The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life
by Jessa Crispin
Jessa Crispin came to tarot as a literary critic, and she reads the cards the way a critic reads a novel: as a system of characters, situations, and turning points that can be borrowed for your own work. This book treats the deck as a tool for getting unstuck, finding the next scene, or seeing a stalled project from an angle you hadn’t tried.
What you get
- Trade paperback, 352 pages
- Published 2016 by Touchstone (Simon & Schuster)
- About 9 × 6 × 1.1 inches
- Includes a section of color plates
- ISBN 9781501120237
What’s inside
Crispin opens with a history of the tarot, a history of artists who used it, and her own history with the cards. The bulk of the book walks through the full deck, Major Arcana first, then each Minor Arcana rank from aces through kings, reading every card for what it offers a person trying to make something. She closes with five original spreads designed around creative questions, and practical guidance on how to do a reading.
Threaded throughout are stories of how working artists found and kept their inspiration, including Virginia Woolf, Rembrandt, and David Bowie. Those anecdotes mean each card meaning is tied to a real life, which makes the interpretations stick better than a list of keywords would.
Provenance & tradition
Tarot began as a fifteenth-century Italian card game and was taken up as a divinatory and esoteric tool in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England. Artists and writers have borrowed from it ever since, from the Surrealists to Italo Calvino, who built a novel out of tarot card sequences. Crispin’s approach belongs to that line: the cards as a storytelling engine rather than a fortune.
Crispin founded the long-running literary site Bookslut and the journal Spolia, and she is the author of The Dead Ladies Project. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. Library Journal gave this book a starred review.
Who this is for
- Writers, painters, musicians, and makers working through a creative block
- Tarot readers who want a fresh lens on familiar card meanings
- Beginners who would rather learn tarot through stories than memorization
- Journaling and morning-pages practitioners looking for prompts
- A gift for the artist friend who keeps saying they’re stuck
The book works with any tarot deck; no cards are included.
