8.19.2024 (Daily Note)
Books!
Quick summary: Unveiling my “Five Tarot Books” mini-essay, along with some other book-related notes.
That “Five Books” thing it took me so long to write!
Ages ago, the nice people at Shepherd invited me to write about five “favorite” or “best” Tarot books.
They have a very specific plan: It has to be five books, and you have to talk about each one from a personal perspective. So it’s not short reviews or summaries, more like a very (very) tiny memoir.
First of all, it took me forever to decide which five books. I didn’t want to do the most popular titles, though I do have a personal fondness for two works that would fall into that category: Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and Mary Greer’s Tarot for Your Self.
But those two books are certainly at or near the top of any list focused on the “most” influential Tarot books. And they are perennially popular. If those were two of five choices—how would I decide on the other three? And what would the list actually be “about”?
I decided to look for a theme that would unify my list. I also decided to focus on calling attention to books that were important, but not “popular” (in the sense of well known).
That led to a whole new round of list-making, with many approaches tried and rejected. Finally, I narrowed down to a couple of decades I’ve written about on EP as a “transformational” period in the history of Tarot.
By then the number of candidates was manageable! So I got to the magic number of five—but then I had to come up with text about why the books were not just important in the history of Tarot, but had significance for me personally. Which was honestly not something I would have thought about spontaneously.
Therefore, it took a few drafts to come up with an approach. And that actually turned out to be a good exercise, in terms of thinking through why the books had been written by their authors, and how they had come into my own life.
I’m sure the suspense is sky-high by now, so here’s the big reveal:
Now for a fair warning. While on the Shepherd site you’ll be served a variety of ads, which might include offers for Tarot readings. But the ads aren’t too intrusive—just keep scrolling!
You’ll also be offered some other Tarot booklists, and the ones I looked at were quite interesting. Two examples:
Writer Tania Pryputniewicz has been mentioned several times here on EP, along with her book Heart’s Compass Tarot: Discover Tarot Journaling and Create Your Own Cards.
Peter Mark Adams is the author of The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, and according to his very handsome website, specializes in “the ethnography and visuality of ritual, sacred landscape, esotericism, consciousness and healing.” Which is quite a lot to take on!
Another fair warning—it appears Shepherd could be a little bit addictive. I already stumbled over several appealing lists, both near and far afield from Tarot topics.
My second promise for today’s Note was a virtual tour of my Tarot library. Which is not actually very large, but has an admirable amount of diversity . . .
However—it turns out that my LibraryThing widget will not work in Substack (hadn’t tried before), so I will come up with another approach, and add this item to tomorrow’s Daily Note.
In the meantime—and as always—thanks for reading! More soon, C
The Game of Saturn is rather speculative, shall we say, but fascinating for all that. I did enjoy your selections (surprisingly I seem to own three of them - never got around to the Kaplan encyclopaedia) but the Leary was totally new to me!
Thank you for this list. I really appreciate solid book recommendations.