Books like Understanding the Tarot Court — picked by fans

Rachel Pollack’s classic guide to the tarot is a well-loved reference for me and for many.

While it’s a great next step to add depth of insight into the cards for the less experienced, it also continually serves up new insights to someone with more familiarity with the cards as well. She wrote it in the early eighties while living in Amsterdam and teaching tarot at the Kosmos Meditation Center.

Robert Place is my favorite Tarot historian and artist.

What I love about this book is that he writes it in such a way that his discussion of the history of the cards makes it easier to understand and remember their symbolism (always useful when you’re trying to read Tarot). It also has detailed descriptions of different spreads.

But to my mind, it’s just a fun, interesting read, and a book I’ve turned to many a time for research and reading purposes.

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.

Today’s Tarot decks tend to be clones of one of the three main “models”: The Rider-Waite-Smith, the Marseille, and the Thoth Deck.

Most books on reading Tarot reference the former, the Rider-Waite-Smith. But if you’re going to get serious about reading, it’s useful to have an understanding of the Marseille deck.

When I first picked up a Marseille deck, however, I put it down pretty quickly. No symbols on the Minor Arcana? How was I supposed to read the cards without rote memorization (which I hate)?

But the Marseille style is based on the original Tarot decks from Renaissance Italy, and they’re more typically used in Europe. This deck is important. So when I found this book, despite my misgivings about ever understanding the deck, I decided to give it a read. 

What a revelation. There actually are symbols on the Minor Arcana—they’re just subtle. Using numerology and an… show more.

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.

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.

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. 

This was the first tarot book that I read at age 17 from the Occult Bookstore in Chicago. I remember reading it cover to cover that first night. I understood it because of my childhood interest in fairy tales, mythology, Egyptian archeology, and my hobby (bordering an obsession) with foreign languages.

I attended Hebrew school as a child and studied Latin in high school. I was reading Ezra Pound's translations of the Confucian Analects at the time, but Crowley resonated more than Pound, for he used symbols in a practical manner. Aleister Crowley (1875- 1947) was a British occultist who was far ahead of his Victorian times. By any standards, this book is unique and perhaps a bit crazy. Still, I recommend it.

When I started a serious study of Tarot, there were very few substantive books on the topic—and barely anything had been written about the history and scope of Tarot art. But, that changed dramatically when collector and publisher Stuart Kaplan began the Encyclopedia of Tarot; over the years between 1978 and 2005, the series grew to four volumes and 1,584 pages, documenting every Tarot deck he could find out about.

However, the first volume stands alone as a turning point in the modern history of Tarot. In almost 400 oversized pages, it discusses artifacts that range from 15th-century museum pieces to esoteric decks designed by 19th-century enthusiasts to hand-made creations of adventurous 20th-century artists. Most of the book’s pages display black-and-white photographs of cards from various decks, but there are also scholarly essays illuminating the many aspects of Tarot history and art.

Kaplan’s Encyclopedia encouraged me to take Tarot seriously,… show more.

Writer, photographer, and journalist William Cook Haigwood selected his own photos to create Journeying the Sixties: A Counterculture Tarot. The book helped me understand the context for my early childhood when my parents had an apartment in the Haight. Haigwood practically offers a graduate-level course in the Sixties by examining the major players, the opposing forces, and the gifts and wages of the unbridled idealism and enthusiasm characteristic for the times (love, religion, art, music, politics, law enforcement, war, drugs, feminism, poetry, revolution, and more). The Eight of Cups chapter looks at People’s Park in Berkeley; Mick Jagger represents the King of Pentacles; the Death card discussion explores Martin Luther King, Jr., Kennedy, and Vietnam. Haigwood’s interpretations make tarot’s archetypal energies relevant to the lessons of an entire generation.