For those of you who missed any/all of the Rachel posts, I’m putting them together in a short ebook, with a few additional comments and pictures. I’ll make it available in the next day or two.
In the meantime, I wanted to share two follow-up notes.
First: Although Rachel’s short-story collection, The Tarot of Perfection, has been out of print for a long time, you can “borrow” it in digital form from the Internet Archive. I’ve previously written about the IA as a great resource for Tarot research—and now seems like a good time to repost that information:
The resource in question is the Internet Archive Books Collection. Some of you may be familiar with the Internet Archive as home of the “Way-Back Machine”—a digital library of web content, amassed by an army of industrious bots over more than two decades. Almost any web page that ever existed in that period is likely to be way-backed, and if you have the URL, you can see what was on it.
But most people don’t know that the Internet Archive is also a huge lending library, stocked with digital books uploaded by both institutions and individuals. And if you enter the search word “Tarot,” you’ll be rewarded with an array of possibilities.
Many of these digitized Tarot books are long out of print, and some are rare. So if you want to see early editions of classic works, or obscure foreign-language materials, you can have a good time. For example:
And if you want to have a look at some important books from the later 20th century—that’s a choice too. For example:
You can flip through these just like any ebook, using the Archive’s excellent online reader.
But the most enticing thing about accessing books from the Internet Archive is that they are fully indexed. You can search on any word in any book, and easily surf through the results. So if you want to see every passage that contains “Hanged Man” in the 848 pages of Israel Regardie’s book The Golden Dawn, you’re covered:
Most items in the public domain can be downloaded, but books still under copyright are only available to borrow—often on an hour-by-hour basis. It’s all completely free, though, and open 24/7, so if you find yourself curious about what a particular author said about something in a particular book, the answer may be just a few clicks away.
Although searching on “Tarot” will bring several hundred items (including Tarot-adjacent books, Tarot-themed novels, and other oddments), you can filter results by sub-category, year, author, and language.
Of course you can also go straight to a book you know is there—so here’s a link to The Tarot of Perfection.
And for good measure, here’s a snippet from the “Introduction”:
Second: I take it as a token of synchronicity that the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies—where Rachel taught so many Tarot workshops over the years—is offering this free online event soon:
Also, you can find this delightful essay on the Omega site:
And finally: Over the coming week, EP will return to its regular course of information and ideas. In honor of our newly begun baseball season, I’ll share the Tarot de Cooperstown and its connection with Arthur Corwin’s calendrical theory of Tarot. Plus two unexpected decks, a striking exhibition at the Folger Library, and poet Kay Ryan’s approach to Tarot exploration.
I’ll also be announcing some changes on the horizon.
Thanks so much for reading. C
Cynthia, I am amazed at this newsletter. Thank you for all the work that you are doing, but at this time, specifically what you are sharing on Rachel's work.