Ah, Tarot: a visual adventure offering so many paths to explore, and so many ways to enjoy its layers of meaning. Rachel Pollack has taken this to a new level though. She is well known for her guidebooks to these cards, but in ‘The Tarot of Perfection’, she takes us on an extraordinary journey through fictional worlds that relate (in some way or another) to Tarot.
Like the Tarot itself, these tales weave in and out of each other, linking threads of images and characters, yet retaining their own energies. The stories are based on characters or scenes from the Tarot, or they involve Tarot readers, or some form of divination, or the gods themselves. They are a blend of allegory, fantasy, and deep imagery that affects the mind and soul. Some of the clever titles include: The Pickpocket’s Destiny, The Souls in the Trees, and Simon Wisdom.
It’s hard to describe these stories, as they sometimes seem like ‘normal’ fiction, but then they divert into realms of fantasy and magic. In essence, I guess they are fairy tales, and like fables of old, this book contains exquisite black and white line drawings to illustrate the text.
Placing the cards into the context of these stories gives them so much more meaning than their traditional interpretations. An example of this is can be found in the first story, where the Ten of Wands is described in the following way: “Look there, he thought, the man with ten sticks on his back, each one with leaves of fire, though none of them burned. No doubt the woman would have seen in this a prediction of ‘burdens’ or ‘hard work ahead’, and completely miss the truth, that the sticks extended from the Great Tree, that itself grew out of the Radiant Jewels of Creation. And what was the man but a sacred messenger, assigned to extend the jewels into the abandoned dross of the physical world? What holiness!” I’m sure that when certain cards turn up in my next Tarot reading, I’ll be relating them back to these imaginative tales that are full of sorcerers and initiates, ghosts, and squirrels!
Even the Outback of Australia gets a mention amongst these stories: “He finally came to a place he thought of as the end of the world, a giant rock on a flat red desert. There were paintings on the rock, circles and lines and spirals and dots, so old even Matyas couldn’t decipher them. He closed his eyes to try to speak to the elementals in the rock. All he could hear was a rumble that might have been thunder. When he looked again he discovered himself surrounded by men and women. They were naked, but covered in paintings and scars. Daubs of color, jagged lines, angular boxes and concentric circles formed some kind of code… He stared at them, not at their faces but at the paint. Suddenly he understood. The lines and blotches were the history of the earth, their chant the song the world sang to itself when it first awoke.”
As Mary K. Greer acknowledges on the back cover, “These mystical, magical travel tales show us that it’s the journey itself that really counts. They will change forever how you see destiny, indeed, all the mysteries.”
This one’s for lovers of Tarot reading and all things magical. ISBN: 1-90557209-3. Published by Magic Realist Press