Desert Oracle

A few weeks ago, I attended the 20th anniversary of the Bay Area Tarot Symposium (BATS), sponsored by the amazing Thalassa and her minions, the Daughters of Divination. It is a two-day festival celebrating all things Tarot, and offers workshops and lectures by the crème de la crème of Tarot authors and deck creators. This [...]

Marcia McCord loves postcards. Antique postcards, from 1900 to 1909, inspired by her mother’s antique shop. So it was only natural that Marcia would create her first Tarot deck using antique picture postcards. And, I have to say, it is just amazing! Marcia carefully went through hundreds of picture postcards to select those that conveyed [...]

Where has the summer gone? I spent a fantastic month of vacation in sunny southern California, visiting my partner. We played tourist, sampled new restaurants, and went to the beach and the theatre. Nothing Tarot-related, although I did find a copy of the mass-market edition of Ciro Marchetti’s Tarot of Dreams. Of course I bought [...]

The longer I study and work with the Tarot, the more enamored I become with the Waite-Smith deck (RWS).  It is a great deck, with its careful synthesis of many systems of thought: alchemy, astrology, Qaballah, and numerology among others. The systematic research and overlay of these schools of thought by the Hermetic Order of [...]

I have returned from the San Francisco Bay Area Tarot Symposium (BATS), and it was excellent! According to its producer, Thalassa Queen of BATS, this year’s Symposium was the biggest and best yet. Ninety-odd people attended, including Solandia, owner of the Aeclectic Tarot Forum, all the way from Australia! Two full days of Tarot lectures [...]

I will be attending the Bay Area Tarot Symposium in San Francisco on October 3rd and 4th.  The theme is a celebration of the Waite-Smith Tarot, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. This will be my 3rd BATS, a wonderful weekend of Tarot produced by the amazing Thalassa and the Daughters of Divination. Presenters [...]