PICTURES FROM THE HEART

By Sandra A. Thompson

a review by John Gilbert

Pictures from the Heart by Sandra A. Thompson (ISBN 0-312-29128-0) is a tarot dictionary published by St. Martins Press under the St. Martin's Griffin label.

Part One of this book is an introduction to tarot entitled Power Tarot. The author outlines several powerful resources and methods for reading tarot cards. This is a small section of the book comprising about fifty pages of useful information for students, readers and teachers.

Part Two is a four hundred page annotated dictionary of tarot terms and symbols. Make no mistake about it, this is not a novel nor your average tell them what the cards mean tarot book. This is a resource book, a reference book, and a handy guide to symbol interpretation.

One of the things that happens to tarot readers the more we study and work with the cards is we start dreaming in tarot symbols. It just happens. Ask average tarot readers about their dreams and you can identify the central card in their dream from the symbols they describe. It's normally not the cards we dream about, but the symbols in the cards.

Keeping a Tarot Diary where we can also record our dreams helps us overcome this weakness not to see and understand ourselves. Using a good reference book to understand the symbols also helps. In my opinion, Pictures from the Heart is a good reference book to be used for this purpose.

By understanding the symbols in the tarot cards we become better tarot readers. Certain symbols seem to jump out at us in particular readings. It's those symbols that yield the most useful information for our clients at the time. Understanding these same symbols in our dreams helps us move along our own spiritual journey. Having a useful reference book handy to assist us in this analysis is of inestimable value. Pictures of the Heart is such a book.

I may never read this book from cover-to-cover, but my guess is I'll refer to it many times each week. On the other hand, someday when I have a few hours...

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