Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies, professor, diviner, writer, trans, nonbinary
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29% complete! Calliope has read 19 of 65 books.
Grimorium Verum is one of the most notorious handbooks of black magic -- one of the few that deals openly …
Sturgeon's last book. A very deliberately sexual take on a new coming of Christ into the world, and what it would look like as people from a variety of backgrounds encounter the embodiment of godhead and those eho have encountered it.
CW: sexual assault, people having sex with traditional total lack of education
@aversatrix this is one reason why I stopped using Goodreads back in the day lol. I hated conflating that I was reading with what I owned, since they're sometimes big ass collections
@arnemancy You'll probably like David Vine's full intro and translation (Place uses Vine's work in this book). I got it direct, but I think a few sites are selling it now. Here's the direct link if you want: tarot-history.com/boutique/
A very good book with some small moments that made me twitch.
So it's a tarot book that doesn't sit down and run through all 78 cards, telling you the meanings. I wish we had more books like this. This particular book is inventive and playful, drawing both on esoteric traditions of tarot and the simple fact that we're looking at playing cards here.
At its core the book is about exploring different means we can draw information and wisdom from tarot, founded on the idea that the tarot is "the instrument of our wisdom."
There's a little more gender essentialism than I expected from Rachel Pollack, but from what I understand, this is a revision of a book first published in 2002.
There's also an understandable but unfortunate -- for me, probably not for you -- tendency to use Pollack's deck she made, and I don't like it …
A very good book with some small moments that made me twitch.
So it's a tarot book that doesn't sit down and run through all 78 cards, telling you the meanings. I wish we had more books like this. This particular book is inventive and playful, drawing both on esoteric traditions of tarot and the simple fact that we're looking at playing cards here.
At its core the book is about exploring different means we can draw information and wisdom from tarot, founded on the idea that the tarot is "the instrument of our wisdom."
There's a little more gender essentialism than I expected from Rachel Pollack, but from what I understand, this is a revision of a book first published in 2002.
There's also an understandable but unfortunate -- for me, probably not for you -- tendency to use Pollack's deck she made, and I don't like it very much. I'm sure the black and white reproductions aren't doing the deck any favors, though.
She draws on Kabbalah including actual Kabbalah, like, you know, midrashes; she also draws on Egyptian myth, astrophysics, and Hindu practice. The latter is perhaps a little too poppy, but still better than many.
The astrophysics bit is also better than you'll see in nearly every other work on occult topics.
A nice expanded lwb essentially. The book goes through both de Gebelin's and de Melletcs lives and essays, briefly, before turning to describing the cards. Place used Aluette cards for inspiration when de Mellet didn't describe their meanings, as he concluded that's where de Mellet got his pip meanings in the first place.
It ends with a nice, succinct description of how to use de Mellet's divination method, including notes on how to deal with the inconsistencies.
If you get the deck -- and it's lovely -- definitely get the book as well.
