Table Of ContentAbout the Author Rachel Pollack is a poet, an
award-winning novelist, a world authority on the
modern interpretation of Tarot cards, and a Tarot
card artist. Her novel Godmother Night won the
1997 World Fantasy Award. Unquenchable Fire,
her earlier novel, won the Arthur C. Clarke
Award.
Her thirty books include twelve books on the Tarot, including Seventy-Eight
Degrees of Wisdom, often called “the bible of Tarot readers,” and she is the
creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot. Her books have been published in fourteen
languages. Rachel lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Llewellyn Publications
Woodbury, Minnesota
Copyright Information Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom ©
2008 by Rachel Pollack.
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First e-book edition © 2014
E-book ISBN: 9780738722405
first edition
Second Printing, 2009
Author photo by Joyce Tudrin Book design and editing
by Rebecca Zins Cover design by Ellen R. Dahl
Line drawings by Llewellyn Art Department Tarot decks
reproduced with kind permission of Lo Scarabeo: Tarot
of Marseille, Visconti Tarot, The Egyptian Tarot, Sola-
Busca Tarot.
Rider Tarot card illustrations are based on those
contained in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Arthur
Edward Waite, published by William Rider & Son Ltd.,
London, 1911.
The Shining Tribe Tarot and The New Golden Dawn
Ritual Tarot are reproduced by permission of Llewellyn
Publications.
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Dedication
To Zoe Matoff, who set up the Intensive classes and then
suffered through all the months of the book that came out
of them—and to all the wonderful people who gave their
time and knowledge and enthusiasm to the Intensive
workshops, especially Carey Croft, Barbara Eres, and
Scott Martin.
Nothing is learned except through joy.
Ioanna Salajan
Contents
Introduction
The Major Arcana
The Fool
The Magician
The High Priestess
The Empress
The Emperor
The Hierophant
The Lovers
The Chariot
Strength
The Hermit
Wheel of Fortune
Justice
The Hanged Man
Death
Temperance
The Devil
The Tower
The Star
The Moon
The Sun
Judgement
The World
The Minor Arcana
Wands
Cups
Swords
Pentacles
The Court Cards
Readings
Bibliography
Introduction
I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Tarot in early 1970 when a friend read my cards. By the
time you read this, I will have worked, studied, and played with Tarot for more
than forty years, the total of the numbered cards—ace through ten in each of the
four suits—in the part of the deck known as the Minor Arcana. Because of Tarot,
I have learned about spiritual and esoteric traditions I did not even know existed.
I have seen many subtle surprises and truths in human behavior and have come, I
think, to a better understanding of subjects like free will and even what we mean
by “sacred.”
Having written stories all my life, I became a nonfiction writer to tell people
what I understood of the cards (my first Tarot book and my first novel were
published at the same time). Through Tarot, I have traveled to many countries at
the kind invitation of people who wanted me to teach. And I have met dear
friends who have remained close to me for decades, no matter where we live.
That first book on Tarot, published in two parts in 1980 and 1983, was Seventy-
Eight Degrees of Wisdom. It came out of a weekly class I was teaching in
Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where I lived for
nineteen years. It seemed to me that I had developed an approach to the cards
that I had not seen anywhere else at that time. Part of that approach involved
using readings as the primary mode by which we entered the deepest levels of
the cards’ meanings, including spiritual and metaphysical truths and secrets. At
that time, people tended either to do readings with formulaic meanings for each
card or else study the cards according to a strict system of occult ideas. My own
approach stressed psychology, myth, esoteric philosophy, and the interpretation
of the cards that came up in readings as moments in someone’s life, or a story, or
a dream.
Over the years, many people have told me they found Seventy-Eight Degrees of
Wisdom of great benefit. And yet, much has happened in Tarot since then. A vast
number of new decks have been published, including my own Shining Tribe
Tarot. Brilliant interpretations have emerged, along with decks and books that
link the cards to specific mythologies or esoteric traditions. Material that had
been kept secret for generations was finally published. We also know a great
deal more about Tarot’s history, so that statements I made in Seventy-Eight
Degrees of Wisdom—for example, that regular playing cards derived from Tarot
—I now know as simply not true.
Because so much has happened and my own ideas have developed so much, I
thought it might be time to do a new book that would once again give a detailed
interpretation of the entire deck, card by card. Actually, just as Seventy-Eight
Degrees came out of my Amsterdam class, so Tarot Wisdom comes from a series
of day-long workshops I taught called Tarot Intensives. In these classes, we
spent an entire morning or afternoon looking at just one or two cards, bringing in
a whole range of approaches—from comparison with many decks, to a look at
how the historical meanings of the cards have evolved over the past two
centuries, to readings inspired by the core ideas of a single card.
One of the special things we did in the Intensives was to go back and see what
the early cartomancers (people who do readings with cards) gave as the meaning
for each card. In this we were greatly aided by a recent book by Paul Huson,
whose early work on Tarot, The Devil’s Picture-Book, was one of my favorites
when I was first learning the cards.
Huson’s new book, Mystical Origins of the Tarot, is one of a group of exciting
new works by various authors that attempt to bridge the gap between historical
scholarship on Tarot and the tradition of occult or spiritual interpretation.
Knowledge of Tarot history has taken huge leaps in the last decade. We now
know far more about not only the origin of the deck but also the likely source of
most of the pictures. At one point, the people doing this research seemed to have
a kind of anti-occult agenda. That is, if they could disprove the claims of Tarot
having a secret origin as a mystical doctrine, then all of the concepts and
symbolism built up around it would be seen as meaningless. All of us who
believe we see spiritual truth in Tarot cards would have to realize that it’s just
nonsense, that Tarot was invented as a game, nothing more, and all the rest is
foolish fantasy. In reaction against this extreme view, some Tarotists have
steadfastly ignored historical evidence. To them, Tarot comes from ancient
Egypt, or Atlantis, or wherever else they have heard (see below for some of the
examples), no matter what all those researchers say.
Huson and others, notably Mary K. Greer and Robert Place, have taken a
different approach. They use what researchers have found out to create a fuller
picture of the cards, recognizing that that picture should include the concepts
that have built up around the Tarot since the eighteenth century (see below for a
brief history) and the intriguing possibility that those first inventors of the game
above Rider & Marseilles Hierophant
above Marseilles & Rider Hermit
of Tarot
may
very
well
have
conceived of the pictures as allegorical
lessons.
One of the things that Huson has done in his book is list for each card in the
deck the meanings given by the early cartomancers, beginning with “Pratesi.”
The name actually belongs to a contemporary historian who found a manuscript
on Tarot that gave simple meanings for a fair number of the cards. The
manuscript dates from around 1750, and since the earliest published meanings
date from 1781, the anonymous text is the first known list of what today we call
“divinatory meanings,” and the earliest sign that Tarot cards were used for
fortunetelling.
When I began to read through the various historical interpretations for each
card—Huson takes us from Pratesi to the beginning of the twentieth century—I
realized something amazing: for many of the cards, the older meanings were
nothing at all like what we believe the card means today. Consider the Fool.
Today we view this figure as a wise innocent making his intuitive way through
