I really enjoyed the experience in (The Queen, The Tower, and Me) and decided to have another. This time I changed it up a bit by picking a deck I love but that isn’t based on the Rider-Waite tradition (by that I mean decks with cards that are recognizable to those familiar with the Rider-Waite deck). I selected another court card with which I don’t have a great relationship: the Knight of Cups. The card that the Knight and I will interpret is the 3 of Pentacles (just because I took a fancy to it). These cards are from the Tarot of the Sweet Twilight. For me, one of the hardest aspects of working with a non-Rider-Waite clone is letting go of the ingrained meanings I have for

For those of you who don't know it, one of my functions with Llewellyn is the editor of their free, on-line encyclopedia. If you look at the top of this page, you can see a button that leads to the encyclopedia right in the center of the menu bar. Our goal for the encyclopedia is to make it the largest, most complete listing of metaphysically-oriented terms on the internet. My responsibility is to find terms and their definitions, then add them to the encyclopedia. I make additions on an irregular basis. This time I've added over 50 new terms, including abacomancy. I also added 6 new reviews of Tarot decks. Our Tarot blogger, Barbara Moore, contributed another half-dozen

Dan Brown's books such as The Da Vinci Code and his latest, The Lost Symbol, have had sales and popularity for adults that rivals the success of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for younger readers. All of the books by both of these popular authors have one thing in common: they're not based on real magick. Many of the ideas on Dan Brown's books are wild assumptions or simply false. The important thing to understand is that this doesn't matter. The goal of those fictional concepts is to allow the story to progress. As long as it moves the story, the objective reality doesn't matter. Likewise, waving sticks and mumbling stilted Latin doesn't qualify as magick. If it did, every kid with a

It’s Banned Book Week! If you’re reading this blog, chances are you have read a book that someone has tried to ban at some point in your life, even if you weren’t aware of it. Some recognized classics of literature have been the subject of complaints from people trying to get them banned from school and even public libraries: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, just for a start. That’s why every year many groups band together to celebrate Banned Books Week, this year from September 26 to October 3. One of my favorite books, which was