Tarot; Talisman or Taboo?: Reading the World As Symbol

A guide to connecting with our neglected unconscious through the Tarot cards. Getting in touch with the unconscious can be difficult and dangerous. Our ordinary approach to life, our trained and cultivated ways of thinking, are allergic to this swampy unknown. We lose our bearings, we panic. The Tarot cards are like ‘an idiots guide’ to the unconscious, an easy way to subvert the rational and allow the energies beneath to creep up through the floorboards. If you learn to shuffle and to deal the twenty-two major cards of this ancient museum of the unconscious, it will help you to familiarise yourself with a symbolic way of thinking and domesticate an underworld of otherwise meaningless shadows and shapes. This book gives an introduction to the Tarot, a history of its uses and abuses, a practical guide to its value as an underground map. It also provides a meditation on each one of the twenty-two major arcana which can help the reader to undertake their own spiritual journey. Mark Patrick Hederman is a philosopher and monk.