A Plan for a Book on Tarot

Abstract

If the average person has heard of a Tarot deck at all, he is likely to associate it with dark rooms full of cheesecloth ectoplasm, old women who make a practice of sticking pins in wax dolls, or one of the various seedy attempts to exploit the occult which, for all their impressive trappings, move the modern man to pity rather than to terror. If he had the further misfortune to read one of the many books written on the interpretation of Tarot cards, he would have the further impression of a very old and impressively historical set of symbolic pictures whose meanings are as clear and arbitrary as the language of flowers and, while admiring the quaintness and charm of their design, would look on their use for a serious purpose as an idiocy or, at best, a parlor game. The truth is quite different. Fortune-telling is an unexplored parascience. Its relation to the science of prediction (or statistics, to take it in its narrower form) is quite the same as the parasciences of telepathy and