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Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana
A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of the tarot brush up against life in a changing world.
The Tarot de Marseille is a 15th-century set of playing cards, the deck on which the occult use of tarot was originally based. When Jessica Friedmann bought her first pack, the unfamiliar images sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.
Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann’s life was touched by floods and by drought, by devastating fires and a pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.
Twenty-Two notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness — and subtle beauty — of 21st-century life.
The Tarot de Marseille is a 15th-century set of playing cards, the deck on which the occult use of tarot was originally based. When Jessica Friedmann bought her first pack, the unfamiliar images sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.
Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann’s life was touched by floods and by drought, by devastating fires and a pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.
Twenty-Two notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness — and subtle beauty — of 21st-century life.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published December 12, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 12, 2024
This is a description of the evolution of tarot cards, using specific decks as examples. The cards are based on symbols and this book explains many symbols. Notes at the back contain many other sources of tarot information. It will interest tarot readers and anyone interested in tarot.
March 20, 2025
“The story of the tarot is the story of 600 years of European thought, history, creativity, and consciousness […] Its endurance comes down to the fact of one thing, and that is participation. And therein lies its allure, its ongoing everyday magic.” There is much to love about Jessica Friedmann’s new tarot-inspired book Twenty-Two Impressions: Notes from the Major Arcana; after an opening essay covering the breadth and depths of tarot in terms of both art history and spiritualism, Friedmann offers up twenty-two short essays, mostly personal in theme, each responding to one of the cards of the tarot’s major arcana, covering figures such as The Fool, The Lovers, The Moon and The Sun. These snapshots cover topics from lockdown to grief to creativity; with ‘The Hermit’ Friedmann considers how “It is a privilege to choose solitude”; with ‘The Hanged Man’ she discusses her discomfort with being photographed, “the fixity of the image, its incapacity to convey more than a single perspective”. Other standouts for me included ‘Justice’ and ‘Strength’. Elsewhere I enjoyed Friedmann’s lucid path through the widely understood five phases of tarot’s history, and into a sixth phase she proposes we understand as Recuperative tarot, where people not represented in the tarot’s cards have sought to redress that. I myself am ambivalent about the tarot, not least for its exploitation by those who use spiritualism in general to hustle lost or grieving people out of their money (a concept of course not unique to tarot); Friedmann’s honesty about her own conflicted relationship to the cards is refreshing and makes the book a comfortable place to learn freely between being reserved and being open to the world and the cards. And above all it’s so deftly written, like her previous essay collection Things That Helped, and so engaging to read. (After finishing the book, I returned to my notes from a tarot reading a friend did for me over Zoom 3yrs ago, which I’ve not thought of much since, and was startled by how prescient the cards seem now!)
December 31, 2024
This is a fascinating book of which half is a potted history of the origins of tarot cards and their journey from objects of status to gaming cards to the divination cards we know today. The second half is the author's own interpretation of the twenty-two cards of the major arcana based on her Marseilles tarot deck. The first half is useful to everyone who is even remotely interested in the cards. It's clear and fascinating and gives you lots of other references and ideas to chase if you want to explore the background more deeply. The second half is incredibly subjective and I think works best read against other interpretations, so you can make your own mind up what you think the cards represent. As a long term tarot reader myself I found all of the author's ideas stimulating and interesting but they do not always gel with my reading of the cards. I will however, have her ideas floating around in my head the next time I read for someone and you never know when what she thinks will be exactly what I want and need to say to the querent.
February 6, 2026
Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana by Jessica Friedmann is a quietly radiant collection that treats the tarot not as spectacle, but as a patient companion to thought. Moving card by card through the Tarot de Marseille, Friedmann braids art history, cultural inquiry, and personal reflection into essays that feel at once intimate and intellectually alive.
What distinguishes the book is its attentiveness to texture the weather of ordinary days, the disruptions of fire and flood, the slow re arranging of meaning that happens over years. The Major Arcana become less a system of prediction than a language for noticing: how change arrives, how symbols travel across centuries, how a single image can open unexpected rooms in the mind.
Friedmann writes with a poet’s restraint and a scholar’s curiosity. The essays never rush to conclusions; they wander, question, and return altered, much like the cards themselves. Readers interested in tarot, creative nonfiction, or the meeting place of art and lived experience will find this a subtle, rewarding work that lingers long after the final page.
What distinguishes the book is its attentiveness to texture the weather of ordinary days, the disruptions of fire and flood, the slow re arranging of meaning that happens over years. The Major Arcana become less a system of prediction than a language for noticing: how change arrives, how symbols travel across centuries, how a single image can open unexpected rooms in the mind.
Friedmann writes with a poet’s restraint and a scholar’s curiosity. The essays never rush to conclusions; they wander, question, and return altered, much like the cards themselves. Readers interested in tarot, creative nonfiction, or the meeting place of art and lived experience will find this a subtle, rewarding work that lingers long after the final page.
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January 4, 2025Didn’t vibe with it
December 20, 2024
Thank you Jessica for such a delicious read! Thoroughly recommend this book to both the seasoned tarot reader, the beginner and those just interested in tarot.
The first half of the book is a very well researched, clear and thoughtful history of tarot - which certainly gave me a new perspective from most short histories of tarot I have read. Especially with the careful consideration of cultural/political influences on the decks evolution, it has made me look differently at the cards when reading and explaining them to people.
The 2nd half - the 22 impressions - gives beautiful, personal reflections on each archetype of the Major Arcana. Never using typical tropes or traditional card descriptions, each impression illustrates how the cards can relate so differently and personally to the reader and their experience. A great example of how beginners can connect to the cards and see their meanings through their own lens.
Overall, this book is well researched, thoughtful and poetic! Loved it!
The first half of the book is a very well researched, clear and thoughtful history of tarot - which certainly gave me a new perspective from most short histories of tarot I have read. Especially with the careful consideration of cultural/political influences on the decks evolution, it has made me look differently at the cards when reading and explaining them to people.
The 2nd half - the 22 impressions - gives beautiful, personal reflections on each archetype of the Major Arcana. Never using typical tropes or traditional card descriptions, each impression illustrates how the cards can relate so differently and personally to the reader and their experience. A great example of how beginners can connect to the cards and see their meanings through their own lens.
Overall, this book is well researched, thoughtful and poetic! Loved it!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews