The Secrets of the Tarot: Origins, History, and Symbolism

by Barbara G. Walker

Fully illustrated with all-new color versions of the complete traditional Tarot deck, this is an appreciation of the history and meaning of the cards.

Genres: Tarot, Nonfiction, Occult, Spirituality, History, Reference, New Age

260 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1984

About the author

Barbara Walker studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania and then took a reporting job at the Washington Star in DC. During her work as a reporter, she became increasingly interested in feminism and women's issues.

Her writing career has been split between knitting instruction books, produced in the late 1960s through the mid-80s; and women's studies and mythology books, produced from the 1980s through the early 21st C.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barbara G Walker is the sort of woman you imagine probably dances around her garden at midnight, naked, daubed in her own menstrual blood and wearing a tiara made of wheat. I find her very endearing, in a sort of 1980s west-coast-US kind of way. Her bibliography is neatly divided between what you might call ‘feminist spirituality’ books (mostly to do with supposed pre-modern matriarchal goddesses), and, strangely enough, knitting designs, which apparently are classics of their kind.

This book, and the accompanying deck, belong to the former group (although if she came out with a knitted tarot, I would definitely get it). I used to use tarot cards quite a lot, and this was my deck of choice. Not that I believe they allow you to predict the future – that would be mental – but I do find them a useful way of ‘mind-mapping’ big decisions when I'm in some confusing situation. They're an entertaining free-association tool.

Among tarot aficionados, this deck is notoriously little-used, most people finding it too dark, too uncompromising, too explicit, too woman-centric – basically all the reasons I like it so much. All the cards have these very stark, archetypal designs which I find extremely appealing, and every one seems to be about SEX! or DEATH! or SEX AND DEATH! For instance:



To give you an idea of her rambling, wise-woman, feminist-hippy, amiably nonsensical approach to interpretation, here's her take on the princess of wands, on the far right up there:

The Philistine name for the fish-tailed White Goddess was Atargis. Her Syrian name was Astarte. Her Babylonian name was Ishtar. At Der she was called Derceto, “Whale of Der,” the great Fish-mother who swallowed the phallic god Oannes, prototype of the biblical Jonah. Even Judeo-Christian Scriptures admitted that Jonah's whale was female, and he spent three days in her “womb” (not stomach) prior to his rebirth. The myth of the swallowing was really a sexual allegory. The fish was a common symbol of the yoni […blah blah…] that ubiquitous castration figure ever apparent in men's dreams and myths: the vagina dentata […blah blah…] power of the female over the male […] well-known principle in psychiatry that both sexes fantasize the vulva as a mouth [… etc.]

As you can probably see, she takes a slightly cavalier approach to comparative mythology, but the results are often weirdly productive and provocative, or at the very least morbidly fascinating.

Her particular brand of proto-Wiccan gynocentrism is unfashionable these days, but I find it very appealing and actually rather creatively stimulating. But it's hard to review this objectively. I must have had this deck since I was 15 or 16 (although I don't think I got the book itself till several years later), and a lot of the images in here are almost a natural part of my thought process now. Which is perhaps a little concerning.

[Eye Summers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle essentially sums up this book, although my primary reason for buying it was less as a "guidebook" for the Barbara Walker Tarot Deck but merely to search for any symbolic insight into the deck beyond the Little White Book. There are indeed some insights tho it's mostly confined to the Minor Arcana.

What this book really does well is trace the pre-Christian origins of the Tarot & how the Church systematically went out of it's way to demonize the Tarot & any Pagan competition.

I wish this would have been one of the 1st books I had read on the Tarot & I would recommend this book to anyone new to the Tarot, in addition to the Rachel Pollack books.

[Laura]

DNF at 50% (I made it through the introduction and major arcana). From the very first sentence's declaration that tarot cards are precursors to playing cards, this book is full of incorrect information. While there are citations throughout, the author attributes their own ideas to sources they don't appear in and many of the sources cited are not very good. There is a lot of problematic generalization here, conflating different cultural contexts and incorrectly positing highly culturally specific ideas as universals. I cannot recommend this.

[Lisa (Harmonybites) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tarot cards have intrigued me every since I've seen a deck. They're so pretty and mysterious and so different, yet so closely related in look to our familiar playing cards, and so many of the decks are rich in symbolism. I started collecting decks, and even reading them for friends for fun, even though I'm a thorough-going rationalist and don't believe they can be tools of divination.

I also don't believe in a lot of nonsense promulgated about their origins. The Wiki will tell you there's just no evidence of the Tarot, either literary or surviving cards, before the early 15th century. At least Walker doesn't claim they go back to Ancient Egypt, although she does link them to the gypsies, another dubious claim to say the least--since Tarot Cards were known in Europe before the Gypsies arrived! (See, this History of the Tarot online .)

All that said, I do find this book fun and informative. It covers each card of the Major and Minor Arcana, devoting pages to each. And I like the deck featured in the book. It's pretty, and with the Tarot I'm all about the shiny!

[Luly Ceballos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book a very interesting reading. Informative. Provocative. Challenging. It presents the Tarot cards in a new way going back to ideas that leads to information about the origins not only of the cards but of many myth and old traditions which change into "moderns" religions. I love that the sources are cited and the references are easy to find on the web. Because that is how the content is presented, it shows itself and one have to look for more, wondering if that could be possible. I love it.

[Anelise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was worth every penny. So unbelievably informative

[Teleri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walker's feminine-centric research is often criticized. I always kind of liked her, & worked with this deck quite well for a while.