Tarot Experience

by Sasha Graham (Editor)

A labor of love ten years in the making, Tarot Experience is the second volume in Lo Scarabeo's authoritative compilation of tarot knowledge. While the first volume, Tarot Fundamentals, focused more on general principles and basic knowledge, this book is more hands-on and personal, full of practical suggestions, spread guides, and specific reading techniques. This illustrated, full-color volume includes contributions from a wide range of tarot experts, including Sasha Graham, Barbara Moore, Mark McElroy, Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Giordano Berti, and Riccardo Minetti. Tarot is a living tradition, forever evolving and growing. This resource book shows that tarot is always reinventing itself while never forgetting its origins.

Genres: Tarot, Divination

640 pages, Hardcover

Published February 8, 2017

Reviews

[Darius Rips · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tarot Experience is the second in a series intended to be the only tarot books you will ever need. The first book, Tarot Fundamentals, went through the deck card by card, and provided detailed meanings for each. Now, in Tarot Experience, it is time to put the cards to work. So the longest section of the book is devoted to spreads, and discussions on how to read the cards in the context of the rest of the spread. Certainly that is important, but the discussion here gets repetitive and exhausting. Later, there is a section on interpretations of the cards again, but this time going over how the meaning of a card can change, depending on the type of question asked. So the queen of cups might mean one thing in a relationship reading, but quite something else in a reading about work or money. The point is valid and helpful, but the interpretations provided seem to directly contradict each other at times, and this section therefore makes reading harder instead of easier. There is, however, some valuable information in this book. The section on the ethics of reading for others goes into how to define your comfort level with certain kinds of questions. Personally, I don't want to answer a question like how does she feel about me, because she isn't there. I feel that the cards are for the person whose reading it is, although starting with a third party question like that can result in a reading that has value for the querent. But the book does a good job of raising these kinds of issues but then giving each reader the space to find their own comfort levels. There also two excellent articles in the back of the book. As with volume one, this section exists because the publisher exceeded the Kickstarter goal that made the book possible. One article talks about the prejudices against tarot one may encounter, and how to decide who to tell about your involvement in tarot and when. The other article I really enjoyed was by Robert Place, and he describes how he received visions for some of the cards in the decks he has created. Based on this sample, Place is an excellent writer, with a gift for describing esoteric material in a way that really speaks to a reader whose experiences have been more mundane.

I mentioned that Tarot Experience, like the first volume, was funded with a Kickstarter campaign. This means that the book had to be ready to go to donors at a fixed deadline, no matter what. As was the case with the first volume, this means that there are signs that the book was edited in haste. But where Tarot Fundamentals had an entire section that could have used a rewrite, (see my review of that volume), here it just means that there is the occasional typo or awkward sentence.

Tarot Experience also contains a lot of techniques and exercises for working solo with tarot. I'm sure there is a lot of good material here, but this is just not something I do much with myself. As with Tarot Fundamentals, this book is lavishly illustrated. These books are published by La Scarabeo, so all of the decks featured here are theirs. This volume had a better score for me in this respect than the first one. Both the Harmonious Tarot and Tarot Mucha are decks I have had me eye on. The Universal Wirth Tarot was new to me, and it is a strange deck, but I find it appealing. The Angel Tarot, Golden Klimt and Thelema decks are ones that simply don't speak to me. The only deck featured in this volume that I actively dislike is the Happy Tarot, and it was featured too prominently for my tastes. La Scarabeo has a similar hit and miss ratio to market leader US Games Systems, so that is forgivable. But La Scarabeo is also know for their quality editions of historical decks, so I wish they would have included some of these.

Over all, I found value here, and I would think others who work more with tarot journals and meditations would get even more value from this book. There was certainly enough good stuff here to assure that I will continue on to the last volume, Tarot Compendium. More on that one later.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book more than Tarot Fundamentals, the first book in this series. This probably says more about me than it does these books: I'm not a beginner, and much of Tarot Fundamentals was stuff I already knew. Here, more was new to me, so I was more interested.

Tarot Fundamentals introduces you to the tarot and familiarizes you with the cards and the whole idea of reading them. Tarot Experience assumes the reader has that foundation, and focuses on using tarot cards. The first section of the book discusses different ways to use the cards: for ritual, magic, dream interpretation, and so on. After that, we get into the main part of the book, which is an in-depth work on reading the cards. The authors take several approaches. One section explains the differences for the reader between giving five-minute, twenty-minute, and sixty-minute readings. It's pragmatic as all get-out, and I really appreciated it. There are chapters on designing your own spreads, reading reversals, handling scary cards, how to read for friends & family/strangers/skeptics, the differences between predictive and advisory readings, psychological and philosophical issues, and doing readings on the topics most people ask about (love, career, and money). There's also a section on card meanings: one page per card, with the meanings worded for readings on personal life, psyche and soul, and divination. And of course, in a book focused on doing readings, there are spreads scattered throughout.

This is a good book, but I just can't bring myself to give it the fifth star. The proofreading is as atrocious as in Tarot Fundamentals if not more so: misspellings, missing words, homophones, punctuation gone awry, odd grammar, strange syntax. While there are several good spreads in this book, there's no index to them. Be prepared to bookmark your favorites. And at least twice I saw a spread referred to as an example, but the page on which to find the spread had been left out: "Acknowledging this, the Reader should select a spread such as Looking for Love on page __." Gah.

This book would probably be most useful to advanced beginners and intermediate tarot readers. It's not a necessary purchase, but it'd be interesting, and I'm glad I read it.

[Roberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another good book and a must read for Tarot fans. Second one of this trilogy. What I really like about this book is the topics it covers, I really enjoy the spreads, the advice on how to make questions and how to get the inquirer to focus and the way it uses the different decks for different inquiries.
Also the expanded meanings chapter, it is a very resourceful and well done part. I really enjoy this book since it gave many insights on new layers that you can use to get deeper readings.

[Trina]

Took a long time to finish and I will be returning to this and other tarot books I’ve read for further insight, perspectives and ideas.
I didn’t feel I could rate this book because the grammatical errors drove me crazy. This should have been proof read! A book of this scope should not have had errors like these- sloppy!
There is a lot of valuable information but it was hard reading for me. I will return back to it for sure

[Alan Snelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building on the first book in the trilogy, this book digs into the day to day life of a Tarot reader. Taking you deep into how to approach Tarot reading, I found this book a little harder to read than the first. I'm sure I'll pick it up again though when exploring new spreads.

[Night · Rating 3 out of 5]

The editing!

[Tabitha Chamberlain · Rating 5 out of 5]

this KickStarter project is a combination of years of work on LS part and several very talented and well respected tarotist. the book is well constructed. the design is again expanding upon our knowledge of tarot reading, with spreads, questions, but in this one it gives a great deal more information on how to be a professional reader. with talking points of the questions you get, the types of sitters you'll have, how to deal with some of the problems that come up, along with ethics and charging for your readings.

the spreads are throughout the book with no index specific is my own complaint, but hey it won't be the first book i have with a bunch of bookmarks sticking out all over the place.