In the last few months I felt like two people fighting to write a review. The Game of Saturn, Decoding the Sola-Busca tarocchi by author Peter Mark Adams (Scarlet Imprint) is a tough nut to crack. The Game of Saturn is the first extensive scientific research in the English language on this rather special historical tarot deck, but that is also where my difficulty lay: I am not just a tarot reader. I am a historian as well and both parts of my brain read the book in a different way. After starting over several times I finally decided which course to take and this is the result. The Game of Saturn might just be the most talked about book of the last year in what you could loosely call ‘the historical tarot community’. With his thesis esotericist, tarot reader and professional energy worker Peter Mark Adams delivered the first scientifically charged book on ‘that weird deck’, which also happens to be the oldest surviving complete tarot – and a museum piece at that. Up until now historical tarot readers had scarce materials about decks older than the Waite Smith, and the Sola Busca in particular, and there’s still a lot…
