Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Sinderella's note

Rachel Pollack's *Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom* is the symbolic deep-read on the tarot — the book every other tarot writer quietly references. Pollack was a poet, a fiction writer, a Jewish mystic, and a tarot scholar. Her writing on the Major Arcana is the closest thing tarot has to a sacred text. Sinderella keeps her copy on the folding table.

The long version

Rachel Pollack (1945-2023) wrote *Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom* — first published in two volumes in 1980, combined and reissued many times since — and gave the tarot tradition its closest thing to a sacred text. Pollack was a Jewish mystic, a published poet, a science-fiction novelist, a comic-book writer (she did Doom Patrol for DC), a trans rights activist, and a serious tarot scholar. Her writing on the Major Arcana is the deepest, most carefully argued, most beautifully written work in the entire tarot canon. Each card gets a 5-15 page essay — historical, mythic, psychological, mystical — that reads like a deeply educated friend explaining what the card has meant across cultures and what it might mean for you specifically. Modern tarot writers all reference Pollack. The book pairs with any RWS-style deck (it cites the Rider-Waite as the standard). It is *not* a beginner book — it's the book you graduate to after Greer's workbook. Pollack also wrote *Tarot Wisdom* (2008), which is more practical and more recent. Together they're the two-book Pollack library every serious reader eventually owns. Sinderella keeps both on the folding table. Saint Catherine of Siena (the mystic-writer-scholar) for the woman who wrote them.