Rachel Pollack and Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Rachel Pollack tarot writing reshaped how English-language readers learn the cards, above all through Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, a two-volume study first published in 1980 that remains one of the most widely recommended tarot books ever written. Pollack, an American novelist and tarot teacher, brought a literary and Jungian sensibility to a field that had mostly produced quick-reference meaning lists before her.

A Different Kind of Tarot Book

Where earlier popular guides offered a paragraph of fixed meanings per card, Pollack built sustained essays that moved through each trump's mythological background, its place on the Tree of Life, and its psychological resonance. She treated the Rider-Waite-Smith deck's imagery as worth genuinely close reading rather than quick lookup. Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom assumed its reader wanted to understand a card, not merely memorise it, an approach that influenced a generation of later tarot authors who followed her lead into longer, more interpretive card studies. The book's two volumes, covering the Major and Minor Arcana respectively, remain in print more than four decades after their first publication.

Rachel Pollack Tarot: Myth, Psychology and the Cards

Pollack drew on comparative mythology and Jungian psychology throughout her writing. She read The Fool's journey through the Major Arcana as a structure comparable to the hero's journey found across world mythology, treating individual cards as archetypal stations along that path rather than isolated fortune-telling symbols. This approach sat alongside, rather than directly descended from, the Qabalistic correspondence systems built by orders like the one discussed in The A∴A∴ and the Thoth Tarot as a Teaching Tool. Pollack's method drew more from literary and psychological criticism than from ceremonial magic, giving her books a different texture from Golden Dawn-descended teaching even when covering some of the same cards.

Her Own Deck

Beyond her writing, Pollack created the Shining Tribe Tarot, a deck she both designed and illustrated, which replaced much of the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith iconography with imagery drawn from a wide range of world cultures and her own symbolic invention. The deck reflected the same impulse that shaped her criticism: a conviction that the tarot's structure could carry genuinely new image sets without losing its underlying function, rather than requiring every deck to restate the same seventy-eight pictures with minor stylistic variation.

A Prolific and Varied Career

Pollack's work extended well beyond tarot. She was also an acclaimed science fiction novelist, winning the World Fantasy Award for her novel Godmother Night, and she wrote comics for a period, including a notable run on DC Comics' Doom Patrol in the early 1990s. That series let her explore identity and transformation with unusual depth for mainstream comics of that era. This range across genres and media marks her as one of the more literarily accomplished writers to take tarot seriously as a subject, rather than a figure who moved into comics or fiction only after an established tarot career.

A Legacy Still in Print

Pollack died in 2023, and her body of published work, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom chief among it, continues to be assigned by tarot teachers and read by newcomers as a serious entry point into the cards. Her insistence that a tarot book could be genuinely literary, drawing on myth and depth psychology without becoming either a dry reference manual or a mystical tract, remains one of the clearest influences on how tarot is written about today, inside and outside any single esoteric order's tradition.

A Different Starting Point from the Orders in This Series

Most of the figures and orders covered elsewhere in this series trace their tarot teaching back to a lodge, a grade structure or a founder's claimed hidden source, from the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor's correspondence courses to the Golden Dawn's examination papers. Pollack's authority rested on none of that institutional scaffolding. She wrote as an independent novelist and critic, citing mythographers like Joseph Campbell and psychologists in Jung's tradition rather than any order's internal curriculum, and her credibility came from the quality of her close reading rather than membership in a lineage. That difference matters for readers trying to map how tarot knowledge actually spreads: alongside the lodge-to-lodge transmission this series traces elsewhere, a second channel ran through ordinary publishing, open to any careful writer willing to look hard at seventy-eight pictures and ask what they meant.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Rachel Pollack's most influential tarot book? Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980), a two-volume study that treats each card through myth, psychology and Qabalistic symbolism in extended essay form.

Did Rachel Pollack create her own tarot deck? Yes, the Shining Tribe Tarot, which she designed and illustrated with imagery drawn from world cultures alongside her own symbolic invention.

Was Pollack active outside tarot writing? Yes. She was an award-winning science fiction novelist and wrote comics, including a notable run on DC Comics' Doom Patrol.

Is Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom still relevant today? Yes, it remains widely recommended and in print, still used as a serious introduction to the Major and Minor Arcana.