"The playing card I had noticed first—the Juggler—was still in the ray of light that ran across the middle of the room. I stared at it, I could not tear my eyes away. As far as I could tell from that distance, it seemed to be a crude picture, painted in watercolours by a child's hand, representing the Hebrew character Aleph in the form of a man in quaint, old-fashioned dress, with a short, pointed beard, and one hand raised whilst the other pointed downwards. I could feel a disturbing thought seeping its way into my mind: did the man's face not bear a strange resemblance to my own?"
—Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

The Madonna Oriflamma of Nicholas Roerich. Evocative of the High Priestess.

"I received these in the mail recently and I was wondering if you could explain something to me." I hand him the one from Spain that read "Fun in the Sun."

Gerald looks the mail over with a careful eye, intrigued by the mystery I've laid out before him. "You say you received these recently?"

"Right," I say, and spread the cards out like a Tarot deck. Tulips from Amsterdam. Bier Gartens from Germany. The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. The Roman Coliseum.

—Kirk Farber, Postcards from a Dead Girl (2010)

Two Italian Renaissance essays on the symbolism of the Tarot cards have been translated into English for the first time. Here's a review by Bonnie Cehovet.

Adam McLean's 25-lessons on the artwork of modern Tarot are available for free at this link.

A Five of Swords on a bronze Etruscan hand mirror. Though there are six blade-bearers in the image, the two central figures grasp the same blade. See a larger image at Peacay's flickr album.

It’s well-known that an author can draw Tarot cards to inspire a literary work (see James Ricklef’s Tarot Tells the Tale and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies). But does the dreaming mind draw upon Tarot archetypes to formulate a dream narrative? An intriguing example in point is the apocalyptic nightmare recounted in Frederic Tuten’s Self-Portraits: Fictions (pages 177-203); no fewer than six Tarot archetypes figure into the story, in the following order:

• The Lovers
• Death
• The Tower
• The Hermit
• The Hanged Man
• The Fool

We’ve worked the pertinent quotations into a mini deck of Tarot card images. If you aren’t familiar with Tuten’s dream narrative, you're in the perfect position to objectively read the spread of Tarot archetypes drawn by his subconscious. What story behind the story is lurking in the shadowy recesses of Tuten’s dormant mind? If you’re intrigued to learn about the context of these archetypes, see Tuten’s chapter entitled “The Park on Fire,” one of several anecdotes comprising what author Cynthia Ozick calls “an amazing, glittering, glowing, Proustian, Conradian, Borgesian, diamond-faceted, language-studded, myth-drowned Dream.”

Here's the link to our card images.

Elizabeth of York, queen consort of Henry VII, is immortalized on card decks as the Queen of Hearts, holding a Tudor Rose.