The Xultun Tarot

The original edition of the Xultun Tarot and its companion book The Maya Book of Life: Understanding the Xultun Tarot by Michael Owen are available from Kahurangi Press at www.xultun.com The Xultun Tarot was created by New Zealander Peter Balin in 1976. It is also known as the Maya Tarot or the Maya Book of [...]

Killing the Thoth deck

by Mary Greer [Mary Greer will be the Keynote speaker at the ATS 2010 Tarot Convention to be held at over the first weekend in July in Brisbane, Australia. The following contribution first appeared on her weblog: Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog] An issue came up on one of the forums about which is the [...]

Enrique Enriquez Interviews J-C. Flornoy

Let me start by asking what everyone in the tarot world is wondering: do you remember your first kiss? Oh yes! How did that first kiss compare to the moment in which you ‘got’ the tarot? I mean that moment in which the whole tarot suddenly made sense to you. These are moments of exceptional [...]

1701 Dodal restored!

Jean-Michel David www.fourhares.com I like to imagine what it will be like in 300 years hence: perhaps one of Flornoy’s decks survives, having been found in one of Melbourne’s museums, and perhaps a mastercraftsman has picked it up, obtained high resolution images thereof, and seeks to remake it afresh for all to enjoy. Some of [...]

A Century with the Waite-Smith Tarot (and all the others…)

K. Frank Jensen When the French author, priest and Freemason Antoine Court de Gebelin (1719-84) in 1781 advanced the allegation, that the tarot deck constituted the Egyptian god Thoth’s ‘Secret Book’, he cast a seed to something, which during the next couple of centuries should grow to immense heights. Tarot was an ordinary card game [...]

Christ, the World and Sin

Jean-Michel David www.fourhares.com Unless living in continental Europe and knowing what to look for and where, it is only since the nineteen-eighties that images from older decks became easily accessible with Kaplan’s first volume of his now four volume (and I hear soon-ish to be five) Encyclopedia of Tarot. Even with the first two volumes [...]

Review: Jean Payen Tarot 1743 / 2008

Jean-Michel David www.fourhares.com There are a small number of decks which many amongst us have longed to see re-printed or make it to publication. The Jean Payen Tarot is one of those, and that for a variety of reasons, not least of which it forms an important link in the lineage of tarot during one [...]

Jordan Hoggard – The Mystereum Tarot

review by Bonnie Cehovet www.tarot.thecrystalgate.com “Form Follows Priority” Jordan Hoggard is an architect (principal for J. Jordan Hoggard Design in Denver, CO), artist, and creator of “The Mystereum Tarot”. Definitely a Renaissance man! I had the privilege to meet Jordan while taking a teleclass given by Tarot author/artist Robert M. Place. I was very excited [...]

A History of Egyptian Tarot Decks

Mark Filipas In 1781, the French author Court de Gébelin referred to the Tarot as a book preserving the pure wisdom of ancient Egypt. This is the first written suggestion that occult wisdom had been encoded in the cards – in spite of the fact that they had already been in use for over 300 [...]

Whither Directing Your Course?

Jean-Michel David If the ‘Whence come you?’ can be said to often be asked of tarot, its complementary question seems often overlooked. Painting upon a broad canvas the development of tarot, we find its genesis in the region that is now Northern Italy, amidst influences from neo-platonism and neo-aristotelean thought. During the 19th century, its [...]