Preface

When Llewellyn first contacted me about writing this book, I was delighted and a bit daunted. The acquisitions editor, Barbara Moore, explained that her company had a series entitled The Complete Book of … and was seeking an author for their Complete Book of Tarot. The word “complete” provoked a twinge of anxiety. Over the years I have run into tarot enthusiasts who have amassed more than a thousand books and an equally stunning number of tarot decks for their collections! How could a single book call itself “complete” when measured against such a vast landscape? Clearly, some decisions about content had to be made.

After mulling the issue over, I came to the following resolution. This book would follow certain principles to offer a “complete” and even-handed approach in the space of a single volume. To achieve this goal, I established the following guidelines:

• • The book would cover the essential topics that someone new to tarot should know. The focus would be on a tarot “core curriculum”—a term that has become both popular and reviled in contemporary news about American education.
• • The material covered would be based on established traditions in tarot literature. To this end, I would cite the works of such tarot giants as Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette), the French occultist whose writings first popularized tarot in Europe; S. L. MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Arthur Edward Waite, intellectual father of the influential Rider-Waite-Smith deck; and Aleister Crowley of the Thoth tarot deck.
• • For easy reference, the text would be concise and to the point and would include a detailed table of contents to enable readers to search easily for topics of interest.
• • More obscure and esoteric aspects of tarot would be mentioned only in passing. Readers would be referred to other texts to pursue specialized topics in further
  detail.
• • To avoid rehashing what can be found in currently available texts, this book would present the core material in a fresh and interesting manner.
• • Because the tarot is the product of the Italian Renaissance, this book would include the Christian cultural influences on tarot symbolism that many authors omit. In addition, it would discuss the symbolic use of the Hebrew alphabet, which was crucial to the Golden Dawn’s method of delineating the major arcana (the twenty-two allegorical picture cards of the traditional tarot deck).
• • Because the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had such an overwhelming influence on modern tarot interpretation at the end of the nineteenth century, this book would follow the Golden Dawn’s astrological correspondences for the cards.
• • Tarot readers come from many different backgrounds and have diverse worldviews, so this book would seek to be as objective and nonjudgmental as possible.
• • Because it can be difficult for a sole author to remain objective, I would label my personal opinions as such. For example, I regard the modern use of the tarot as a form of divination (an attempt to “communicate with the gods”) but with the important caveat that the gods help those who help themselves. Readers should be aware that I am assuming this point of view.
• • A major focus of the book would be the use of the art of tarot as a tool for insight, empowerment, clarification, and self-understanding rather than its older use as a method of fortune-telling, popularized in Hollywood movies.
• • The book would avoid dogmatic pronouncements and instead serve as a tarot travelogue, much like a guidebook to a foreign country. In it, I would describe things I had seen and done in tarot land, but it would be up to readers to explore the territory, do their own experimentation, and come to their own conclusions.

My hope as an author is that I have succeeded in presenting a useful and comprehensive guide to tarot for the twenty-first century. It will be up to the reader to decide whether this book has lived up to these aspirations.

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