A Critical Introduction to Tarot
Examining the Nature of a Belief in Tarot
Simon Kenny
Iff Books 2023
Pb, 248pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781803413921
The Tarot of AE Waite and P Colman Smith
Johannes Fiebig (ed)
Taschen 2023
Hb, 444pp, £100, ISBN 9783836586429
Necronomicon Tarot
Titan Books 2023
78 cards plus guide, £24.99, ISBN 9781803367217
The most sceptical fortean may take an interest in esoterica, if only in why people believe in it. Here are three very different tarot-related offerings.
Simon Kenny’s book isn’t the “how to” guide that the title suggests. Rather than the various meanings of the suits and cards he poses more fundamental questions. Does tarot work? If it does, how? What are its uses? The book is illustrated throughout with the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) tarot deck, of which more later.
The introduction gets the history and a typical card spread out of the way early on, before moving on to something far more interesting; the adoption of tarot by feminists and the LGBTQAI+ community has led to the creation of new decks which reform or reject the heteronormative imagery of traditional cards and the binary nature of much tarot imagery, the Emperor and Empress, for example, or The Lovers. Kenny traces this binary back to Pythagoras and a human tendency to categorise everything by opposites: male/female, dark/light, good/evil.
Subsequent chapters examine the connection tarot has with various magical systems including the Kabbalah, Jung’s mysticism, Satanism, Witchcraft and Freemasonry. There are many digressions, all for good reason, proposing frameworks for using tarot in magical practice and personal reflection.
Multiple perspectives on how the cards work don’t help to answer how and why the cards work, however. More practically, the book needs a decent index. It does provide a refreshingly innovative perspective on tarot and would be of
