head.  These guided visualizations, based on the Golden Dawn material, will introduce you to all of the Tarot archetypes in their own natural habitats.

Gareth Knight, The Magical World of the Tarot: Fourfold Mirror of the Universe. An intriguing collage.  There's some art history, some meditation and pathworking, some divination. There's a sprinkling of question-and-answer exchanges with students, which are sometimes helpful, sometimes amusingly random.  But for me, Knight's best contribution is a schematic of the Major Arcana that I've not seen anywhere else, which divides the cards into four "halls" governed by four elemental rulers, which correspond to the four classical Virtues.  An obscure book worth getting for this diagram alone.

Trish Macgregor and Phyllis Vega, Power Tarot.  In the introduction, these two ladies recall honing their tarot skills in the trenches--psychic phone lines, where you have less than a minute to hit on something good before the caller hangs up.  The fruit of their experience is this book of creative and down-to-earth divinatory meanings for all the cards.  Power Tarot is a great resource for divination, especially if you read over the phone, at parties, or other venues where you need to get specific information fast, for querents who could care less about the esoteric side of the Tarot.  The first part of the book provides card meanings for questions related to love, money, health, etc.  The second part contains fun and original spreads to help pull you out of the Celtic Cross rut.

The "intuitive" cop-out: Thoughts from a recent Tarot class

So, I've been attending a Tarot meetup for a more than a year, and I love it--but I want to talk about something that's been bugging me from the beginning.  Now, the format of this get-together is kind of loose, and activities vary from week to week.  We pass around different books and decks, exchange readings, and share our experiences and methods.  Usually there's a fairly in-depth discussion segment, where we will consider traditional and alternative meanings for the cards, talk about their elemental and astrological correspondences, and decode some of the mythology and symbolism embedded in the images.

But almost every time, there's someone who becomes very resistant.  It's not the same person, but a succession of them. This visitor sits through the discussion, not contributing, then raises his or her hand and says,"All this information is well and good for you people, but I'm a natural intuitive and the cards speak to me despite the fact that I know nothing about them.  (And don't want to.)  In fact, I don't need any tools at all.  I read a person's vibes like a teleprompter, and I have a personal chat with Mother Universe every Saturday. If I were going to condescend to do a reading here--which I'm not--I promise you'd all be blown away."

Now, the rules of etiquette prohibit me from laying into these folks on the spot, so I'm going to do it here. Leaving aside the obvious insecurity bubbling up from this statement (and the obvious question, what are you doing in a Tarot study group?) it's time to call bullshit on self-styled intuitives who resist study, practice, and discipline.  One foundational occult maxim is "Know Thyself"--and Tarot is "yourself, turned inside out" (Trish Macgregor and Phyllis Vega, Power Tarot).  Deep study of the Tarot, or any organizing system of wisdom, can only make you bring you closer to self-knowledge and enhance your intuitive work.
 
Now, I'm not quibbling with those folks who use personal meanings for the cards that differ from the traditional ones, or those who take intuitive cues from visual elements in the cards.  Most, if not all, good readers do this.  And it is just as common to be too rigid when interpreting the Tarot as it is to be too loose.  What I'm reacting to is the implication that some students are less wise, less intuitive, because they have the commitment to take notes, read books, exchange ideas and debate with others.  As if careful, persistent examination of one's spiritual path could diminish its beauty and mystery.  As if it were even possible to diminish something so beautiful and mysterious as the Tarot.  The anti-intellectualism that pervades the pagan/New Age arena is a pernicious, eroding influence.  Intuitive and intellectual faculties are not mutually exclusive.  The best diviners--the best practitioners of any magical art--are the ones who can synthesize all the parts: knowledge gained from study, wisdom gained from living in the world, and intuition gained in the moment.

Legendary scryers: The Page of Cups

And now for something completely different.  Our legendary scryer for today isn't a historical figure or a fictional character, but instead a Tarot court card, the Page of Cups.

Also known as the Princess of Cups in some decks, this card usually depicts a dreamy youth holding a cup or chalice.  In the classic Waite-Smith and derivative decks, a fish is popping up to the surface, symbolizing the deep unconscious.  When taken as a significator, this card stands for a young, intuitive person of any gender (and often an androgyne). The Page of Cups is creative and sensitive, but not always emotionally mature.  When reversed or ill-aspected, it can indicate someone who is flaky, withdrawn, impractical, or subject to mood disorders or substance dependence. Astrologically, it corresponds to the water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces).  Besides representing a person, the appearance of this Page in a reading can signify the beginning of a creative undertaking or psychic exploration.

So why do I call the Page of Cups the scryer of the deck?  Well, for one thing, she bears a cup of water, a perennially popular scrying tool.  The Queen of Cups is also traditionally a card of clairvoyance--but she, being ruled by Scorpio, possesses a more forceful psychic/sexual energy than the Page, who is gently receptive.  The obedient and and humble Page is, I believe, a closer expression of the process of scrying.  When we seek visions, we adopt a passive mental state and accept information as it comes.

Another reason is her sub-elemental attribution.  Each of the court cards has a sub-elemental correspondence which bridges two of the elements--the Page of Cups is Earth of Water.  The Page stands with her feet on the ground, but her eyes are cast into the cup.  In this context, Water represents the world of visions, and Earth represents the world of manifestation.  The scryer uses physical tools to access an intuitive reality.  To extend the metaphor, when we scry, we cast a line out for the things swimming around in our unconscious, and allow them to be beached on the shores of our Earth senses.  We see the creature of the deep manifesting before our eyes, seeming to have a life of its own--just like the fish in the cup.

Finally, there's the symbolism of the cup itself.  The chalice of water is, among other things, an eloquent expression of the Hermetic concept of the Universal Mind.  The water in the cup is linked to every drop of water on the planet via the oceans and individual mind is a reflection of the One Mind, and contains infinite multitudes. If we can look past the cup (the ego that contains our being), we can link up with the ocean (Being with a capital B).  This allows us to see things that are distant from our own experience, narrowly defined.  Many have argued that this connection with the Universal Mind is the source of all psychic experiences, and I certainly don't have a better theory!

So, if you work with Tarot, as I do, you could try using the archetype of the Page of Cups to enhance your practice.  Try meditating on the card to learn about the nature of seership.  Place him on your table or altar when you scry, or store him with your bowl or crystal.  If you reach a place where you're stuck and feel like you're not making progress, you could do a reading, placing the Page in the center as your significator, to find out what will help you move forward.

The Page of Cups pictured above is from the Morgan Greer deck.

Divination methods: Intuitive vs. inductive

Open almost any occult reference work, and you're likely to find a list of divination methods ranging from the familiar to the chuckle-worthy:

acultomancy	divination using needles
aeromancy	divination by means of the weather
ailuromancy	divination by watching cats’ movements
alectormancy	divination by sacrificing a rooster
alectryomancy	divination by watching a rooster gather corn kernels
aleuromancy	divination using flour or meal
alomancy	divination using salt
alphitomancy	divination using loaves of barley
alveromancy	divination using sounds
ambulomancy	divination by taking a walk
amniomancy	divination by examining afterbirth

And so on. The word "divination" connotes communication with the divine, but it's rarely as simple as a two-way communication between the seeker and the Big Guy. Rather, the practice of divination infers that the divine communicates with us through obscure and densely coded signs--hence the proliferation of methods around the world, based on the tools that are available and traditional.

 I was interested to learn recently that anthropologists who study divination in past and present cultures divide the mantic arts into two broad categrories.  Intuitive divination involves the direct reception of information (from spirits, visions, or dreams).  Inductive divination is the process of observing signs (from objects, generally) and extrapolating meaning from them.  Divination methods may be placed on a sliding scale between these two points.  Shamanic trance work, for instance is strongly intuitive, and only incidentally inductive.  Observing the flight of birds or the arrangement of entrails, is mostly inductive with a minimal intuitive component.  The former method is thought to require some special skill or natural ability, while the latter can be done by anyone, once they learn the system and standard meanings.

This dichotomy describes two fundamentally different (though not mutually exclusive) assumptions about how divination works.  One centers on the ability of the human mind or spirit to go out into the ether and find the information it seeks; the other focuses on the tendency organize itself in an orderly fashion, in which reflections of events are noted by the observant diviner, and missed by everyone else.

Now, some may argue that we're describing two sides of the same coin, if we say the intuitive approach relies on the power of the individual to receive knowledge, and that the inductive approach relies on the universe (or gods) to communicate knowledge.  In any case, it's clear that the divination practices cannot neatly be divided into two discrete categories, which is why some posit a third category, which is really an intermediary to the two and which is called interpretive divination.

Some of the most popular forms of divination fall into this interpretive category.  A tarot reader, for instance, generally uses a combination of inductive and intuitive abilities to produce a reading.  He will shuffle the cards until he feels that it's time to stop (intuition).  He will then lay the cards out in a prearranged pattern, and accept the dealt cards as a message relevant to the matter at hand (induction).  A good reader will also be able to choose the most accurate among the many possible meanings for each card (intuition again) and relate the basic card meanings to the question in an expansive way (more induction).

Now for a little discussion on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

I've come to believe that inductive divination practices can be useful problem-solving tools even if the diviner's psychic senses are weak or non-existent.  This is because induction is a form of creative thinking that can trigger new and unexpected ideas.  I'll show you what I mean.  Let's suppose, for the sake, of argument, that you live in a universe where psychic abilities do not exist.  There are no supernatural or synchronistic forces at work, and complete randomness is the law.  Nevertheless, you're having a relationship problem, and you decide to do a divination by drawing a rune from a sack. The rune you draw is Berkana, "Birth."  It's totally random, remember, but you believe that it has significance--that it carries some encoded message about your relationship--so you turn it this way and that in your mind, you look up some different definitions and try to apply them.  Does it herald a new beginning for the relationship or does it mean someone's being a big baby?  Maybe it points to something that you need to bring forth or develop, but what could that be?  And so on.  And at the end of this exercise, you know more about the relationship than you did before--not because the divination gave you real information (it didn't), but because it coaxed you into focusing on your issue and thinking about it in a creative manner.  I've noticed this phenomenon with beginning tarot readers.  Often they haven't developed their intuitive faculties and the cards they draw seem (to me) to be pretty much a mishmash of random cards.  But in the process of scanning the scattered cards for meaning, believe that they contain profound and personal messages from the universe--surprise! They find some.  (I know this sounds cynical, but I mean it in the least cynical way possible.  It is truly marvelous what kind of practical information beginners can come up with when they give themselves permission to think magically.)

 Of course, there are times when the inductive approach falls apart--like when you need specific information that isn't easily expressed by the more mechanical systems of divination.  Another example:  Let's say you left your wallet out on the kitchen table, and while you were at work your adorable basset hound mistook it for a chew toy and dragged it off somewhere.  Well, you can throw the I-Ching until your brain is swimming in broken and unbroken lines, and still not get any usable information about the location of your wallet.  Is the answer there within all the noise?  Maybe--but that's a philosophical question.  It doesn't matter to you if you can't parse the signal, and there is no trigram for "under the chaise lounge."  It would be much easier if you could just lie down for a nap and have a psychic dream in which you see Buttercup depositing the wallet in its hiding place.  You need an intuitive method.

Different methods can also provide us with different information about the same situation.  For the sake of the example, we'll say the "target", the thing the is reading about, is the movie When Harry Met Sally.  We ask a talented scryer, and we might get something like this:

I see a woman...she's blonde, pretty.  She's smiling, but I feel that she's deeply lonely.  Smell of Aquanet hairspray.  There's a crowd of people walking, like an airport or bus terminal.  A yellow car...older.  Tables in a restaurant--why is everyone laughing?

In other words, we have images, impressions--but not the plot of the movie.  Now let's ask a talented tarot reader:

The reading concern a young man and a young woman--both have very busy lives.  They're friends, but there's a lot of sexual tension.  There's the potential for travel in the future?  The Wheel of Fortune here indicates the forces of karma and destiny, the Two of Cups, marriage.  It is very likely that after experiencing various ups and downs, these two will wind up together.

One more point of comparison.  There's a long tradition of using inductive methods for here-and-now information, and intuitive methods for spiritual development and exploration--and I think there's something to that.  Again, I'm not trying to draw a false dichotomy here--you can talk to your Holy Guardian Angel with casino dice and you can scry for lost socks if you want to.  But we bliss junkies and space cadets know that visionary practices can impress upon you the full magnificence, beauty, and terror of your situation in a way that regular ole fortune-telling does not.  For me, the most profound tarot reading is about as immersive as getting absorbed in a good book, while intuitive experiences can seem, for the moment, more real than anything else.

So, let's bring all this divination theory back around, shall we?  How does it help the practitioner?  If you're clairvoyant at will, then you can probably just dispense with this divination stuff altogether. But for the rest of us, learning to use our intuitive and inductive talents in tandem (with a good measure of savvy interpretation) is offers the surest chance at success.  You should know how to choose the method best suited to your question and to your particular talents--which, of course, will vary from day to day.  So, the next time you have a vision that you don't understand, why not throw a couple of bones to try and clarify it?  Or when you notice the Empress staring seductively from the center of your Celtic Cross, how about taking a journey to her realm to see what she has to tell you?

Hope your divinations are both transcendent and enlightening.  And I hope you find those socks,

M

More words for methods of divination.