Event:  Review - Godless Savage

The Good: This book breaks down a lot of what other tarot books build up. From the introduction, Cynova makes it clear she’s rather practical about reading tarot cards. She’s big on keeping them clean and taking care of them, without being dogmatic about sleeping with them under your pillow or only wrapping them in black silk with a single pure clear quartz crystal. The approach she takes is based in intuition (with some stories about mediumship), grounded in a fair dose of reality. She discusses the responsibility of a tarot reader, and when not to force oneself to do a reading.

I loved her deep-dives on individual cards the best; she references other books and pieces of wisdom she’s picked up throughout her time reading cards, and managed to make me appreciate the Lovers in a way I never could before, discussing how it can be about finding your Tribe as much as your One True Love. I need to sit and spend some time on her bit about the Hierophant as a Trickster figure, though—it’s something I never would have reached with my own experience of the card.

One thing she does as part of these deep dives, particularly with the Major Arcana, is to relate them to other cards, discussing how one can see the sword in Justice’s hand as the Ace of Swords, or the canopy of the Chariot as the Four of Wands, and that makes me want to pull out my deck and intuit more of these connections for myself.

Cynova’s also an expert storyteller, laying bare her early days as a tarot reader and explaining why one needs to be sensitive, and when things have gone poorly in her own readings—and when she’s had to shrug and tell a client “I don’t know”, which is important. I never got the sense of her talking down to me, and the casual language and references (from quoting Cartman from South Park to calling the angel on the Lovers card the “Angel of Outlandish Flaming Hairdo”) make it easy to take the fool’s journey alongside her.

The Bad: Smudge sticks. I’ll leave that be at that, and move on to a more personal issue I had.

This is a book written by a professional tarot reader to help others become tarot readers. As someone who was simply looking for new perspectives on my old friends, the Arcana, I found there was a lot of information in this book that was irrelevant to me. 95% of Cynova’s stories are “this happened while I was reading for a client”, and though it’s great to get a peek into that side of things, I was left wanting more personal touches: “this card has historically meant X when I read for myself”, or guides to creating those personal connections.

In addition, there’s a bit of a disconnect between Cynova’s recommendation that one start off with a ‘Basic’ (here used to describe a deck based on the Rider-Waite deck) deck because of its symbolism, while not diving into all that symbolism and where it’s coming from—she calls out the Biblical reference in the trees on The Lovers without discussing what it means, for anyone who might not come from an Abrahamic background. There’s a sort of inherent assumption that everyone’s in on that particular joke.

The Bottom Line: Would I recommend this book? Yes, conditionally. I would not recommend it to anyone who’s Very Serious about Tarot and comports themselves with utter dignity, nor would I recommend it to anyone without stressing that it emphasizes the viewpoint of a professional tarot reader. However, if someone came up to me (or sent an ask to my blog) saying that they were frustrated with how opaque some books about reading tarot cards are, this would be on my list of recommendations beside Alan Moore’s Promethea, for a different perspective.