Tarot Books | Tarot Heritage

Sep 19

Portrait of a Lady by Diane A. S. Stuckart cover

Portrait of a Lady – Tarot in a 15th-Century Murder Mystery

This book has everything a mystery-loving, tarot history nerd could desire: brisk pace, tight plot, illicit love, murder at the Sforza court, and those four missing cards from the Duke of Milan’s Visconti-Sforza deck.

Diane Stuckart has written three mysteries set at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza in the early 1490s, when Milan was at the height of its splendor and economic power. As artist in residence, Leonardo da Vinci tinkers with his ingenious military machines in between designing costumes and scenery for pageants and masked balls. Whenever a dead body inconveniently appears in the garden or under a tower, Leonardo uses his astute powers of observation to discreetly solve the crime and save the Duke from embarrassment.

Leonardo’s sidekick in these sleuthing adventures is his young apprentice Dino. What Leonardo doesn’t know (or does he?) is that Dino is actually Delphina, a 16-year-old girl who ran away from home disguised as a boy to avoid an arranged marriage with a repulsive old man. Read more

Sep 5

Cover of All Love Goes Before me by Stewart S. Warren

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Two Tarot Poetry Books by Stewart S. Warren

Opening these evocative books of poetry based on the 15th-century Visconti Sforza and Sola Busca decks releases a gentle magic into the air. The tarot figures speak for themselves in these elegant, imagistic poems, opening up surprising revelations about each card. Energy hums between the poems and color photos of their cards on the facing page.

All Love Goes Before Me: Poems on the Sola Busca Tarot

Tarot historian Giordano Berti sets the mood in his preface by invoking the muses and a lineage of alchemist-poets, while telling us the poems are “access portals to another dimension.” In the introduction, Il Meneghello’s art director, Dr. Cristina Dorsini, conjures up the special magic of this deck. Read more

May 4

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Reading the Marseille Tarot by Jean-Michel David

If you want to learn how to read with the Tarot de Marseille while immersing yourself in tarot’s early history, this is the book for you. The heart of the book is an in-depth examination of each trump card accompanied by a web of historic associations illustrated with numerous examples of medieval and renaissance art. The book features the 1650 Noblet deck restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy, but each chapter offers illustrations of numerous decks for comparison; so the book works easily with any TdM. Read more

Feb 25

11 Comments

Tarot: The Open Reading by Yoav Ben-Dov

For years, English-speaking Tarot de Marseille readers have been complaining about the lack of books in English. Well, the book we’ve all been waiting for has arrived! Ben-Dov’s book has everything one could ask for in a comprehensive how-to manual: history, card meanings, symbolism, tips for conducting a reading session, and examples of spread interpretations. Read more

Sep 15

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The Way of Tarot by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa

This is one of the most significant books in English on the Tarot de Marseilles. Jodorowsky is a Chilean surrealist filmmaker, therapist and tarot reader based in Paris who uses the Tarot de Marseilles exclusively. His background and tarot experience couldn’t be more different from mine, but I feel he’s a kindred spirit. Jodorowsky’s approach to tarot, which I heartily endorse, rests on the following principles:

He does not apply external systems like Kabbalah or astrology to tarot. He uses the structure of the deck itself to discover its meaning. (He mentions Kabbalistic correspondences in some of his card descriptions, but they don’t have much influence on his card meanings).
He uses tarot for counseling and psychological healing; does not use tarot to predict the future.
He does not confine the cards to fixed meanings, but reads intuitively by closely examining the card images and their interactions while in a trance-like state. Read more

May 30

What’s the Sola Busca?

The Sola Busca Tarocchi was created about 1490 in Northern Italy, and is named for the family who owned the deck until 2009, when they sold it to the Italian government and it was placed in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

There are two theories about the deck’s creator: either he was an artist named Nicola who had connections to Florence and Ancona; or he was an unknown Ferrarese artist living in Venice; or perhaps it was printed in Ferrara and colored in Venice. We don’t know if the artist created the deck himself, or if it was a commission. A small number of decks were printed from the plates, and a handful of unpainted examples from four different decks are scattered about in museums and private collections. The 78-card Sola Busca in the Pinacoteca di Brera, which was painted a decade or so after it was printed, is the deck that Mayer and Il Meneghello used as the basis for their recent facsimile publications. Read more

Mar 27

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Honoring Gertrude Moakley

Gertrude Moakley is my tarot history muse and the wise and magical aunt I wish I could have had. We never had an image of her until the late Michael J. Hurst found her yearbook picture from Barnard College. I always imagine her in the 1950s as a gray-haired librarian in tweeds and sensible shoes, a Waite Smith deck hidden in her purse, slipping away from her colleagues at the public library to have lunch with Eden Gray.

After graduating from Barnard College, then the Columbia School of Library Science in 1928, Moakley began a 40-year career with the New York City Public Library. In the 1950s, she published two articles in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library: on the Waite Smith deck’s influence on T.S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland; and on the relationship between the Visconti-Sforza trumps and Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi. Read more

Aug 21

5 Comments

Graphic Structure and Card Meaning

I’ve just discovered a technique that helps me see the cards in a new light. It’s from a book written in 1973 by Fred Gettings that I just reviewed for the American Tarot Association’s Quarterly Journal. Gettings was way ahead of his time in his approach to tarot history and the Tarot de Marseilles, and is one of the first English-speaking authors to focus on this deck. I couldn’t find any biographical information on Gettings online. If anyone knows about him or if he’s even alive today, I’d love to hear about it.

Gettings’ method is all about analyzing the underlying structure of each card. When you reduce an image to its basic geometric shapes you can see how the parts relate to the whole and read astrological or alchemical symbols into the image, adding layers of meaning. Read more

Aug 8

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Comparative Tarot and the Tarot de Marseilles

A comparative tarot reading starts as a short spread using two to five cards from a deck you’re familiar with. Once the spread is laid out, you add the same cards from one or more different decks to get an alternate view of the reading. Read more

Aug 5

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Il Castello dei Tarocchi

An absolutely gorgeous book arrived in my mailbox the other day from Italy – Il Castello dei Tarocchi, a collection of nineteen essays by an international roster of tarot authors. Many of the contributors are familiar to those of us who lurk around the tarot history forums: Lothar Teikemeier, Alain Bougearel, Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis, and many others. Read more

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