AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I buy a new tarot book after casually researching it, I trust that the contents will provide insights to inspire my own writing. Although it has its merits in that regard due to fostering a couple of my recent essays, Lon Milo DuQuette’s Tarot Architect didn’t quite measure up overall.

Knowing DuQuette’s reputation as a Hermetic Qabalist, I was expecting a more thorough esoteric treatment of the cards than the one I found in the book. The most valuable parts for me were the intelligent yet easily-digestible analysis of the Cube of Space that received accolades from Mary K. Greer (this topic has eluded me for years since I first discovered it in the writing of Israel Regardie and Robert Wang), and the discussion of “elemental mixing” in the Aces, courts and numbered minor cards that accompanied his chapters on the Golden Dawn’s “Chaldean” wheel of zodiacal correspondences. The second of these is a subject I’ve explored in previous posts, and I did receive some fresh ideas from Tarot Architect.

But the lion’s share of the material is given over to coloring one’s own tarot cards using DuQuette’s instructions and the book’s printed black-and-white line drawings from the Tarot of Ceremonial Magic, his personal deck that is heavily influenced by the 16^th Century Enochian Magic of John Dee and Edward Kelley. I should have been tipped off by the word “architect” in the title. What I was anticipating was information related to the architecture of the tarot as documented in Book T, the Golden Dawn’s tarot curriculum that was assembled by the Order’s chief adept, MacGregor Mathers, and member Harriet Felkin, assisted by others including Florence Farr, Annie Horniman, Frederick Leigh Gardner, etc. Instead, the architecture covered is entirely that of the Tarot of Ceremonial Magic with virtually no explanation of the cards; the book is basically an instruction manual for duplicating the color scheme of DuQuette’s deck with suggestions for adding creative touches, most of which are strongly reminiscent of artistic features in the Thoth tarot.*

I have a passing interest in Enochian magic, but not enough to want to take a deep dive into deck development based on its principles, since as a graphic artist I wouldn’t be satisfied with just using DuQuette’s images as a “coloring book.” As the saying goes, this isn’t what I signed up for when I bought Tarot Architect. I’m too thoroughly immersed in the more respected of the published esoteric decks to derive much value from coloring my own.**

One thing I may do as an outgrowth of reading the chapter on the Hindu Tattwas is set to work on creating a portfolio of graphic symbols that encompasses all of the two-tone combinations in the book. This exercise appeals to both my mystical sensibilities and my love of color symbolism.

My conclusion is that Tarot Architect is primarily a treatise on deck creation (or, more accurately, replication) within prescribed design limits. For esoteric novices who want to put an individual stamp on their deck without having to draw and paint it from scratch, following DuQuette’s guidance will get them there while also giving them a basic grounding in card design features and color attributes with an Enochian slant. Except for the early chapters, it’s not a volume to be read as a comprehensive source of tarot knowledge since the sequential card sections later in the book are skeletal “cookie-cutter” affairs that give the barest of details in repetitive language and artwork that alter only a few words and pictures between cards.

For the most part, the bulk of the text was not so much written as “compiled.” I acknowledge that the goal was simplification, but this carves too close to the bone for me and I found myself skimming over the card-specific material. If you don’t intend to pursue the coloring regime, there is really no point in buying this book. (However, after reading it I’m likely to purchase his deck for some of its thoughtful [and frequently compelling] images since it has recently been republished.)

*I stand corrected. Appendix 1 presents an economical set of “Simple Divinatory Meanings” that aligns well with my own esoteric understanding of the cards, accompanied by a few “pleasant surprises.” It is for the most part a creative regurgitation of The Book of Thoth and the Golden Dawn’s Liber T on which DuQuette put his own well-informed spin, and it serves as a concise compendium of their definitions for those who don’t own them; therein lies a usefulness that is marginally worth the price of admission.

**The various “meditation exercises” with their breath-and-sound charging of the deck seem valuable, but I have been “living with the cards” (in Aleister Crowley’s pragmatic turn-of-phrase) for so long now that the significance of the images has already become deeply entrenched “within my inner house of cards.” DuQuette’s personal house of cards (which he acknowledges is a work-in-progress) is eerily reminiscent of my own tableau with Trump 11 (in my case Strength or Fortitude) as a “fulcrum” between an upper and lower division of the trump, court and pip cards, although mine is particularized differently.