Waking Up the World Soul

The Shining Tribe Tarot was created by Rachel Pollack, acclaimed author of numerous books on the Tarot. Out of print for several years, The Shining Tribe Tarot is now available again, in a revitalized and expanded form, which Llewellyn is proud to release for a new millennium.

Drawing on her extensive travels to sacred sites around the world for imagery and meaning, Ms. Pollack has created a deck that returns the Tarot to its shamanistic and prehistoric roots, enabling the reader to explore his or her personal spiritual path through life. For example, though The Shining Tribe Tarot follows the traditional Tarot structure of seventy-eight cards, the human artifacts of the four suits of the Minor Arcana—Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles—are replaced with aspects of nature: Trees, Rivers, Birds, and Stones. Similarly, the Court cards of each suit are replaced by the Vision cards: Place, Knower, Gift, and Speaker.

In the following excerpts, Rachel Pollack gives some of the history of The Shining Tribe Tarot, and a myth for its origins:

from shining woman to shining tribe
Based on the tribal and prehistoric art from around the world, and rooted in the wisdom and tradition of the Tarot itself, The Shining Tribe Tarot grows from an earlier deck called Shining Woman. In that deck the name derived from the card of Shining Woman, itself based on the World card in the traditional Tarot.

The World card has always shown a nude dancing woman (sometimes with suggestion of an hermaphrodite). She represents the perfected spirit, the person who begins as a Fool and travels through the varied experiences to discover freedom in union with divine truth. For the Shining Woman, I drew on the sacred traditions found in many cultures all over the world, of the cosmos as a single being. Some mythologies describe this figure as a Goddess or God, others as a perfect human.

Shining Tribe uses ancient prehistoric images from the very origins of art. The rock paintings and carvings of Africa, Australia, and America, the cave art of France and Spain and Siberia—all these are both the origins of art and the ancestors of Tarot cards. Shining Tribe takes us back to these ancestors. the myth of the shining tribe

Here then is a story of the Tarot’s origin. It makes no claim to be historically true. Then again, it makes no claim to be false either.

The earliest humans knew the Spirits as seven bright figures of golden light and gleaming darkness. They appeared to those most ancient of ancestors all over the world as were known everywhere as the Shining Tribe. They could be seen emerging from the walls of caves at night, or in the sky where they outshone the stars. They helped humans understand fire, and what plants to eat, and how to make tools, and how to skin the animals they killed. Their greatest gift came when they touched certain people with the power to see and understand the world as a parade of images and stories. Inspired by the Shining Tribe, people began to paint on rock and cave walls—magnificent bulls and horses, vibrant people with heads of pure light, bird-headed women, even abstract symbols that would carry wisdom to new generations.

Those whom the Spirits touched carried the radiance of words and knowledge. They became the seers and journeyers and they shone with truth. Though they did not leave their families they, too, became part of the Shining Tribe.

Many centuries passed. The original images, once alive, hardened into doctrines and rigid rules. The radiance had drained from them. The Spirits decided to give the images in a new way, one that would preserve their purity and at the same time draw people even more deeply into them.

They came to creative humans while they slept and breathed their radiance into the humans’ dreams. Inspired, those people took old images from many sources and placed them on cards. You could do many things with the cards—play a game, teach lessons, memorize information, code ideas, tell stories, learn about the very structures of existence—even predict the future. Most of all, you actually could use them as doorways back to the Spirits themselves. And they could never be corrupted, because the spirits had inspired people in different places and different times, so that there was no single set of images with absolute doctrines. And no matter how many people set out theories about the cards and their meanings, the pictures themselves would always dance away, ready to accept the next person to approach with openness and love of the images.

Those who use the cards to enter the sacred world receive the radiance of the Spirits. They themselves become the Shining Tribe of diviners. This deck is my small gift to that tribe, through all their generations and in all cultures.