Sarah Bartlett’s Iconic Tarot Decks

 Sarah Bartlett is a professional astrologer and the author of numerous books on topics such as knot magic, earth magic, moon magic, and crystals, as well as one on Feng Shui and three on Tarot: The Key to Tarot: From Suits to Symbolism: Advice and Exercises to Unlock your Mystical Potential (2015), The Tarot Bible: Godsfield Bibles (2017) and, most recently, Iconic Tarot Decks. The earlier Tarot titles are how-to books with short sections on Tarot history. Iconic Tarot Decks has short how-to and history sections as preamble to chapters titled “Influential Decks,” “Beginner’s Divination Decks,” “Esoteric and Occult Decks,” and “Contemporary Decks.” Each deck within each of these chapters is allocated two-to-six pages and illustrated with at least one full-page colour card reproduction, and most have between one and six additional smaller images.

If you already have Rachel Pollack’s The New Tarot: Modern Variations of Ancient Images (1990) and are looking for a visual follow-up, you might want to consider Iconic Tarot Decks. If your interest is casual — that of a collector, or you need a Christmas or birthday gift — this volume will do nicely and may even inspire an interest serious enough to endure the denser prose and complicated visual genealogies that tend to characterize more advanced Tarot studies. Readers of Coreopsis may choose this book just to browse through a sampler of recent Tarot imagery, much of it based on the work of Pamela Colman Smith, a storyteller, theatre lover, and artist, known today primarily as the co-creator (with Arthur E. Waite) of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909). The current status of this particular deck as the most recognized and popular worldwide is largely attributable to Smith’s talented illustration of the entire deck, that is the courts and pips of what was formerly a regular playing deck as well as the 22 trumps (including the Fool). The trumps were added to the playing deck in the 15th century to diversify the games that could be played with it, and were more or less conventionalized by the 16th century to include, with some differences in order, the Fool, Magician, High Priestess or Papess, Empress, Emperor, Hierophant or Pope, Lovers, Chariot, Strength, Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, Devil, Tower, Star, Moon, Sun, Last Judgement, and World. In the late 18th century, Tarot was reinvented as an esoteric prop, and by the mid- to later 20th century, reinterpreted and frequently re-envisioned in terms of Jungian archetypes and the mythologies and symbolic systems of many different individuals and cultures. Smith’s influence is not apparent in every deck, but certainly her talent for making pictures that tell stories and identify character types remains a prevalent inspiration for many Tarot artists today, including those represented in Iconic Tarot Decks. However, readers will need to acquire a copy of that most iconic of decks if they are interested in comparative studies, because only a few images are included from it.

Tarot has been riding a wave of ever-increasing popularity since the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot was published. Several books relating to the art history of the cards have been published just in the past year, with more on the horizon. Most of these are coffee table books with lots of good-quality reproductions, very little text that is worth-reading, and lacking the ornaments of scholarship, such as bibliographies, lists of works cited, indexes, and endnotes. While most of these failings also characterize Iconic Tarot Decks, Bartlett, being an experienced professional who knows her subject as well as how to address the general, interested public, offers something a notch or two above the attractively mediocre. She writes well and delivers a sampling of images from a wide array of decks, about most of which she provides at least one bit of interesting information.

However, even casual readers are likely to be frustrated by a few aspects of Iconic Tarot Decks. (Those scholarly ornaments are no guarantee of quality, but they aren’t really as ornamental as they may seem and are left aside at a cost). First of all, the table of contents does not identify the decks represented. They are listed in the two-page index (which is, at least, in a readable font), along with the names of various artists and authors, but readers will be obliged to get out their sticky notes and make tabs for quick access to the individual sections and deck discussions. I had to count by flipping pages to find out exactly how many decks are included. For everyone’s convenience, here is a list of the decks (with a deck count added to each section) in Iconic Tarot Decks identified by the titles and dates associated with them there.

Influential Decks (5 decks): Visconti-Sforza (1450/1991), Le Tarot de Marseilles (Jean Noblet) (original 1650-60), The Book of Thoth Etteilla Tarot (1788/2012), Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1910/1971), and The Crowley Thoth Tarot (1969/2008).

Beginner’s Divination Decks (10 decks): The Aquarian Tarot (1970/1991), Morgan-Greer Tarot (1879/1991), The Classic Tarot (1835/200), The Universal Tarot (2003/2007), The Mystical Tarot (2017), The Enchanted Tarot (2007), Crystal Visions Tarot (2011), Paulina Tarot (2009), The Good Tarot (2017), and The Golden Tarot (2004/2005).

Art and Collector’s Decks (19 decks): The Golden Tarot of the Renaissance (2004), Mantegna Tarocchi (1400s/2002), Minchiate Etruria (Anima Antiqua) (1500s/2018), Mitelli Tarocchino (1660/2018), Le Tarot de Paris (1969), Tarocchi Fine dalla Torre (2016), The 1JJ Swiss Tarot (1972), Le Tarot Astrologique (1927), John Bauer Tarot (2018), Tarot of the Thousand and One Nights (2005), Crystal Tarot (2002), The Dali Universal Tarot (2014), The Wild Unknown Tarot (2012), The Golden Tarot of Klimt (2005), Deviant Moon Tarot (2016), The Lost Code of Tarot (2016), Prisma Visions (2014), Tarot Noir (2013), and The Gilded Tarot Royale (2019).

Esoteric and Occult Decks (12 decks): Sola Busca Tarot, Oswald Wirth Tarot (1889/1991), The English Magic Tarot (2016), The Alchemical Tarot Renewed (2007), The Hermetic Tarot (1990), Brotherhood of Light Egyptian Tarot (1936/2003), Tarot Illuminati (2013), Via Tarot (2002), Splendor Solis Tarot (2019), Cosmic Tarot (1986), Tarot of the Holy Light (2011), and Rosetta Tarot (2011).

Contemporary Decks (9 decks): Dreams of Gaia Tarot (2016), Bianco Nero Tarot (2016), Tarot of the New Vision (2003), Anne Stokes Gothic Tarot (2012), Book of Azathoth (2012), Shadowscapes Tarot (2009), Vision Quest Tarot (1998), Golden Thread Tarot (2016), and The Goddess Tarot (1997).

Note: The cover of Iconic Tarot Decks is taken from Norbert Losche’s Cosmic Tarot and is reproduced in full on page 193.

That is fifty-five decks, all illustrated in color, but not in any particular order, alphabetical or chronological, within each section. By comparison, Pollack’s The New Tarot includes over seventy decks, all listed in the table of contents and index, and each assigned to a thematic chapter: Art, Popular, Story-Telling, Cultural, Women’s, Psychological, and Esoteric. Most are illustrated in black-and-white with some included in the color gallery. Pollack explains that the groupings, and criteria for including this or that deck in one or the other group, are her own and perhaps subject to debate, even by herself, and provides a thoughtful introduction discussing each one. For example, she considers the category of art decks in conjunction with the notion that they are usually created by professional artists, as are those by Dali and Niki de Saint Phalle, and she makes several observations about edition size, distribution, and the role Italy continues to play in the history and art history of Tarot.

Bartlett’s introduction to the parallel section in her book is, like the book in its entirety, written in the third person, and more or less repeats the opening line that this is an “eclectic selection of tarot decks that sing from the heart, call to the soul and connect to the universal spirit that leads us on our tarot journey.” It integrates a few words implying value-added qualities, such as rarity and unconventionality, and concludes, “This section brings you the beautiful, true and unique in art terms” (103). Pollack’s observations tell us about her personal experience and knowledge base and, in retrospect, they tell us a lot about the period in which she was writing. Bartlett, by contrast, tells us nothing explicit about her personal perspective. However, the deeper one goes into her book, the more simplistic the commentary seems to become until, arriving at the contemporary section, it definitely sounds like a voice-over for models on a fashion-show catwalk. So perhaps we do know something about Bartlett’s opinion of at least some of the decks she has selected?

The only deck that appears in both Pollack and Bartlett’s volumes is the Dali Tarot. In Pollack’s discussion of this deck, she references her own book on it — Salvador Dali’s Tarot (1985) — and explains that since Dali did not provide commentary on the deck, her writing about it is based on her own background and knowledge. In the discussion of other cards, Pollack likewise draws on her own connections with the specific deck and knowledge of Tarot in general, or references the deck author, artist, or its associated booklet. Bartlett presumably does the same thing, but with very few exceptions, she does not tell us so. While I do not doubt Bartlett’s expertise or the likelihood that she could write many descriptive entries, spiced with accurate tidbits and anecdotes, more or less off the top of her head, there are drawbacks for readers who trust such writing as good history.

One demonstration of this drawback in Iconic Tarot Decks is the representation of the Sola Busca Tarot, which is a historical deck of some interest because of its influence on the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. Bartlett includes the 2019 Lo Scarabeo Sola Busca Tarot in her esoteric section and discusses it solely in terms of its connections with alchemy. She makes no mention of the book accompanying the deck, the earlier Lo Scarabeo edition of the deck (1995), or of the rather complicated history behind the available prints and photographs of the original. While that history does require some untangling, there are entries about it in all four volumes of Stuart Kaplan’s widely available Encyclopedia of Tarot and, more importantly, there is a scholarly essay about the deck and the sources of the card images by Professor Andrea Vitali in the book accompanying the recent Lo Scarabeo edition — that is the very edition represented in Iconic Tarot Decks. The book is packaged with the deck. If Bartlett has the deck, she most certainly has the book. Vitali tells us something of the alchemical interpretation, but also presents some very compelling reasons why that interpretation is false, and offers an alternative understanding based on a detailed study by Mauro Chiappini that was first published in Italian and is summarized in English by Michael S. Howard in an article titled “New Material on the Sola Busca Tarot” (23 July 2015) on his blog. The post is somewhat rambling, but it isn’t hard to get the gist of it or to follow Vitali’s confirmation of the key points. That Bartlett favours the alchemy interpretation is hardly unusual, but that she chooses to not only omit compelling factual and historical arguments about the meaning of the card images, but fails to even mention that there are other interpretations, is likely to undermine the value of her book to Tarot historians even more than the simple lack of source identification.

Still, I did enjoy browsing through Iconic Tarot Decks and will be keeping it on my shelves. I don’t have sticky tabs all over it, but I did have a eureka moment when I saw the cards for Andrea Aste’s The Lost Code of Tarot (2016). I’ve been looking at the Tarot of Light and Shadow (2020), for which Aste also did the art work and in much the same style. Like the entry for the Sola Busca Tarot, it sent me off to my personal library and deck collection to refresh my memory on this or that image and source. For that experience alone, Iconic Tarot Decks is worth at least a browse. I would be more whole-hearted in my recommendation if the author had offered a little less empty commentary, a little more history, and a few more acknowledgements of the shoulders that she stands on. Unless an author’s research and comprehension has gone profoundly astray, doing so can only makes one taller, never smaller.