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Robert: Actually, you can read more fully about it in the introduction to the Alchemical Tarot on my web site. I also tell the story in detail in the introduction of my newest book: The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.

Diane: How did you happen to create your first tarot deck?

Robert: Every deck that I have created has been inspired by dreams or revelations. I discuss the revelation that led to the creation of The Alchemical Tarot on the page on my web site where it describes the dream but I will go over it here and see if I can add some details. The inspiration for it happened one day in August, in 1987. I was reading the Picture Museum of Sorcery, Magic, & Alchemy, by Emile Grillot de Givry. I became fascinated by a 17th century symbolic alchemical engraving representing the philosopher's stone. The design depicted a heart in the center of a cross with images of the four elements assigned to each corner, an arrangement called a quincunx.

Diane: Like the astrological aspect?

Robert: Well, the quincunx in astrology is the name of a minor aspect that describes planets that are 150 degrees apart or five twelfths of a circle. It seems to be derived from the literal meaning of the word and has little to do with the quincunx that is found in mystical symbolism, where it describes a pattern like the five in a die. In mysticism, this pattern becomes a mandala and focuses attention on the “sacred center.” The heart, which was in the sacred central position in this alchemical quincunx was surrounded by a wreath of thorns which seemed to be related to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was unusual to find the sacred heart depicted in the center of a cross and, in Christian art, the quincunx arrangement is usually reserved for the icon called "Christ in majesty," which depicts Christ seated on a throne in the center of the symbols of the Four Evangelists, the lion, the bull, the eagle, and the man, just as the figure on the tarot’s World is depicted in the center of these same creatures.

Images like this are more than symbolic works of art; they capture archetypal realities that have power over one's psyche and, on this occasion, I accidentally unleashed that power. As I looked at the design, I realized that the heart in the center was a symbol of the soul, and that, in the Renaissance, a female nude like the one dancing in the center of the World card was also a symbol of the soul. They were interchangeable. Likewise, in Medieval and Renaissance thought, the symbols of the Four Evangelists in the four corners of the World card are interchangeable with the four elements that were depicted on this design. I reasoned that if the image on the World card, which is the culminating image in the series of trumps in the tarot, symbolizes the philosopher’s stone, the spiritual substance that the alchemists sought as the end and goal of their Great Work, then it is likely that the tarot trumps are telling the same story.

This thought unlocked a stream of images that proceeded to pour out of my psyche. I sat mesmerized as a flood of alchemical images flowed out of my mind and aligned themselves with the tarot trumps. In an instant, I saw that all of the tarot cards were interchangeable with alchemical symbols and that when this interchange was complete, the trumps told of the same journey or process, the alchemical Great Work. Although this insight happened in seconds, it took me seven years of research, writing, and drawing to illustrate that vision and the result was the Alchemical Tarot.

This realization happened shortly after the time of the Harmonic Convergence. The Harmonic Convergence was predicted by the Mayan calendar, a time when it was said that there would be a global change in consciousness. The Convergence had become a popular subject in New Age circles and I thought of it as merely a New-Age fad. But one day, I heard a commentator on the radio mention that during the Convergence, sensitive individuals would be receiving a flood of information on spiritual subjects. At that exact time, my curiosity on these subjects became insatiable and I was spending most of my time reading about alchemy, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and related subjects.

It seemed that the commentator’s prediction was certainly true in my case and since then I have met other people who experienced a change in consciousness around that time. I have also discovered that most cultures in the world have prophesies about a transformation in consciousness that occurred in the late 20^th century. Whether we call it the Harmonic Convergence, the Age of Aquarius, or the Third Millennium, this was a time when many of us discovered an inner calling, a spiritual mission, and I feel that my discovery of the spiritual power of the tarot was something that I was called on to do - it was something that the Soul of the World demanded of me.

Diane: And then you created another deck?

Robert: Right after The Alchemical Tarot was complete, but not yet in print, HarpersCollins San Francisco asked Rosemary Ellen Guiley, who was my co-author on the book for The Alchemical Tarot, and I to hand in a proposal for an Angels tarot. Angels were getting popular right then and they wanted to cash in on the fad. So, it would seem that this deck did not stem from my inspiration like the others. However, just before the publisher approached us, I dreamed that because of my involvement with Rosemary, I would be painting portraits of angels and because of this I would be invited to the White House. Again it was a vivid dream, and having had it, I was not surprised when we received the contract to do The Angels Tarot.

The second part of the dream came true, in a way, a year later. I was asked to make an angel out of metal for the national Christmas tree in the White House. Clinton was in office then and his daughter, Chelsea, picked the theme. They asked specific craftspeople to create angels for the tree and I was one of them.

Although I finished the Angels Tarot many months after the Alchemical, the publisher was in a rush to get it in print and both decks came out in 1995. After they were released, Rosemary mentioned that she had seen someone using saint cards, the kind that are printed by the Church, as divination cards and suggested that I create a tarot based on saints. I was ambivalent about the idea at first, but shortly I had a dream that changed my mind.

Diane: Another dream? Is this a Christian version of Fiddler on the Roof?

Robert: Possibly...In the dream, I came upon a ruined church and decided to explore it. After letting myself in through the basement window, I found that the ceiling had collapsed and I was disappointed that there was no art work left. Under the rubble in the back, however, I discovered the altar stone was still there and behind the altar I found a corpse. It was not the body of someone who was recently dead; it was more of a dried up mummy, black and skeletal. With typical dream logic, I decided to bring the corpse home. Once I arrived, I tried to keep the corpse in the refrigerator, but it did not stay put. It jumped around in there and contaminated the food that was stored with it. I reasoned that if it did not do well in the cold, I would have to heat it up, so I put it in a large pan and began to cook it on top of the stove. As it heated up, the corpse began to melt into a thick brown liquid and flowed over the edge of the pan. It covered the top of the stove and dripped onto the floor. This was creating even more of a mess, so I tried to stop the liquid with my hand but it just flowed over me. I picked up my hand and it was covered with the dripping blown substance. Then, again because this was a dream with its own unique logic, I began to wonder what this substance that I was cooking tasted like. I put my finger in my mouth and tasted the most exquisite chocolate.

The church in the dream was in ruins because, although I had been brought up Catholic, I had long ago gone beyond the confines of Catholicism to embrace a more expansive spiritual philosophy. While not attending mass since I was a teenager, I do visit churches periodically to admire their artwork. Therefore, it would not be unusual for me to explore a ruin, as I did in my dream. I remember visiting a similar tumbled down church that was near my home when I lived in New Jersey. In a Catholic church, the altar has to be consecrated by placing a relic inside of it and the best relics are pieces of the body of a saint. The corpse in the dream church was a very complete relic. In dreams, a kitchen often serves as an alchemical lab and that is exactly how it was presented in this dream. In the kitchen/lab, I exposed the saint to the alchemical opposites, cold and hot; a complete psychic process helped me assimilate the saint in a new way. The result was chocolate. As I woke up from the dream, I remembered that the Latin name for chocolate is theobroma, which means “the food of God.”

Diane: That's amazing. Are your dreams always this rich (pardon the chocolate pun!)?

Robert: No, most of my dreams are not that different than other peoples' but these were what Jung would call “big dreams.” This dream had helped me realize that, although I no longer found the rituals of the Church valuable, I should not throw away some of the teachings of the saints because they are a valuable resource in the search for spiritual ecstasy. The dream convinced me to go ahead and write a proposal for the Tarot of the Saints. Once the proposal was complete, however, all of the publishers I presented it to rejected it. Years later, I was a speaker at the World Tarot Congress in Chicago and I met a representative from Llewellyn there. It turned out that Llewellyn had been looking for someone to create a saints tarot for the previous three years. It seems that I came up with the inspiration at the same time that they developed the desire to publish it, but it took us three years to find each other.

Diane: Llewellyn published your next deck, too: the Buddha Tarot.

Robert: That’s right, Diane. The inspiration for The Buddha Tarot also seems to have happened in a dream but, for some reason, I could not remember it for a while. On Christmas Eve, 1996, I went to bed reading the section on Buddhism in Huston Smith’s The Illustrated World’s Religions. When I woke up on Christmas day, I found that a correlation between the life of Buddha and the tarot trumps was all worked out in my head. It was just like what had happened when I had discovered the correlation between alchemy and the tarot, but the revelation had happened while I was sleeping.

I started explaining my revelation to my wife, Rose Ann, and amazed myself with how the elements of Buddha’s life fit the images in the tarot. There were the four sights that convinced Siddhartha to leave his life of pleasure and his lover and become an ascetic: an old man, suffering, death, and a hermit. There was even the chariot that he used to ride to town to see the sights. Before this, his farther had ruled his life like a Pope and had been guiding him toward the role of Emperor, another trump. Once he realized that the ascetic life was also a dead end, he embraced the virtue temperance and had to deal with the temptations of Mara, the Devil. Buddha remained undefeated and rose through various levels of enlightenment, just as the tarot depicts a hierarchy of celestial images leading to the mystical vision on the highest trump. The story even fit the three-part pattern that I have found in the tarot: the first dealing with hope, the second with fear, and the third, the middle path, the one beyond hope and fear that leads to mastery or enlightenment.

I wrote a proposal for the Buddha Tarot and drew some sample cards but, once again, at first, I could not find a publisher. While I was working on The Tarot of the Saints, my editor, Barbara, sent me a memo mentioning that Llewellyn was looking for ideas for a Buddhist divination system. I sent her the proposal and we signed a contract even before I had finished the Saints. When I was working on the project, I was amazed to find that a correlation could be drawn between Buddhism and the four minor suits that was just as pertinent as with the trumps.

Diane: Could you describe that correlation?

Robert: Sure. First, we need to understand that when Siddhartha became the Buddha, he became one with the entire cosmos. The cosmos is thought of as having a sacred pattern with a center and four cardinal directions. This is called the mandala and, as we can see, it relates to the quincunx we spoke of before. The Buddha, being one with the cosmos, has to embody the same pattern, Therefore, on the celestial plane he became not one but five Buddhas called the five Jinas, the Sanskrit word for “Conquerors.” In effect, Buddha took on the form of the mandala with one Jina in the center and one to each of the four cardinal directions. In a complex tapestry of symbolism, the Jinas are related to the sacred fivefold patterns we find in Buddhism. Besides a direction, each Jina represents a color, an element, one of the five precepts, and five dharmas; they also embody the five wisdoms and cure the five poisons. Each one also has a feminine counterpart called a Sakti, an animal protector, a servant called a Dakini, and magic tool that becomes his emblem.

Diane: Which then become the court cards for the deck?

Robert: Yes. The tarot has the same sacred structure with the trumps symbolizing the sacred center and the four minor suits symbolizing the fourfold world. In the Buddha tarot, the Jinas of the four directions became the kings of each suit, their Saktis became the queens, the animals the knights, the Dakinis the pages, and their magic tools the suit symbols. The trumps tell the story of how Siddhartha became the Jinas and the fifth Jina of the center appears on the Sun card with his Sakti at the point in the story when Siddhartha reaches enlightenment. The symbolism fits together amazingly well and illustrates perfectly what I had been expressing all along, that the tarot contains a sacred structure and can be used a sacred tool, a tool for developing intuition and maintaining a dialogue with one’s Higher Self. Ultimately, it can lead one toward enlightenment.

Diane: You are now working on a new tarot, the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, yes?

Robert: That’s right. I started on The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery because of my love of Pre-Raphaelite art, especially the paintings of Burne-Jones. Although Burne-Jones’ name or the name of the Pre-Raphaelites may not be familiar to many readers, his art is immensely popular and most readers recognize this 19th century art when they see it. His fairytale-like paintings, peopled by tall, pale, stunningly beautiful women and equally memorable heroic men, have a melancholy, otherworldly quality that was rediscovered and became the focus of popular attention, particularly among the book-buying public in the latter part of the 20^th century.

When studying the famous Waite-Smith tarot cards, people often look into the traditions and teachings of the Golden Dawn, the English occult society to which both Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith belonged. But, Smith was also influenced by the mystical art prevalent in England at that time. In fact, it was the work of these artist/mystics that created the fertile soil in which the Golden Dawn could take root. This English art movement was the creation of a mystical brotherhood of artists called the Pre-Raphaelites. They dominated the art world in England in the last half of the 19^th century, and their influence helped create an international art movement called Symbolism.

The Pre-Raphaelites chose their name because they wanted to create art that had a mystic sincerity like the works of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance before the time of Raphael. They believed that art could be a mystical religious expression, a type of magic, and, for their model, they looked to the Italian artists of the 1400's, the century and the location that gave us a revival of ancient mysticism and that gave us the tarot. The Pre-Raphaelites created a cultural environment in which magic and mysticism were once again prevalent.

One of the most prominent artists in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was Edward Burne-Jones. He based his tall, female “stunners” on the paintings of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the two artists whose works are considered primary examples of Renaissance Neoplatonic mysticism. His work expresses the Renaissance ideal that physical beauty and spiritual beauty are linked in one continuum that can lead to the mystical experience of beauty itself, as a timeless, underlying reality. It is this ideal that allowed the creators of the tarot to place a nude on the World card as a symbol of this primary beauty.

It is not surprising that, when we look at the works of Burne-Jones, we find that he painted many of the same themes that we find in the tarot. He has paintings of Temperance, the Wheel of Fortune, lovers, allegorical chariots, kings, and queens. It is like he was creating a tarot but he never finished it. The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery started with my desire to finish Burne-Jones’ tarot for him. I wanted to see what a deck would look like if it was done in his style and with his sense of sensuality and symbolism.

I have completed ten of the trumps for the deck and I feel that they are the most beautiful and compelling tarot art that I have created. The first two that I completed, Temperance and the Fool, were based directly on a painting and a drawing by Burne-Jones. Alter those, I began to create cards that had figures that were proportioned and dressed like his, but were my own creations. As with my other decks, I am basing my interpretations on my understanding of traditional Renaissance decks, but with this deck I am also including details from the Waite-Smith deck that I feel harmonize and add to the traditional meaning - creating a bridge between the original tarot decks of the 15^th century and the 19^th and 20^th century occultists.

Diane: One consistent feature in all your very different decks is that your Minor Arcana cards tend to be pips, not illustrated with a fully-realized pictorial. Are you planning to do the same with the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery?

Robert: Well, actually, The Alchemical Tarot pips are fully illustrated and the pips in The Angels Tarot bear only a repetition of the suit symbols, like an antique deck. After that, I worked out a compromise in which I mostly depict a repetition of the suit symbol on the top of the pip and a divinatory-friendly scene on the bottom. The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery will follow this style.

One of the underlying constants of the Western mystical tradition, from its origins at the beginning of the historical period to the present, is the importance of the number seven as a symbol for the mystical journey. This symbolism is incorporated into the tarot with its three times seven trumps, two times seven cards in each of the minor suits, and eleven time seven cards plus a Fool in the entire deck. The prominence of the number seven in the structure of the tarot is one of the things that convinced the 18^th century occultist Court de Gebelin that the tarot was occult and this is what started the occult interest in the tarot. When we examine the roots of Western mysticism in the ancient world we find that there was a process of spiritual attainment that involved seven steps. It is this process that is behind the sevenfold symbols that are ubiquitous in our culture, such as the seven days of the week, the seven virtues and vices, and the seven notes in our music scale, and I feel that this mystical journey is expressed in the tarot. The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery will illustrate this ancient heritage.

It is the thesis of the deck that the tarot contains a mystical teaching that makes use of the Seven Virtues as a spiritual tool and demonstrates how they can be used to purify each of the three parts of the soul as presented by Plato in his philosophy. Each one of the three acts illustrated by seven trumps in the tarot corresponds to one of the three parts of the Platonic soul, the soul of appetite, the soul of will, and the soul of reason. When each of these three parts are perfected through the practice of the Seven Virtues, energy is liberated in the seven soul centers, which are the Western equivalent of the Chakras. As this process is completed in each aspect of the soul, it moves the aspirant toward the spiritual goal of enlightenment.

I also intend The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery to be the most beautiful deck that I have created. As I have often said, I believe that beauty in itself it the greatest mystical truth.

Diane: There have been other tarot projects you have started--a Celtic tarot and The Vampire Tarot. Will they ever see the light of day (pardon the Vampire pun!)?

Robert: Being Irish-American, I have always been interested in the history and mythology of my ancestors. The idea for the Celtic Tarot came out of my observation that the sacred pattern found in the tarot is also found in Irish mythology. According to legend, the original inhabitants of Ireland were a magical people called the Tuatha de Danann. We may consider them gods. When they first came to Ireland, they brought with them four treasures of great power, one from each of their four great cities that they previously inhabited. A sword from which no foe could escape was brought from the city of Findias and it became the weapon of Nuda, King of the Tuatha. From Gorias was brought a spear that would endlessly seek blood unless it was put to rest in a brew of poppies. This became the weapon of Lugh, whose radiance in battle was like the sun. From Murias came a cauldron that would feed multitudes of champions and never be depleted, but for a coward it contained nothing. This was watched over by Dagda, "the good god." Lastly, from Falias, they brought a stone called the Stone of Destiny. The Tuatha de Danann set this stone in Tara, the sacred center of Ireland and the seat of the high king. From that time on, whenever the rightful king of Ireland touched the stone, it would cry out like a human and this man would be chosen to marry the Goddess of the Land. These were known as the Four Treasures of Ireland.

Like a mandala, Ireland was divided into four kingdoms, each corresponding to one of the four cardinal directions, and Tara, the home of the high king who ruled over all the others, was located in the center. This is the same structure as the tarot, with its four minor suits, each with its own royal court, and the fifth suit of

trumps which contains the Emperor and Empress and a host of archetypal figures. The Four Treasures also relate well to the four tarot suits, the Sword of Nuda to swords, the Spear of Lugh to staffs, the Caldron of Dagda to cups, and the Stone of Destiny to coins.

I created one card, The World, which illustrated this theme and demonstrated how well it harmonized with the traditional tarot images. In the middle I depicted the Goddess of the Land with the Four Treasures and, in a decorative style making use of Celtic knotwork, I depicted the symbols of the four evangelists as representing the four kingdoms surrounding the Goddess. I was very pleased with the illustration and I sent it to several publishers with a proposal for a Celtic Tarot. The publishers, however, felt that there were too many Celtic tarots on the market and were not interested. Inner Traditions never actually rejected the idea, but they have not sent me a contract ether and they have had the proposal for over seven years.

The World card illustration was published on the back cover of the last issue of Gnosis magazine in 1999. Celtic knotwork is time consuming to draw and I do not think I will be able to complete this deck unless I receive an advance from a publisher that will cover the time it will take. Even if I got a contract, it is doubtful that I would get enough of an advance. I have sold many prints of the illustration, especially when I was selling my work at Celtic festivals. My best selling prints, however, are the illustrations for the Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery and the Vampire Tarot.

Diane: I have bought several from the first, and one from the Vampire Tarot for a friend. It is unfortunate that your Vampire deck is not available--I prefer it to any currently on the market.

Robert: I think that is because I see vampires in a different way than most people. The inspiration for the Vampire Tarot came from a revelation I had that was partly influenced by a series of dreams that my wife was having. I realized that the vampire of legends, novels, and movies was a modern incarnation of the long forgotten moon god, who in ancient cultures was associated with women and fertility but who was also the god of the dead. The myth of the moon god is the basic pattern for the mystery traditions, with their rites of death and rebirth that lead to personal transformation.

For a classical example, we can look to the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, which are based on the myth of the rape of Persephone by Hades, the god of the underworld and of the dead. Hades was the twin brother of Zeus, the god of the sky and the ruler of the living. Together they are the rulers of darkness and light, of day and night, archetypally of the sun and the moon. In the ancient world, Hades was so feared that he was not mentioned by name, only by titles, such as “Terrestrial Zeus.” There were no temples built to Hades because he never listened to prayers. As the god of death, he took whom he wanted when he wanted. Yet, the most important mystery rite in ancient Greece was based on his myth. In this myth, the Dracula-like Hades abducts the young, beautiful virgin, Persephone, while she is picking flowers with her friends. He carries her off in his chariot through a fissure in the earth and makes her his underworld bride.

Persephone’s mother is Demeter, the goddess of grain and vegetation. Because of her daughter’s abduction, she is overcome with grief and the earth becomes barren and cold. Zeus tries to have Persephone returned but she has eaten the food of the dead, the blood red seeds of the pomegranate. Zeus is forced to make a compromise in which Persephone spends half of the year in the underworld and half in the sunlight. As a result the earth is split between winter and summer, darkness and light.

Persephone becomes a goddess of spring and rebirth, and yet she is the queen of death. It is this combination of eroticism, life, and death that gives the story its power. The participants in Persephone’s mystery believed that they were transformed by re-experiencing her myth. By seeing the connection between life and death, they became confident in the knowledge that there is life after death. At its most eloquent, the experience was one of enlightenment, in which an individual ceases to identify themselves with the limited confines of the body and the ego and recognizes the oneness of life. This is the immortality of the mystic and this mystical quest is what is captured in the trumps of the tarot.

The modern vampire story is the shadow of this mystical quest. When I first focused on it, I saw it as the dark opposite of the alchemical quest that I had illustrated in The Alchemical Tarot. Like the alchemist, the vampire seeks the magical red elixir that assures eternal life, but by trying to achieve immortality in an selfish egotistical way: by resurrecting his corpse and living on the blood of others instead of identifying with his soul and the part of him that is beyond the physical, the modern vampire transforms the quest into a horror story. I feel that it is important to deal with these archetypes from the shadows if we are going to make spiritual progress. They allow one to see the egotistical side of one’s self and they have a beauty and power that must be integrated to make progress. Without the shadow, we are not whole and the whole self is what the mystic seeks.

Diane: Are you familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I ask because you are addressing some of the themes of that series.

Robert: I have not had the pleasure of watching Buffy, but I am not surprised that the same themes are incorporated. I have completed five of the illustrations for The Vampire Tarot. They are some of my best selling prints and I intend to make more. I will finish The Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery first, but The Vampire Tarot is next on my list.

Diane: That is wonderful news! Now that I'm a Buffy fanatic, I will appreciate the deck even more. Finally, you have a new book out: The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination. What makes it stand out from other books about the tarot?

Robert: The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination is my fifth book on the tarot, but the other four were always sold in connection with a tarot deck that I designed and therefore reached a limited audience. This is my first book on the tarot in general and it is the most complete account in print of my theories on the tarot and on how to use cards for divination. My editor wanted it to be a basic text on the tarot that he could keep in print for many years and that is what I was after also. It covers all three aspects that are mentioned in the title: a factual history of the tarot from its origin in the early 15^th century to the creation of the Waite-Smith deck in 1909; symbolic interpretations of the cards, demonstrating the differences between the original Renaissance artists' view and the view of modern occultists; and a thorough explanation of my three-card reading technique and its application in various spreads.

My research into the history of the tarot would have been impossible without the groundbreaking work of Gertrude Moakley, Stuart Kaplan, and Michael Dummett, whose books I relied on for accurate information. I am also indebted to tarot historians Robert O’Neill and Tom Tadfor Little for providing leads. But most of all, I am grateful to historian Ronald Decker, who was a co-author with Michael Dummett of A Wicked Pack of Cards and A History of Occult Tarot. Decker supplied me with an unpublished paper that he wrote on Etteilla, which contained valuable information, and he reviewed my text and gave me his advice before I sent it to the publisher. My editor included a comment from Decker on the back cover of the book.

What I added to this history is a knowledge of Renaissance history, art, and iconography that allowed me to coordinate all of the information and weave it into a complete picture. My understanding of art and symbolism in particular gave me the tools I needed to see the tarot, particularly the trumps, as the original creators and users of the deck in the 15^th century would have. I feel that this is one of the first books to attempt to explain the symbolism of the tarot in a way that is grounded in facts and provides a complete mystical story for the trumps that is historically plausible.

As I continued the history into the modern occult era, starting in 1781 with the publication of Court de Gebelin’s theories, I demonstrate how the occultists, at times, veered away from the original understanding but, at other times, intuitively tapped into the original meaning. Of all the occultists, Waite seems to have had a grasp of the mystical message in the tarot and see clearly how his colleagues were delving into historical fantasy. I make use of quotes from Waite as introductory tags throughout the book. In the next to last chapter, I focus on each of the cards in the Waite-Smith Tarot and provide interpretations derived from Waite’s ideas, but also based directly on the images created by Smith. We must not underestimate the role of Smith in designing the deck and, at times, I feel that Waite actually misinterprets her art.

Robert: Yes, the most often cited discrepancy is that Waite claims that there are four streams of blood flowing from the cup on the Ace of Cups. The cup is a symbol of the Grail and Smith has drawn five streams which connect the image with the five wounds of Christ in Christian iconography. There are numerous other discrepancies however that have been mostly overlooked. For example, Waite says that the man on the Seven of Pentacles is resting on a staff and looking at the pentacles on the vine in front of him with desire. But, in Smith’s drawing, the man is resting on a hoe, which suggests that he's admiring the fruits of his labor. Waite missed the detail at the lower end of the handle. There are numerous other discrepancies, even in the trumps. On the Chariot, for example, Waite says the charioteer is carrying a drawn sword, but he is depicted carrying a scepter. To discover the others, the readers will have to consult my book.

In the last chapter of the book, I demonstrate how all of this knowledge comes together when one uses the tarot for divination. This section is the closest that I have come in print to providing lessons in the use of the tarot that are like the ones I give in my workshops. Besides explaining my three-card technique and listing the six different patterns that can occur when we look at the three cards, I provide examples of readings making use of the Waite-Smith cards, as well as new layouts. Bringing together all of these facts and ideas into a complete theory and applying them to divination has been a transforming experience for me and I hope that my readers get as much out of it as I have.