The best books that revolutionized modern Tarot studies

When I started a serious study of Tarot, there were very few substantive books on the topic—and barely anything had been written about the history and scope of Tarot art. But, that changed dramatically when collector and publisher Stuart Kaplan began the Encyclopedia of Tarot; over the years between 1978 and 2005, the series grew to four volumes and 1,584 pages, documenting every Tarot deck he could find out about.

However, the first volume stands alone as a turning point in the modern history of Tarot. In almost 400 oversized pages, it discusses artifacts that range from 15th-century museum pieces to esoteric decks designed by 19th-century enthusiasts to hand-made creations of adventurous 20th-century artists. Most of the book’s pages display black-and-white photographs of cards from various decks, but there are also scholarly essays illuminating the many aspects of Tarot history and art.

Kaplan’s Encyclopedia encouraged me to take Tarot seriously, and did the same for a generation of influential writers and teachers. Whenever I take this book off the shelf (which is often!) I see a door opening into the most innovative period of Tarot scholarship.

This is probably the least-known and most surprising book ever written about Tarot. And yes, the author was pop culture icon Timothy Leary—Harvard psychologist turned apostle of psychedelic experimentation. I discovered this book more than a decade after it was published in 1979 and was amazed to realize it had come out just a year after Volume One of Kaplan’s meticulous Encyclopedia of Tarot. It’s impossible to imagine two more different authors or two more different books!  

It’s equally impossible to explain what Leary’s 288-page, large-format book is ”about” since it was deliberately composed as a mix of ideas, themes, and graphic illustrations that would challenge our normal expectations of intellectual order. However, you can get a flavor of Leary’s approach from this chapter title:  “Tower portrays your self-actualized brain-control-reality-director neuro-technology.”

Opening this book, I revisit a time when the “counter-culture” movement surfaced wildly exploratory questions, and Tarot was being reimagined as a guide to self-transformation. Leary’s idiosyncratic view of Tarot was (for the most part) an extension of his highly personal, deliberately provocative cultural critique, but the book expanded serious study of Tarot to new dimensions and new audiences.

When this book was published in 1979, mythologist Joseph Campbell was not yet a media celebrity—just a noted scholar. But poets and artists had already begun to engage with his exploration of the “hero’s journey.” As a student of archetypal psychology, I was initially excited to discover that Campbell had written about the Tarot.

I say “initially” because I was soon put off by the fact that Campbell had placed the origin of Tarot around 1350—a hundred years too early. But since then, I’ve become enthusiastic about his commentary, which draws associations between Tarot and Dante Alighieri’s 1332 epic poem, the Divina Commedia. Although 1450 (the probable timeframe of the earliest Tarot) was a transitional space between the periods designated as the “Middle Ages” and “Renaissance,” my research and experience suggest that Tarot is most closely tied to a medieval worldview and best understood in that context.

The other author of this book, Richard Roberts, also wrote Tarot and You—one of the earliest guides to what became known as “projective reading,” and one of the first Tarot books I ever owned! His adventurous collaboration with Campbell remains one of my favorite Tarot treasures.  

Research scientist Robert O’Neill was the first to publish a rigorous, in-depth analysis of Tarot as a symbol system. However, his 1986 book was almost unknown to the Tarot community until he was invited to speak at the first International Tarot Symposium in 1992. Like everyone else who met him there, I was impressed by his scholarly knowledge and original ideas. O’Neill told us about his interest in Tarot, which began as soon as he saw the cards in the 1950s—around the same time a cadre of artists and poets on the West Coast started using Tarot in their creative work. 

As a scientist, O’Neill recognized that the symbolic dimensions of Tarot deserve serious study, so he spent years researching various topics and writing an almost 400-page account of his findings and interpretations. This work is a challenge to read—with very small type, no illustrations, and many footnotes! But every time I open it, I’m impressed all over again by O’Neill’s commitment to illuminating a complex topic. This project was far off his professional path, with no obvious audience. Yet he persevered and produced a rigorous, ambitious, and thoughtful book. So I open it for inspiration, as well as information.

For this ambitious 1992 anthology, anthropologist Angeles Arrien and political scientist James Wanless collected twenty-two pathbreaking articles from an assortment of contributors that included two physicists, half a dozen practicing psychologists, a social worker, an ordained minister, and an assortment of writers and artists who had integrated Tarot into their professional and/or creative practices. I’m still fascinated by the different perspectives displayed in this collection and its surprisingly wide range of topics:  parapsychology, dance, relationship therapy, self-transformation, nature symbolism, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and much more.

Looking back at this book, it seems important in (at least) two ways. For one thing, it’s a snapshot of certain cultural/intellectual trends that were converging in the later 20th century: consciousness research, “new age” philosophies, and cross-cultural and alternative approaches to psychotherapy. For another, it represents the first serious attempt to treat Tarot as a subject matter, bringing together various disciplines and perspectives. 

Whenever I want a reminder of how Tarot connects with individual interests, I page through this collection. Every contributor has a different background, professional focus, and way of thinking about Tarot.