Genesis of a Book

Writing a book for a few years is not an easy matter when you have children and even some granchildren running around the house. It is even harder when you are writing a book about Tarot symbols which you happened to discover in Franz Kafka when no one in the world thinks Franz Kafka was familiar with the Tarot, and your own neighbors do not know you even use Tarot cards. But there it was, the Tarot card The Hermit, staring out at me from Kafka's Amerika, and I knew I couldn't be quiet about it. The world had to know that the occult Tarot and respectable literature do meet.

I ran to my own Tarot library. Using esoteric scholar Robert Wang, I studied his bibliographies. There was a strong connection between Tarot and Kabbalah. So I began studying kabbalah at the university where I was doing my doctorate and for one year I studied the Zohar and the kabbalah of Rabbi Yizhak Luria, (the kabbalah that Madonna studies) Yet, I knew in order to write about the Tarot in literature I had to write more concretely and academically and I had to use models. Where had the Tarot in literature been discusssed before? I ran to the Encyclopedia Britannica. No entries for the Tarot, but their index directs me to T.S Eliot’s “The Wasteland.’ I learn that the Tarot figures in his ‘Wasteland’, in Madame Sosotris's Tarot.

I ran to the data base called the MLA. There were no entries for Eliot and the Tarot or this particular poem and the Tarot. I searched for ‘the Tarot and Literature.” It opened up to W.B. Yeats who was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. So my bibliography grew. I studied and researched and looked at the Tarot cards and read their meanings in the stories, poems, and novels of Yeats, Eliot and Kafka, and wrote and wrote, and edited and sweated, and compiled a bibliography and even did an index.It was a journey of discovery with lots of pain and confusion and frustration on the way.

The most frustrating thing of course was sending out letters to publishers and either being ignored, or politely refused, But finally my manuscript was accepted by the University Press of America, and just this week three years after I began, my publisher just sent me my copies hot off the press!

You can see my book on Amazon.com or on my website http://www.spiritualityteaching.com/