100 Books Like Tarot for the Hard Work

Part memoir, part guidebook for the modern Witch, Amanda Yates Garcia’s Initiated is one of our all-time faves–the brave, bold, and vulnerable tale of how the author stepped into her calling. We love how this book is teeming with Amanda’s humanity.

Her honesty about mistakes and triumphs led us through an emotional journey that never claims to have all the answers. She is determined to seek out the truth in witchcraft and remind us that the personal is political AND magical. We both developed major crushes on Amanda while reading Initiated.

In this book, Christopher Marmalejo entranced us with a singular take on investigating tarot cards through a queer and Indigenous lens. Exploring cartomancy as a mirror to understand lived experience, Christopher brings to light a practice that is unafraid to confront, listen, critique, and unveil.

We love how Christopher’s personality shines through this thoroughly academic yet approachable description of tarot cards and their uses. Reading it filled us with hope for a future of liberation and ideas of how we can make that happen.

If anyone ever tries to tell you that studying astrology is brainless, send them a copy of this book. We were amazed and astonished by the research and intellect that Alice infused in this work, tackling Euro-centrist history and forcing it open to reveal a praxis for recontextualizing the stars.

This is astrology beyond horoscopes, beyond personality types. We were electrified to read Alice’s view that astrology is a language we can use to communicate and that history amounts to collective memory. This book blew our minds.

We believe that words are spells and that writing down our thoughts, feelings, and ideas is a form of doing Magic. So we were thrilled to discover this book, co-edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White, a book that validates and reifies the magic of poetry.

This book opens a portal to discuss the ritual of writing, the radical imagination required for social justice, the alchemy of collaboration, and a slow revolution. We’re enamored with the collaborative nature of the book and how it illustrates that writing and poetry are not just kept for times of solitude but can be ritualized into a community-building praxis to change the world.

When this book was published in 1979, mythologist Joseph Campbell was not yet a media celebrity—just a noted scholar. But poets and artists had already begun to engage with his exploration of the “hero’s journey.” As a student of archetypal psychology, I was initially excited to discover that Campbell had written about the Tarot.

I say “initially” because I was soon put off by the fact that Campbell had placed the origin of Tarot around 1350—a hundred years too early. But since then, I’ve become enthusiastic about his commentary, which draws associations between Tarot and Dante Alighieri’s 1332 epic poem, the Divina Commedia. Although 1450 (the probable timeframe of the earliest Tarot) was a transitional space between the periods designated as the “Middle Ages” and “Renaissance,” my research and experience suggest that Tarot is most closely tied to a medieval worldview and best understood in that context.

The other… show more.

As a poet, I love the Poet Tarot, for which Two Sylvias Press matched Major Arcana and Court Cards with deceased British and American poets. The Guidebook offers a mini history lesson about each poet’s strengths and weaknesses, including psychological wellbeing, journey to publication, and sources of inspiration. Each chapter ends with suggested actions: “Remember and honor the inspirational women in your life,” (Gwendolyn Brooks as the Queen of Muses / Cups) and prompts: “Is there a project I’ve been afraid to undertake—why?” (ee cummings as The Fool). Taken collectively, the prompts provide a roadmap for a rich self-reflective inventory and the chance to write new poems based on the themes of each poet’s work. I love to use the exercises in the poetry workshops I teach.

I like many of Rachel Pollack's books, but this was one of the first tarot books I read. This kind of book is perfect for me to learn something. It reads very easily, more like a course than a book with pages full of text. The layout is light and each page is richly illustrated with colour photos including tarot cards from all over the world, so you can compare and get a good idea of ​​the character of each card.

All facets of tarot, which you can delve into later, are discussed: origin, history & the different traditions, symbols & colours, the Tree of Life & the Hebrew letters, numbers & the paths of the Sefiroth, Kabbalah & astrology, the journey of the fool through the Major Arcana, different readings & card spreads, different ways to use the tarot cards: to meditate, to work with dreams, games, storytelling and… show more.

This is a Tarot how-to book with a difference: It organizes the cards by theme, making it way easier to understand and remember their meanings compared to the usual memorize-them-one-at-a-time approach. The book is really a Tarot course in 22 lessons (it’s no coincidence that there are 22 Major Arcana cards in a Tarot deck!). Tarot 101 is an excellent resource for demystifying the Tarot and breaking it down into manageable chunks that make sense and that you can remember and use for the long term.

As a designer of systems, I find this book intriguing because the author has created his own rather idiosyncratic system of sorcery. (The emphasis being on “sorcery,” written from a practicing sorcerer’s point of view.)  In addition to outlining his theories on rules of magic and providing new perspectives on magical tools, Emerson provides a section of tarot spells with rhyming incantations, unusual layouts, and diverse aims, including concealing a secret, conjuring an omen, seeing from afar, sequestering beyond time, drawing wayward souls, brewing a tempest, and more.

The spell layouts also have fanciful titles like “The Knight’s Vigil,” “The Queen’s Mirror,” “The Prison of Shadows,” and “The Shroud of Unseeing.” One warning, though: this book is not for people who are easily offended by any hint of manipulative magic.

The famed filmmaker and esotericist, Alejandro Jodorowsky, has poured decades of profound spiritual and divinatory understanding into this text to create one of the most significant systems for using the cards as a divinatory tool. Based on the Tarot d’Marseilles - arguably the stylistic form that constitutes the tarot’s most fundamental iconography - the text includes a comprehensive training system that can be used to provide a foundation for professional divinatory work.