The feminist outlook of the author was also evident, and it added a certain je ne sais quoi to the writing. There’s an old Irish New Year’s custom that requires you to melt metal and then pour it into cold water. I thought this description of The Moon was brilliant: “The Moon rules our dreams, and that’s a good way to think about this card. I understand that we’re dealing with 50 plus cards and they can’t all receive extremely detailed treatment, otherwise we’d get the George R. If you’re still confused, you can always talk to a friend about the cards you drew or swap readings with each other.

Just because we may have different takes on a card doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from your interpretations, and I hope you can learn something from mine. Indeed, the indelible experience of taking in art marries perfectly with tarot’s wordless and often inexpressible deeper meaning. Since the book’s geared towards creatives, it breaks down the cards in ways that makes sense to creatives. I liked Crispin’s description of Temperance: “Temperance is an easily misunderstood card, as it has become associated mostly with abstention. There can be no "elevation of the soul" if the beginners can't understand the first thing about reading tarot cards.I'm the author of A Guide to Tarot Card Reading, A Guide to Tarot Card Meanings, and eight other Tarot books. And if you establish a meaning for one aspect of the card—say, that Sword refers to air, and air refers to thought and communication—then it makes sense that a story would arise rather naturally from a progression. Swords is an easy way to understand this, because its progression shows that as the numbers go higher, the darkness of the cards increase. So if we have been feeling lonely lately, wondering if we will ever see an end to our dry spell and if we’ll ever fall in love again, we might see a man’s silhouette in that wax.

I usually hate half stars (and am glad Goodreads doesn't seem to have them) but I would give this one 2. I remember early on—maybe 8th grade—I wanted to make a deck of playing cards with my own suit designs. Nowadays, Crispin lives in New York when she’s not traveling the globe, and also runs the literary magazine Spoila. I found this section of the book the weakest; though there are illustrations for each card in the card review, there aren’t any in this section.The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life is an excellent tarot card reading manual for beginners to the more experienced card reader. You then flesh out that skeleton with your own circumstances, you populate it with the people in your life, and, using the intuitive cues provided by the cards’ images, you fit your story onto the story in the cards.

Greatest detail centers on unique spreads she created as ways of helping her identify a direction for her creative project. And so the mixing of those symbols, adding an element to a number, to a Greek god, to an astrological marker, would create more complex meanings. But the majors and Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrated minors aren’t the only sources of inspiration for the visual arts. A hip, accessible, and practical guide for artists and creative people looking to tarot for guidance and inspiration. If we’re supposed to interpret the images and use our intuition to guide us, all on our own, then why does the Ten of Swords have the same meaning from deck to deck?Her first book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exile, Expats and Ex-Countries is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.