Customer Reviews

Tarot of the Thousand and One Nights

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These beautiful miniatures were originally paintings done by Leon Carre for Sir Richard Burton's late nineteenth century translation of 1001 Arabian Nights when these stories were published in twelve volumes in the late 1920s. They were published more recently as the 1001 Nights tarot deck, which may be why they have more depth than many decks. I am a collector of tarot decks and have taught tarot at community colleges and in small groups that often include artists and poets as I live in a university community, so I have many decks and I often recommend decks to my students that I think are uniquely suited to them. This one is romantic, exotic, and exquisite.

Few tarot decks are this beautiful, even if they have more specific tarot symbolism. While this may be a bit difficult for a beginning reader to manage, if the student is past the beginning stage, some decks can be too simple to fire the imagination, and this one remains a joy to use. After years of doing tarot, I believe the more beautiful the deck, the richer the impact on the creative imagination of the reader.

The small book that accompanies it is fine but I would have liked a fuller explanation although that may have made for a very large book. The cards are small enough to fit comfortably in my hands when doing the different spreads.

I recommend that my students keep a tarot journal and use them daily and I find that these illustrations help connect with the truth of the heart. Other decks that are also beautiful are the Fairytale Tarot, the Golden Tarot, and if you like "arty" decks, the Klimt Tarot, which was designed around Gustav Klimt's Art Nouveau paintings.

This Tarot deck is a lesson in frustration. The title sounds very promising, and scans of the images by Leon Carre made my mind up-they are magnificent. But therein lies the problem. This kind of art, depicting elaborate carpets and intricate textiles, is chock-full of detail, and these cards are just too small to do it justice.I find myself squinting a lot!

Another major gripe is the images. Most of them don't correlate with the traditional Tarot meanings. Others "kind of" correlate-like the Empress. The image IS of an Empress, grandly-dressed and
sitting on a throne, but she is so far away she is impersonal, also she appears to have none of the natural attributes-leaves, fruit, flowers-usually depicted with that card. Most of the cards appear to have been selected at random.

Perhaps most damning of all, but connected to the imagery problem,is the total lack of information about the pictures and the stories they depict. There is the paltry little white booklet that Lo Scarabeo seems to include with all their decks, and that is all.

A Thousand and One Nights is surely a gift to anyone interested in tying Tarot imagery up with story, but it just hasn't been done. It's a pity, because this could have been a great deck.Bigger cards would have been a good start.

If you do want a Tarot that unites the images-more or less-with fairy tales, not just Arabian ones but European, Chinese and Japanese ones too, may I suggest the newly-published Fairytale Tarot. It is first-class.

This is a beautiful deck! I have just started using it for readings for myself and others, and it seems that I am able to make intuitive connections about relationships with this deck. The pictures are sensuous and detailed, and not frightening at all, and the readings I have done so far seem accurate in the issues they bring to light.

The "Tarot of the Thousand & One Nights" promises much much more than it does give. Being of oriental background i was really excited at the perspective of discovering the partnership Tarot and the stories of the 1001 Nights. The pictures are lovely with a frame that looks like a Persian carpet, yet one needs a big magnifying class in order to grasp the scene, let alone enjoy the details of the graphics. Though i am by now used to the Lo Scarabeo booklet with its multilingual interpretations very minimal interpretations, i still expected - perhaps wrongly that they will at least mention which stories correspond to which card, if not the whole story, at least the title, so i could go and look for it elsewhere... After all that is really the interesting aspect of this deck : relating the Classical Tarot with the symbolism of the stories chosen from 1001 Nights - a partnership that is really successful in the Rumi Tarot for example. To finish on a more positive note, the deck is not expensive, the size is easy to handle and Amazon sends really quickly and i got it in perfect conditions