The
Mythic Tarot: A New Approach
to the Tarot Cards
By Juliet Sharman - Burke and Liz
Greene
Cards illustrated by Tricia Newell
A Fireside Book published by Simon
& Schuster
The Mythic Tarot, a deck
of Tarot cards with an accompanying book, is the product of
collaboration between Liz Greene and Juliet Sharman - Burke, both of the
Centre for Psychological Astrology.
Liz Greene, a depth psychologist and director of the Centre, has
been one of the most successful and widely-read innovators in the field
of astrology during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Ms. Sharman - Burke, a colleague of Ms. Greene, has written a
number of books on the Tarot.
The strength of this deck and book is also its weakness:
it is an excellent tool for the study of human psychology, but it
limits the Tarot to a solely anthropomorphic (human) focus.
The Tarot traditionally is an arcane tool based on the
mathematics of the universe and hence able to classify and describe all
events taking place within our consciousness.
However, as the majority of people
using Tarot are interested basically in the human psyche and its
challenges, The Mythic Tarot
might be superior to traditional decks in making psychological insights
accessible to the reader.
The
myths of the major arcana (trumps) are well-written.
They are entertaining. The
authors take a Greek myth close to the meaning of a major arcana card,
illustrate the card with that myth, relate the myth to the human psyche,
and give a clear divinatory meaning to the card.
Some of the major arcana fit well with Greek myths.
The story of Apollo illustrates the Sun card wonderfully.
The book has a strong
focus, consisting almost entirely of mythical and divinatory meanings for individual Tarot
cards. The book constantly reminds the reader to look within and to look
for underlying patterns in events. These
are two of the best uses of Tarot.
The
Mythic Tarot does an
excellent job of organizing the numbered cards of each suit into
a journey. Cup cards are
organized around the story of Eros and Psyche; wand cards tell the story
of Jason and the Argonauts; the dark story of Orestes and the curse of
the House of Atreus is used to describe the sword cards; and Daedalus,
builder of the Labyrinth, is the mythical figure used for the pentacles
cards. Ironically, although
it is technically inaccurate
to ascribe human personalities to the numerical and abstract minor
arcana, the myths make the numerical progression of these minor arcana
cards easier to understand. The
myths chosen by the authors fit surprisingly well here, and the
associations to the minor arcana learned here should transfer well to
other Tarot decks.
The court cards are very well done.
This book does a tremendous job of explaining the personality
types of the suits, especially the swords.
Even though the court cards technically are processes, not
personalities, readers sometimes need to humanize information to access
it. The Mythic Tarot does just this for the reader.
If one has already
internalized meanings of the cards, one can use the Mythic Tarot as
an ordinary deck. The book
ends with a very good explanation of how Tarot cards work
synchronistically. The
explanations and examples of spreads are also quite good.
The images are
evocative, and one could get information from these images without
consciously knowing the traditional
meanings of the Tarot. The
artwork is sharp and well-defined. Colors
are strong.
Drawbacks and
Limitations
The
chief drawback is that the set is too similar to the Tarot to be truly
an alternate system yet
different enough to be confusing. Again,
its strength, its wealth of mythological stories, is its weakness.
Readers might be limited to seeing only human psychology in the
cards. Although the authors
feel the Greek myths are more accessible to the Western psyche, they are
no more--or less--accessible than the Indo-Egyptian-Celtic-Judaic myths
of the traditional deck. (The
authors are primarily astrologers, and Western
astrological myths are based on Greco-Roman tradition.)
There
was a tremendous strain in matching the major arcana to Greek myths.
Many just did not work.
For example, although the authors did a good job of verbally
picking elements of the Dionysus myth that matched the Fool, overall
Dionysus just does not equate to the Fool.
Dionysus lacks innocence and is too earthy and sensual.
If one internalized Dionysus as the Fool; it would be difficult
to undo mistaken associations.
Another way in which The
Mythic Tarot deviates from Tarot convention is in assigning the
major arcana to inner events, and the minor arcana to outer events.
Traditionally the opposite assignation is used.
Further, the concept of “bud” is applied to pages, but pages
are also the tangible “result” of a process.
Some images, such as the
murder of Agamemnon for the three of swords, are so graphic and
unpleasant that the meaning of the card is overly limited. The
renderings of people in the deck are stiff, the features too uniform.
In summation, this is a confusing deck for beginners
because of the handling of the major arcana, but it may become the deck
of choice for advanced readers who are writers, counselors or
astrologers. For any student
of Tarot, the mythical explanations of the number cards (minor arcana),
and the Court cards offer a grand addition to any Tarot library.
