Rachel Pollack’s Tarot Wisdom

669 Pages·2014·18 MB·English

by  Rachel Pollack

About 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.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
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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.

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn
Worldwide Ltd.

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public.

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Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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