This review originally appeared at Green Man Review.
McFarland & Company has been sending us a lot of intriguing non-fiction books lately. This one caught my eye when it arrived in the mail room. I’ve been using Tarot and other meditation decks for divination purposes for roughly thirty years and have just this year had my first opportunity to show another person how to use them. So I was more than ready to brush up on my Tarot knowledge with this volume!
Emily Auger is an art historian who is currently teaching at Lakehead University in beautiful Thunder Bay, Ontario — a town where amethyst is so plentiful that people use chunks of it as doorstops. She approaches the cards primarily as forms of popular art, which is understandable since they are after all mass-produced commodities, typically illustrated by people who don’t have “serious” art credentials. It’s evident from both her preface and her approach in general that while Auger does not use the cards for divination or personal development, she finds them fascinating as cultural artifacts and has spent considerable time and money collecting and reviewing different decks.
Exclusive of various appendices (more on these below) Tarot and Other Meditation Decks is less than 150 pages long, fairly typical of a scholarly monograph. However, given the brevity of the book coupled with its trade paper format, a suggested retail price of $49.95 is pretty steep. And it’s not available discounted on Amazon, either!
Following a rather lengthy Introduction, Auger organized her narrative into three chapters titled “Tarot and Visual Art,” “Tarot and Literature,” and “Tarot as Tarot.” While these titles adequately represent the contents of their associated chapters, they don’t provide the reader with any guidance with regard to her development of the themes suggested by the book’s subtitle “History, Theory, Aesthetics, Typology.” As it turns out, most of the historical material is to be found in the aforesaid Introduction. The theory and aesthetics aspects appear passim throughout the narrative in the first two chapters.
Auger presents her typology, by far her most original contribution to Tarot lore, in the third chapter. In a way this placement is unfortunate, since she makes use of her shorthand labeling of the various decks in the illustrated examples that appear throughout the first two chapters, leaving me to write notes to myself saying, ‘Where does she explain this typology?’ The full explanation starts on page 95 and if you are a true Tarot aficionado, you may well find this section worthy of the price of the book.
As you might expect in a book about Tarot, this one is indeed well-stocked with illustrations. All of these are sample cards from some of the Tarot and other divination decks Auger discusses in her narrative. Some of these are laid out on pages within the book’s narrative sections. A larger group appears in block layout format in one of the appendices. These illustrations are of a reasonably decent size and are all quite meticulously captioned with information about the source deck as well as the deck’s place in Auger’s typology. To be honest, my only quibble with these illustrations is that they are all in grayscale. Yet virtually all the source decks are printed in color and in fact their color palettes are generally an important aspect of their aesthetics, as well as their ostensible divinatory properties. Most of us do associate certain colors with certain meanings, after all! So showing the cards in grayscale really doesn’t do them justice.
I would venture to say that, after the typology, the appendices to Tarot and Other Meditation Decks are its strongest selling point. I’ve already mentioned the block layout of the sample Tarot cards — that’s twenty pages at four cards per page, by the way. The book also includes endnotes, an index, a rather interesting reference bibliography and, most useful of all to me, lists of the Tarot and other meditation decks discussed in the book. A few of those decks appear sufficiently interesting that I want to take a closer look at them!
Overall, I found this a disappointing read. I have a PhD, regularly review books and articles written by other academics, and teach college-level courses, so it’s not that I don’t understand or appreciate scholarly writing. It’s just that Auger’s style is about as impenetrable as any I’ve seen since I stopped dabbling in post-structuralism a few years ago. Here’s an example from the end of the “Tarot and Literature” chapter:
All of these decks, like contemporary Tarot in general, place a heteropian emphasis on meditative, transformational, and enlightenment experiences, but their overt connection to literary sources dramatically enlists the dynamic possibilities of the relationship between the visual and the literary. The presence of specific literary references or strong allusions to narratives known through literature in Tarot images may lend particular contextualizations and content sought by the querent-reader using such decks.
After I was through reviewing Tarot and Other Meditation Decks, I had planned to share this book with my friend who is just learning to use Tarot, but on second thought, I don’t believe I will. He would find it terribly boring and might decide not to continue his studies of Tarot for that reason. That would be a shame!
(McFarland & Company, 2004)
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