Read Like The Devil: The Essential Course in Reading the Marseille Tarot

by Camelia Elias

This book is the first in a trilogy of books based on courses in cartomancy under the signature Read Like the Devil. It is packed with examples of student work and teacher feedback. Camelia Elias lives up to her reputation of a cartomantic martial artist, taking no prisoners. Her cuts through misunderstandings and misinterpretations are clean, leaving the serious student of cartomancy with a sense of wonder. The aim is to establish a top-level cartomancy that gives the possibility for all the students of the Marseille Tarot to reach the level of competence where they are beyond comparison, in a league of their own.

This course book offers rigorous deconstructions and revisions of traditional approaches to reading the Marseille Tarot, establishing a unique, oracular voice that's efficient, convincing, and poetic. The fortuneteller that emerges from these pages is analytical, deductively logical, and contextually situated. Her Read like the Devil method fuses the obvious with an incisively penetrating Zen clarity.

Genres: Tarot, Nonfiction

366 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2020

About the author

http://www.cameliaelias.com/about-me-2/

Reviews

[Gabriel Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough one. Four stars for genuinely inspiring me to look at my cards in some new ways and jogging myself out of a bit of a cartomantic rut. But a few too many sentences make little grammatical sense (too long in the aphoristic academic critical trenches?) and a little repetitive. Is it fair to judge this as a piece art as well as a course in tarot? If the former, two stars - it feels unedited. If the latter, still four. I split (or cut?) the difference.

[luckykarmatx · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's good information in here for someone interested in doing readings with playing cards, but this reads like a book translated by Google. This is sad because there are some real nuggets of information that are genuinely useful.

I'll look for a copy in Spanish, just because I believe there's value here, and this is a subject of interest to me. It's just sad that the translation is so dreadful!

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really tried because other reviews said this book is good for deepening your tarot practice, but I just can't. 90% of this book are long tirades outlining the author's opinions about: life choices, fate, feelings, the role of a tarot reader, and why her students' interpretations of their readings were wrong.

Here is a small excerpt as an example:
"A fortuneteller is a psychoanalyst with a light-saber in her hand. ‘Keep talking,’ she says, and after each sentence her weapon makes words disappear."

What does that even mean? That was the straw that broke the camel's back and made this a DNF.

The other 10% are pieces of actually useful information sprinkled through the weird opinion pieces.

I appreciate the author's insistence that you do not need to know the history of tarot to read with the Marseille Tarot and the small nuggets of useful info I got before DNFing. Hence the 1 star.

[Adri Mich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sinceramente me ha sorprendido la manera original de Camelia a la hora de leer las cartas, su estilo duro y humorístico al mismo tiempo es único. Creo que este libro es imprescindible para cualquier taromante. Sale de lo común con una técnica propia que hace que abras tu mente y comiences a ver las cartas de otro modo. Sin dudas lo recomiendo

[Nicole Bergen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book by a captivating author, although I disagree with both her arguments and sense of ethics sometimes. It’s simultaneously blunt and poetic. I’m glad I’ve tried to wrap my head around this one. I’m not always sure what to make of it but it’s definitely challenged some of my ideas and introduced me to others.

[James Mclallen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esoteric Gaslighting

The author seems like an unbearable pain in the ass. However, the book is worth reading in as much as it will loosen up your divinatory practice.