It’s official! Today is publication day for Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers, my first tarot book. (It’s actually my second book. My first was the 2011 food memoir, A Spoonful of Promises: Stories and Recipes from a Well-Tempered Table.)
It’s only been 22 months or so since I emailed the brilliant Barbara Moore, whom I knew only from her impossibly stylish Steampunk Tarot. I introduced myself and asked if Llewellyn might be interested in a nerdy sort of book about tarot correspondences, the hidden codes embedded in every card and threaded into all modern tarot imagery. To my delight, she was willing to give it a shot.
But it’s been over 21 years since I first made up my mind to buy a tarot deck. I still have the diary entries! embarrassingly earnest and self-serious as they are. I was a different person then, after all, sleepwalking through the life I thought I was supposed to live. A month later I would meet my husband - a wild story of its own - and all of that, the givens and norms of life, would change forever.
I still remember the doubt, the nerves, indeed the shame of crossing over into a world of intangibles. Here there was no transcript, no annual projected revenue, no track record, no c.v. Exactly no one would applaud me for walking up to my unconscious and asking for an interview. But like so many of you, I felt beyond a doubt that there was something missing in my life. There was something more, and if I didn’t find it or at least start looking, I was going to die by tiny increments for, oh, 50 or 60 years.
I didn’t know that tarot was going to do more than restore me to myself - it was going to open a door for me into worlds of art, philosophy, and magic. It would cause me to revisit my education in Classics, to learn to address the old gods in ancient Greek, and to fumble my way through the Hebrew alphabet. It would mean that all of it - stars, myths, plants and animals, numbers, letters, music, scent - would require redefinition into a vast and ubiquitous field of meaning.
All these years in, my tarot journey has still only just begun. But I hope that with this book, I can help you take a few more steps on yours.
Here’s where to find your copy of Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers.