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I like this deck a lot. And the book is often necessary because cards will depict gods and historical figures that aren't necessarily recognizable in sight.

But the book sometimes gets its mythology wrong, refers to worrying ideas like theosophical Akashic records, and tries to brute force a thesis about prisca theologica that's as unnecessary as it is culturally flattening. The book will often talk about how "all cultures" do something that's factually untrue, like believing in "the light."

It does feature a more systematic mapping of I Ching trigrams to tarot cards, which was interesting. And much of the myth and history is still good.

The introductory polemic is superb; i wish the author would read it and reconsider his support of people derided as "fascists" and "transphobes", and rejoin the actual left. But the amount of binary, cissexist thinking throughout the rest of the book suggest that he won't. Nevertheless, it has a few great ideas, and the writing is beautifully florid. Pirate it.

I think Farr may have been one of the people in the Golden Dawn who actually knew what she was talking about. This is a collection of her essays on magic and the like, though inexplicably the editor also included her "calendar," a booklet with a literary quotation for every day of the year. It's a waste of space. Aside from that, though, the essays are stimulating, interesting, and incisive, even if I don't agree with every bit of every one of them.

@arnemancy I agree, but I always felt like this book was sort of his attempt to convince "normie" psychologists to give it a chance. I may be giving him too much of the benefit of the doubt, but it seems like it doesn't deny there's "real magic" so much as it doesn't matter, the practitioner will see X positive changes if they do Y exercises.