Sacred Isle

David Higgins's Sacred Isle arrived for review as loose A4 landscape art, and the reviewer's word was transfixing: a majors-only tarot of sacred island landscapes, self-published in 2007, the arcana rendered as places rather than figures. That substitution is the deck's whole argument, and it is a strong one: pilgrimage traditions have always mapped inner states onto holy geography, and an island, bounded, whole, reachable only by crossing, is practically the Major Arcana in landform. Majors-only suits the material; twenty-two destinations make a coherent sacred geography where seventy-eight would sprawl into an atlas. Landscape reading is its own discipline, mood and weather carrying what expression and gesture usually do, and it naturally favors contemplative use. It suits readers of the Celtic and island-monastic imagination, landscape painters and their admirers, majors-only readers, and anyone whose spiritual life includes actual coastlines. Figure-readers who need a human face to work with will find these shores beautiful but unpeopled.