Tarot Tracings: Essays on Literature and Divination

Lovers, villains, murderers, magicians, spirit conjurors, and ghosts. You'd think this was a popular book of fiction blending tales of love, war, and magic. It isn't. It's a book written for the curious reader who might like to know what some of the greatest literary figures in Western literature are up to when they read the Tarot, or use divination as inspiration for their work. Italo Calvino, Robert Browning, W.B. Yeats, and Rachel Pollack gather in a concatenation of voices across the page; voices that the author traces as if using transparent paper, a good ink pen, and an occasional draw with the Tarot cards for the idea that baffles, or the philosophy that resists the gratuitous. The result is a sustained focus on the classic theme of love and war as seen through the prism of a discourse on poetics, magic, occultism, hermeticism, esotericism, shamanism, and divination.