Ascension

Elizabeth Berg's twenty-two card Ascension belongs to the majors-only school with a metaphysical brief: spiritual evolution as the through-line, the arcana read as stages of ascent rather than episodes of fortune. The record is thin beyond that, placing it among the catalog's under-documented spiritual decks, but the format itself speaks clearly: a trumps-only deck always argues that the big transitions are the only cards that matter. Ascension language, growth upward through levels of consciousness, was a defining register of 1990s metaphysical publishing, and the deck documents that vocabulary in card form. Read it as a ladder rather than a wheel: draws locate a rung. It suits majors-only readers of the contemplative kind, collectors of nineties new age material, and practitioners whose frame is development rather than divination. Readers who want the full deck's texture of dailiness, the pips' small weathers, should remember this instrument deliberately left them out.