Tarot of Eden

Alika Lindbergh's painting with Maud Kristen's direction takes the Tarot of Eden to the garden itself: paradise-themed, seventy-eight cards working Eden's symbolic inventory, innocence, temptation, expulsion and the long memory of the gate. French tarot's painterly wing produced it, Lindbergh being a fantastical realist of genuine reputation and Kristen a prominent French clairvoyant, the artist-seer pairing in the Continental manner. Eden is tarot-native material wearing its original costume: the Lovers card was always the garden's scene, and a whole deck of paradise runs the arcana through humanity's first symbolic address, every card somewhere between the planting and the flaming sword. The French register keeps it lush rather than doctrinal. It suits readers drawn to biblical-mythic imagery without church furniture, French-deck collectors, admirers of Lindbergh's visionary painting, and anyone whose questions are secretly about what was lost and whether the gate has a gap. The fallen world's other decks fill the remaining shelves, appropriately.