Books on Tarot and other forms of Divination

[theduchess]

Just looking for recommendations on the best books on these. I am interested in Divination of any kind, but I have also been looking into palm reading.

[lioness]

Just looking for recommendations on the best books on these. I am interested in Divination of any kind, but I have also been looking into palm reading.

 
For tarot, Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom is a classic.

[Jenett]

For tarot, Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom is a classic.

Pollack's more recent Tarot Wisdom is also excellent. It's a sort of intimidatingly sized book, but she's really great at breaking things down, and it's very easy to skip over topics you're not interested in (or yet).

For a much more streamlined intro, I like Barbara Moore's Tarot for Beginners. I sometimes find her deck writing (booklets, etc.) doesn't work as well for me, but that particular book does a good job of looking at cards briefly, doing some comparisons between different decks, and giving a solid overview of different things to look at when doing readings.

[Mellee]

Just looking for recommendations on the best books on these. I am interested in Divination of any kind, but I have also been looking into palm reading.

 
Another Pollack fan here! Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom was the first tarot book I ever bought.

For tarot, I highly recommend starting with one book and thoroughly working through it, rather than browsing several books at a time. I did the latter initially and struggled, until I released what the problem was!

Jenett's rec of Barbara Moore's Tarot for Beginners is a good one. Otherwise, try Learning the Tarot by Joan Bunning or The Tarot Revealed by Paul Fenton-Smith.

I also like Mary K. Greer, but leave her stuff for later on.

I've only read one book on palmistry so far: The Art of Hand Reading by Lori Reid, so I'm no expert but I would recommend it! A diviner buddy of mine likes  Johnny Fincham's Palmistry: From Apprentice to Pro in 24 Hours and a few others by him.

[RecycledBenedict]

Just looking for recommendations on the best books on these. I am interested in Divination of any kind, but I have also been looking into palm reading.

 
On the divinatory end of tarot, I would suggest Papus' Divinatory Tarot, translated by Beryl Stockman. For a more philosophical approach to tarot, Oswald Wirth's Tarot of the magicians is very, very good - one of the best. That's all you need, unless you happen to be interested in the history of tarot, in which case you have to read several books by Michael Dummett, Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis.

[RecycledBenedict]

Just looking for recommendations on the best books on these. I am interested in Divination of any kind, but I have also been looking into palm reading.

 
Just an afterthought about my former post. Wirth's book is the type of book that will grow in depth, as you grow in depth youself, as life goes by. It is definitely not a beginners' book as such - but it is good! Papus' book, on the other hand, is extremely beginner-friendly.

[SunflowerP]

Otherwise, try Learning the Tarot by Joan Bunning....

 
Which reminds me that Joan Bunning also has a Learning the Tarot website, which I think quite well of.

I first learned to read tarot back in the '70s, initially from a little book I ordered from the school book club called Astrology and Other Occult Games (which, along with astrology and tarot, also had sections on numerology, palmistry, I Ching, and I think one other thing but I don't recall what), which is now out of print but can sometimes be found secondhand, and a bit later from Eden Gray's A Complete Guide to the Tarot.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend the former or not; that was a lot of years back, and I long since misplaced my copy - but it served my 12-year-old self well enough as a way to sample several currently-popular divination methods and determine that tarot suited me and the others in the book didn't really. It did, I think, pretty well for something that covered six (or maybe only five) methods in a mere 176 pages, but that's probably less useful now in the Internet age than it was back then.

Just about everyone who learned tarot from books in the '70s learned from at least one Eden Gray book - so in that sense her work is highly recommendable. But it's no longer the '70s; I see from the Amazon reviews of the one I linked that a lot of people find it much more rudimentary/basic than they've come to expect from books on tarot. That makes sense to me; tarot as a field has grown and expanded, and many folks have taken what they learned (perhaps from Gray!) and built on it.

Sunflower