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.