Tarot Revelations Paperback – January 1, 1987

I second the other reviewers - it's a magnificent, advanced-level book but the false advertising on the cover left a bad taste in my mouth. Still, Richard Roberts is worth reading in his own right (if you're into Jungian Tarot also check out his incredible "The Original Tarot & You", feat. the Jungian spread and countless reading transcripts, incl. one for Joseph Campbell himself!). Campbell's essay (Marseilles-based) is delightful and quick. The rest gets Very Heavy Very Fast, but if you're into the more academic side of Tarot, Numerological & Alchemical contexts, etc. - you won't be disappointed. (Keep in mind it's not really a how-to book; plenty of those around, though.)

Overrated. I don't really care for R.Roberts approach on archetypes.

WoW, it is an excellent book. I would recomened, it has so much detail and shared knowladge, it was absolutly wonderful, a great book to own. I love it

Just started to read it when I got it.It's an essential book for all tarot readers and students of that art!

For years, I ignored the Tarot because I thought it was a frivolous card game and that material written about it was cultish at worst and childish at best. It did not help that Tarot cards on the market were manufactured by American Games. I became interested in the Tarot cards because Bill Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, and as Moyers had never struck me as a kook, I thought perhaps Campbell was worth getting to know. Getting to know Campbell led me to TAROT REVELATIONS.Much of my formal education concerns the social sciences including ethnography and the study of religion, myths, belief systems, etc. As a professional social scientist in a job that deals with ethnic issues, I have struggled to operationally define and measure ethnicity, and view cultural elements including myths as the basis of belief systems around which various ethnic groups organize their societies. I have arrived at the conclusion that most of the smaller systems are doomed, but fortunately, anthropologists and others have recorded enough material that we may still study the myths of our ancestors. Joseph Campbell points the way.Mark Twain is purported to have said, don't let school get in the way of your education. Like Twain, Campbell--a highly educated man and a college professor--was able to break out of the mold of formal education and develop a fresh viewpoint concerning the world and what makes it tick. In other words, he was able to get past the mental censorship of academe.In TAROT REVELATIONS, Campbell takes a leaf from Sir James Frazier's book 'The Golden Bough' and suggests a core set of concepts underlie all belief systems. He suggests Jungian psychologists have their own terms for these mythical elements which Jung recognized ages ago. As an empirical test of his idea that mythical elements have universal meanings, he compares the Tarot cards of the Major Arcana with the works of Dante and notes their similarities. He also demonstates how the cards can be used to illustrate the "ideal life, lived virtuously according to the knightly codes of the Middle Ages."In the remainder of the book, Richard Roberts, a student of Campbell, shows how the cards reflect the various mythological belief systems of historical peoples in the ancient world--Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Keltoi, Iberians, etc. Roberts uses a deck designed about 100 years ago by A.E.Waite, a member of a group interested in arcane matters that included many illustrious members including W.B.Yeats. Waite did not invent the cards, he merely redesigned them using historical sources such as Tarot decks from the Middle Ages. Waite hired Pamela Coleman, an artist and fellow New Dawn member to illustrate the cards. Coleman, a Jamaican by birth with occult interests of her own was later "discovered" by Afred Stigliz who arranged for a showing of her works in New York City.Roberts compares the elements in the Tarot deck with various myth based and arcane systems including alchemy, astrology, and Hermetic teaching. The Tarot deck is absolutely loaded with connections to all these systems. One could argue that some very educated folks constructed this deck, but the elements of the Tarot cards are recorded back to the mid-1300s thanks to Church Inquisitors who took an interest in the Cathars. Folks in the 1300s did not have had the expertise required to "construct" the cards from scratch because the cards reflect the heavens (arrangement of constellations, solstices, equinoxes, etc.) in about 2000 B.C.E. No one in the 1300s understood astronomy well enough to deduce how the heavens might have looked 3500 years earlier and if s/he did they sure kept it hidden--as in occult knowledge. Since Europeans in the 1300s were struggling with establishing the dates for the moveable feasts (they could not figure out when Easter would come 10 years hence) it strikes me that if anyone could have provided an answer they would have provided an answer--depending on how they felt about the church.Information about the heavens between 4,000 and 2,000 B.C.E. can be found in the ruins of the ancient world--Stonehenge, the Azetec temples, the Pyramids so there is a great deal of evidence that the ancients understood their moment in time. Events moved too slowly for them to understand that 4,000 years after they lived the spring equinox would not fall in the sign of Taurus. However, Roberts suggests the ancient Persians figured out many things about the heavens and incorporated this knowledge into their belief systems. After all, those Magi who found Christ were onto something. Much of the knowledge of ancient Persia was locked away in Constantinople to be discovered years later by prying minds.So, the Tarot cards are very old because the knowledge in them is very old. The Tarot cards represent the distilled knowledge of ancient peoples including the Persians who had a Mithraic code that still manifests itself in Zoroastrianism today (number one religion on Islam's hit list in Iran). Archeologists have long argued diffusion versus spontaneous theories regarding the spread of cultural elements including creation tales. Roberts does not take sides, but suggests the information in the cards could support either view point. Whether the information captured in the Tarot cards was discovered by many people in different places at different times or in one place and later spread across the world does not matter. The truth is, humans have been stuggling with the meaning of life for a long time, and while no one has the final answer the Tarot cards are a leading competitor.

Since no Table of Contents is provided, I provide it herein:p. 3: Part I-Exoteric Tarot: Symbolism of the Marseille Deck by J. Campbellp. 27: Colin Wilson's Intro to Part IIp. 39: Part II Richard Roberts' Esoteric Tarot: Symbolism of the Waite/Rider Deck:p. 41: Prefacep. 43: I. The Great Mythp. 49: II. The Infinite Ladderp. 59: III. The Magic Nine Arrangementp. 101: IV. Alchemical Descentp. 133: V. The Alchemical Ascentp. 167: VI. Patterns in the Magic Ninep. 193: VII. The Hermetic Worldp. 229: VIII. The Book of the Deadp. 259: IX. The Caduceus and Astrologyp. 286: List of Footnotes [actually endnotes w/o explanatory material & mostly Jung, Cirlot, & Case as well as Waite, Campbell, Frazer, & a few others)p. 295: Color Plates--too small but drawings are interspersed in text to some degreeThus Campbell & Wilson's portions are quite small; it's really a Roberts book (Wilson only introduces Roberts' work--was Campbell's an afterthought?). Despite brevity, Campbell makes acute observations e.g. pp. 23-4: "The 4 signs of Ezekiel's vision...in the 3rd & 4th millenniums BC, however, were read as zodiacal references to the 4 equinoxes & solstices: Taurus, the Bull, the Spring equinox; Leo the Lion, summer solstice; the Eagle (now Scorpio), the autumnal equinox; & Aquarius, the water-carrier, the winter solstice" & p. 25: "turn card 12, The Hanged Man, upside down & the legs will be seen to be in the same position as those of the dancing figure of The World. The implied idea is of each of us as an inverted reflection, clothed in the garments of temporality, of the noumenal or "Real."Roberts provides p. 293: "3 treatments given to the Major Arcana, numerical, alchemical, & astrological" for which p. 247: "Our task is rather like that of the restorer of a painting which lies beneath several layers of other pictures added over the years. One has to know how much to rub away--& where to stop!" But there's the rub! The amount depends on the level of abstraction (inverse of level of detail) one uses as context ~ a microscope with several lenses. What's seen differs by lens (~the 4 levels of interpretation, PARDES in Kabbalah). Roberts mostly uses 2--individual elements on a card & certain card layouts (arrangement), for each of his 3 "slide stains" [my terms] i.e. numerology. He did an exhaustive (& exhausting) survey of symbolic meanings to card elements, mostly reflecting his 3 "stains." But, stains sometimes mask important highlights & alternate stains may be better. He does introduce bits from Kabbalah, Hinduism, Gnosticism, & Hermeticism & heavily uses Jung ( Collected Works of C.G. Jung: 21 Volume Hardcover Set ). It's surprising that there are so few quotations from Waite--whose deck is being analyzed, esp. since Roberts attributes a multitude of meanings to Waite's deck not given in Waite's  THE PICTORIAL KEY TO THE TAROT: BEING FRAGMENTS OF A SECRET TRADITION UNDER THE VEIL OF DIVINATION --stating that Waite was being spiritually coy. He assumes Waite was fully conscious of his usage of symbols--not likely IMHO. This reminds me of a cartoon in which a critic analyzing a painting--strongly disagrees with a bystander. The expert states his credentials, & the bystander states that he's the artist! Attributions are risky. Some correspondences seem far-fetched to me; he uses Jung but also ignores him (e.g. p. 222: he considers the Tarot a western Book of the Dead but overlooks Jung's dark sea voyage & p. 109: the Ox-herding pictures  Buddhism and Jungian Psychology  & Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology) ). He also states p. 280: "It would be naïve to assume that these are haphazard relations" which reminds me of the game of finding 2 persons w/same B'day in a small group--though non-intuitive, it almost always occurs. Thus, p. 209: his criticism of science as "materialistic" reflects his ignorance of statistics & set theory such that his correspondences frequently seem forced. His axe to grind makes him ungrounded. Many symbols are synchronistic/unconscious. Further, per Jung, symbols are amorphous--need personal interpretation--once they are given specific meanings they become signs & lose their power. Roberts, I think, preserves their power through Jungian amplification--what the symbols mean to him. Per Jung, a dog may not be man's best friend if the man was mauled by one when young--his dream image of a dog differs. Thus, Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols can mislead. Personal is not archetypal.Antithetically, he misses many (to me) obvious correspondences: p. 160: "In alchemy all opposites contain an element of the other" but ignores the Yin/Yang symbol with a black dot in the white half & vice versa; his extrapolation of lines to form a mandorla (almond shape) could be an ellipse--planetary orbits; p. 153: doesn't see a parallel of the Fool to Sufis  ] despite the many Moslem alchemists; argues for Persian influences but ignores the Chinese  The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life  to which Jung wrote a pithy introduction; p. 214: describes horns as symbols of cycles--but ignores their fecundity/earthiness (Bull & goat); & doesn't see that Waite vs. the Marseille deck made card 15, the Devil's, chains removable by the man/woman (over their heads) due to the slack!On a theoretical level, Roberts creates two card layouts, Magic 9 (Ch. III & VI) & Caduceus (Ch. IX). They're interesting, but he implies they have an inherent value. There are many possible layouts; one could argue their symbolic value too. BTW, the Magic 9 (typical numerology) is called Modulo 9 in mathematics & is based on the decimal system. It doesn't work in other number systems (e.g. binary or hexadecimal). I agree with his helical approach to progress (though not original to him). If one arranged the cards to represent the growth cycle, the order might be considerably different. His omnipresence of Mercurius seems ~Mercury poisoning. Much of his analysis rests on relative symbols/levels vs. Jungian archetypal ones. Strangely, some of his referential arguments go back to 4000 BCE, yet he seems unfamiliar with ancient Hekhelot literature which became part of Kabbalah ( Kabbalah: New Perspectives ) & p. 93: the Kabbalistic Tree of Life which he describes incorrectly (see  The holy Kabbalah;: A study of the secret tradition in Israel as unfolded by sons of the doctrine for the benefit and consolation of the elect dispersed through the lands and ages of the greater exile ). Waite certainly was familiar with these.I do agree that p. 112: "The psyche has conferred value on the universe through its own evolution of consciousness." Thus, we create the meaning (e.g. in synchronistic events). I believe Roberts has done just that--more expressionistic than archetypal, not too well organized, highly Sensate (detailed & short on Intuitive--i.e. systems thinking,  Existential Psychology , & Jung as scientist (Jung's claim). This probably follows his prior Tarot and You. I did like his one fun pun, p. 236: "A labyrinth is a form of Recycling Center." Still, Roberts has provided a plethora of symbol interpretations & methods which can be valuable as a starting point for one's own amplifications & proved IMHO the alchemical nature of the Tarot. But, I would differentiate personal (conscious), archetypal (collective unconscious), & mixed (personal unconscious/subconscious) meaning. Unfortunately, lack of an index limits this book's usefulness as a reference resource. Since this is a theoretical or transcendental text, for a more concise & divinatory use of Tarot, see Eden Gray's "The Tarot Revealed: A Modern Guide to Reading the Tarot Cards" &  The Complete Guide to the Tarot .