Rachel Pollack

Rachel Pollack is widely considered one of the most influential writers and interpreters of tarot of the last half century. Her inclusion in this section, alongside contemporary visual artists, speaks to the fluidity of tarot culture and the way in which personal insight and scholarly interpretation intersect. After publishing her groundbreaking book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom in the early 1980s, Pollack decided to make her own deck but she couldn’t find the right artist to execute her vision. She therefore set about illustrating all 78 cards herself in brightly-colored ink on paper. She originally called the deck The Shining Woman Tarot but republished and renamed it The Shining Tribe Tarot in 1994 to make it clear that the deck was for everyone. To highlight the way in which, in Pollack’s words, “Tarot absorbs into itself any and all belief systems we apply to it,” her iconography taps into tribal and prehistoric forms of image-making including rock carvings and cave paintings which she subtly alters so as to avoid repeating an exact sacred symbol out of its original context. In place of the traditional suits Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, Pollack substitutes Trees, Rivers, Birds, and Stones as a way of emphasizing tarot’s universality beyond fixed symbolic systems.