me in front of the Sforza Castle, Milan

I’m working on an overview of the Italy Tarot Tour, but with nearly 2,000 photos and an unbelievable number of wonderful experiences, it’s hard to know what to select. I want to mention a few things that have come up in the meantime and I’m trying out the BlogPress app on my iPad (all mistakes are due to this).

Check out Destined: A Novel of the Tarot, a book-in-progress by Gail Cleare at authonomy.com. The story is built around the 22 Major Arcana of the Payen Tarot (an early Marseilles-style deck) and her encounter with an esoteric scholar who owns an old curio shop. It can be read directly online for free, and you can offer suggestions to the author, so get in your helpful criticisms before the book is finished.

I’ve come across several novels recently that include some tarot in them.

First is the 4th and 5th books of Sara Donati’s Wilderness series:
Fire Along the Sky and Queen of Swords. These books are epic, romantic melodramas that may or may not be to your taste. The use of tarot is a little anachronistic, even given that it is post-de Gébelin, but I’m not really complaining – it’s lite fiction.

Mystery writer Martha Grimes includes a little tarot in two books in her Emma Graham series:
Belle Ruin and its follow-up Fadeaway Girl. Both contain a fortune-teller who reads tarot cards. In the second book, the 5 of Pentacles is described as “Orphans in the Snow” and the Hanged Man shows up as a ‘good’ card, reflecting the twists and turns of the plot and the main character’s indirect way of questioning people, or, perhaps, one of the book’s themes – about the difference between fiction and reality. I enjoyed the “fadeaway” motif.

I understand that the new book, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, has a little tarot in it.

In an earlier post I talked about the Daily Tarot Journal, pointing out Quirkeries – a Personal Tarot Book of Days as one model for using a blog to record your readings. While you can set a blog to private, you may not feel comfortable with an internet format. A much more private option is available FREE for the iPhone, iPad and Android. It is Moment Diary, also known simply as MD. Simplicity is its theme. It provides a handy format for keeping daily records and allows you to include a photo or video of your cards. The video is really great if you’d rather speak instead of typing your card observations. I recommend starting out with a consistent system for naming your daily tarot card(s) so you can search on all appearances of any card. I believe you can use hashtags as a quick way of listing them. The only real failings are limited design/font options and not being able to send the entries to your social media – but Moment Diary is designed to be private and elegantly simple within a calendrical format.

Statue of Columbia Pacific Cemetery

Finally, you might want to look into what’s going on with DC 40 and the 51 Days of Reformation Intercession organized by the New Apostolic Reformation movement, a group that presidential hopeful, Rick Perry, has claimed as an inspiration. They believe that God’s word should be the legal and governmental authority in the United States, and that Christians should acknowledge no other. Compromise is ungodly and any form of feminine Goddess is demonic. This includes, if course, Columbia (patron Goddess of the United States, i.e., District of Columbia) and Lady Liberty. Read about their prayer initiative at PNC-Minnesota Bureau and The Wild Hunt. They may sound like a fringe group, but with people like Rick Perry taking them seriously, we need to be aware of their influence. Personally, I am erecting an altar to Goddess Columbia to send her my share of positive juice. Perhaps she needs a tarot deck dedicated to her . . .

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad. Follow-up note: BlogPress crashed when I was trying to save, but I was able to recover most of my material in the iTunes backup.