In this handbook on the practice of sorcery using tarot cards, S. Rune Emerson utilizes the Rider Waite-Smith tradition of tarot art to teach the myriad practices of the Art Magical. Included in this book are: A modern look at sorcery through the eyes of the Rider Waite-Smith tarot cards and their derivatives, including laws and fundamentals of magic, and how magic actually works. An explanation of the twelve categories of commonly cast spells, the six kinds of magical initiation and quickening, and the four great tenets of a sorcerer's philosophy, all encoded within the Major Arcana. Methods and ritual practices which help you employ the basic principles of sorcery, and learn how to become a sorcerer. A series of spells and techniques crafted from the study of the Pip and Court cards, as well as appendices on group work and ritual tokens. And more! Any magician, whether long-experienced or just beginning, will find unique and useful information in these pages. If you want to learn how to use that tarot deck for more than just card games and fortune telling, this book is for you.

Demonstrates how to perform different types of card tricks with step-by-step instructions and photographs.

What Art Is Like is a comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art. It provides welcome relief from prevailing modes of explaining art that involve definitions, philosophical claims, and critical judgments put forth by third parties. Scrapping all such chatter, Miguel Tamen’s aphoristic lark with aesthetic questions proceeds by taking its technical vocabulary only from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. According to Tamen, it would be ridiculous to think of poems or paintings or films or any variety of artistic production as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about many other relevant and important matters. Tamen offers a series of analogies and similes to help us imagine these connected experiences. One, taken from the analytical table of contents where the book is writ small, suggests that “understanding a poem is like understanding a cat; neither ever says anything back and you can’t keep a conversation with them. All art is like this, but not only art is like this; nature, the past, numbers are also like this.” Tamen takes up many central issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including the connection between art and having fuzzy ideas about art, the mistake of imagining that art-decisions are put forth by art-courts where you are both judge and jury, and the notion that what happens with art also happens to you.