100 Books Like Tarot for Troubled Times

This was the first book that ever taught people not only how to read for themselves, but also how to use the cards to attain personal insight. It will teach you how to develop a deep relationship with the cards, and it shows you how to use the cards for greater self-knowledge. Every book on this subject since has Mary K. Greer to thank. When I first came across it, it changed the way I read forever. And it gave me new tools to use the cards for my own.

This is a very recent book that I love for its deceptive simplicity. The explanations are easy, the language is conversational, and each card is described in contemporary terms so that you’ll recognize yourself or people you know on every page. And for each card, there are a series of questions and journal prompts that on the surface seem simple, but that takes you on a deep inner journey. The subtitle of this book is “Know the cards to know yourself” and it’s a promise this book will help you keep.  

There is no personal growth or spiritual development without encountering and coming to terms with one’s shadow. It can be a frightening prospect, and it’s not a very comfortable process, but there is no getting around it. That’s why this book is important. When you confront your shadow, it helps to have a guide who has been there and done it. Steel has done the work and knows how to help you do it too. I am very grateful for this book—it helped me face inner conflicts and accept things about myself I always thought were unacceptable. It’s not an easy practice, but the results are profound. 

Jessica Dore’s book is a revelation.

Coming from a psychological view of the cards, Dore incorporates ideas from different psychological schools of thought such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as well as Greek myth, Arthurian legend, folklore, fairy tales, and more.

Dore offers a unique, modern, and very personal approach to the cards and their meanings. A fascinating example for anyone building their own tarot practice and figuring out what tarot means to them on a personal and individual level.

When I was first learning to read Tarot, one of my big challenges was understanding how the cards worked together.

I eventually came up with my own method. But if I’d had this book when I was starting out, I would have figured things out much more quickly. 

Diane Wing goes into all the basics of Tarot reading, including some of the more metaphysical elements. But this book’s strength is the extensive Tarot combinations section.

If understanding how the cards fit together is something you’re struggling with, this is your book.

Poetry is supposed to be difficult, right? The erudite poets like Milton, Shakespeare, Yeats, and Dickinson blend insight, psychology, philosophy, wisdom, meter, and magic sauce into a puzzle to suss out. Eliot is like that most of the time, but not in this book, where he is so direct, plain and simple, amazed and amazing, that I am not once tempted to apply critical theory.

If there is a possibility of divine inspiration, this has always felt like Exhibit 1 to me. Every time I think I might have to figure out what he’s saying, he says, “Don’t bother,” by taking me into a picture that is so concrete and full of the everyday that it paradoxically shines the divine out at me. This book can be opened anywhere, started anywhere, and it will bring me comfort and joy. 

The Tarot is littered with symbols and occult references. You do not have to go deep into esoteric corresponds if you do not want to, but if you do I recommend Tarot Deciphered. This book gets down and dirty into all the symbology of the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot, the Thoth Tarot, and other decks which share its symbols. This book is probably not for beginners unless of course, you want to dive deep into Tarot and occult symbology fast. 

Research scientist Robert O’Neill was the first to publish a rigorous, in-depth analysis of Tarot as a symbol system. However, his 1986 book was almost unknown to the Tarot community until he was invited to speak at the first International Tarot Symposium in 1992. Like everyone else who met him there, I was impressed by his scholarly knowledge and original ideas. O’Neill told us about his interest in Tarot, which began as soon as he saw the cards in the 1950s—around the same time a cadre of artists and poets on the West Coast started using Tarot in their creative work. 

As a scientist, O’Neill recognized that the symbolic dimensions of Tarot deserve serious study, so he spent years researching various topics and writing an almost 400-page account of his findings and interpretations. This work is a challenge to read—with very small type, no illustrations, and many footnotes! But every… show more.

This is probably the least-known and most surprising book ever written about Tarot. And yes, the author was pop culture icon Timothy Leary—Harvard psychologist turned apostle of psychedelic experimentation. I discovered this book more than a decade after it was published in 1979 and was amazed to realize it had come out just a year after Volume One of Kaplan’s meticulous Encyclopedia of Tarot. It’s impossible to imagine two more different authors or two more different books!  

It’s equally impossible to explain what Leary’s 288-page, large-format book is ”about” since it was deliberately composed as a mix of ideas, themes, and graphic illustrations that would challenge our normal expectations of intellectual order. However, you can get a flavor of Leary’s approach from this chapter title:  “Tower portrays your self-actualized brain-control-reality-director neuro-technology.”

Opening this book, I revisit a time when the “counter-culture” movement surfaced wildly exploratory questions, and Tarot was being… show more.

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.