Illuminated: A Journal for Your Tarot Practice (The Illuminated Art Series)

Product Description
Record your journey of self-discovery with any tarot deck by using the prompts in this journal to engage with your cards and create a sacred space for spiritual development—from the creator of The Illuminated Tarot.
Illuminated: A Journal for Your Tarot Practice is at once a primer on tarot and a sacred space to record and reflect on your readings. As you cultivate a personal practice—whether you pull a daily card to set an intention or a spread to ask for guidance on a time-sensitive obstacle—this journal is a place to work through tough challenges, come to surprising conclusions, and see things clearly.
Illuminated contains an informative introduction with tips for beginners followed by a glossary of the seventy-eight cards in a standard deck. The common interpretations are listed for each card, along with a pair of corresponding questions for the reader to reflect on. The Fool card, for example, typically represents a curious, fearless novice who is open to change and ready for anything. When you pull the Fool, you'll be asked to consider
: How can I be more playful and less fearful? What journey is about to begin?
As you strengthen your understanding of tarot,
Illuminated will help light the way to more introspective readings and a deeper connection to the spiritual world around you.
About the Author
Caitlin Keegan is an illustrator and designer. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, has illustrated books and products for a variety of clients, and has worked at Sesame Workshop and
Nickelodeon Magazine. She is the author and illustrator of
The Illuminated Tarot; Illuminated Playing Cards; Dreamer’s Journal; and
Illuminated: A Journal for Your Tarot Practice.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Tarot cannot predict the future, but it sparks new ideas and clears new paths.
A regular practice helps us develop intuition, set intentions, make decisions, and clarify perspectives.
The history of tarot is long, varied, and somewhat mysterious. Tarot-like games and divination systems have appeared across cultures and regions beginning as early as the ninth century (or as “recently” as the fifteenth century, depending on which scholars you consult). Tarot’s unique symbolism is constantly being reinterpreted for new audiences and changing times, making every deck a new dialect of an old language.
My own interest in tarot started in middle school. Interpreting the cards felt like putting together an intriguing visual puzzle. I continued to be interested in tarot well into art school, where I studied illustration and even created a tarot-based game. Years later, I was seeing a therapist for the first time, and, in an early session, she asked me to talk about my own artwork as a way to access deeper issues and feelings. I understood then that image interpretation was one way of clarifying and externalizing unacknowledged emotion. This experience led me to think about tarot in a psychological context. I’ve since learned that some therapists do, in fact, use tarot as a tool in their sessions.
Up to this point, tarot had fascinated me, but I could never fully grasp what to do with it. When I realized tarot could be used for something other than predicting the future, I committed to learning more about it. At the same time, therapy had become an important agent of change in my life, and I wondered if I could contribute to therapeutic practice through my work as an illustrator. The process of studying tarot inspired me to create
The Illuminated Tarot: a fully illustrated tarot and playing card deck that is designed to be read intuitively.
Art is both a universal language and a highly personal one. Tarot imagery harnesses this dichotomy, making a tarot deck an accessible and endlessly adaptable tool. In his book
Tarot and Psychology, Arthur Rosengarten compares reading tarot to analyzing a dream. The advantage that tarot has over dream inte