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Here is a list of online divination books which I have found over the years. The catch is that with the exception of the Kent book on Tea Leaves, the Halliday book on Greek Divination, and the Legge book on the I Ching, all of these books are inane, stupid, overwrought, and pretty much worthless. Lenormand's books are a case in point. She was probably the most famous card reader in the 19th century and counted the Empress Josephine among her clients. She spent the rest of her life trading upon this association (apparently no one cared that her fortune-telling skills hadn't prevented certain people from ending up divorced, dead, or exiled to an island in the middle of the Atlantic).
Lenormand's books exhibit all the weaknesses of most card divination books at their worst, namely that she concentrates on "what the cards mean" and little else. What the cards (or the tea leaves or the runes or the astrological signs) "mean", of course, inevitably varies from one human being to another, and what works for one person will not necessarily work for another.
The tarot books listed below are all sublimely silly and don't offer any kind of helpful information about working with the cards on a rational or practical basis. Arthur Edward Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot is a case in point. This ridiculously bad book has probably done more damage the whole idea of card divination than anything else ever written. His commentary on Pamela Colman Smith's illustrations are full of portentous obfuscations, occult claptrap, and preposterous dead ends. (Further details on Waite's idiocy will be delineated in my upcoming Tarot Unbound.) The one and only thing we can thank Waite for was his decision to ask a genius like Smith to design a new tarot deck.
Nevertheless, all these books are valuable, if only as examples of how not to practice divination. Read for amusement purposes only.
Alliette. Le petit oracle des dames (1800's).
Alliette. Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots (1783).
Anonymous. The Oraculum, or Napoleon Buonaparte's book of fate (1913).
Bosc, Ernest. Glossaire raisonné de la divination, de la magie, et de l'occultisme (1910).
Halliday, W. R. Greek divination: a study of its methods and principles by W. R. Halliday (1913).
Kent, Cicley. Telling fortunes by tea leaves (1922).
Leadbeater, C. W. (Charles Webster). Clairvoyance (1903).
Lenormand, Marie-Anne Adélaïde. Le grand jeu de société et pratiques secrètes (1800's).
Lenormand, Marie-Anne Adélaïde. Les oracles sibyllins, ou la suite des souvenirs prophétiques (1817).
Lenormand, Marie-Anne Adélaïde. L'oracle parfait, ou le passe temps des dames: art de tirer les cartes avec explication. (1875).
Legge, James, translator. The I Ching (1899). Other information about the I Ching can be found at I Ching on the Net.
Mathers, S. L. MacGregor. The tarot (1888).
Nicolaides, Jean. Les livres de divination (1889).
Ouspensky, P.D. The symbolism of the tarot (1913).
Papus (Gérard Encausse), translated by A. P. Morton. The tarot of the bohemians (1892).
Shipton. Mother Shipton's gipsy fortune teller and dream book: with Napoleon's Oraculum (1890).
Waite, Arthur Edward. The pictorial key to the tarot (1910), text also available at Wikisource. Illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith (and the illustrations are what count!).
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One final note: the New York Public Library has a large collection of public domain divination books, many of which seem to be unique copies (including, for example, the 16th century Italian cartomancy book Le sorti di Francesco Marcolino, which is the sort of divination text I would love to take a look at). The NYPL is one of the libraries which Google is currently digitizing. I am hoping that within the next few years people will be able to access books like this at the Google Book Search site. Every so often I go to this site and do a title word search to see what appears (at the moment only one book--Occultism Simplified (1921) by Willis F. Whitehead--come up from the search word "tarot"). But when I use other search words such as fortune telling, fortune teller, divination, crystal, cards, cartomancy, fate, astrology, astrologer, tea leaves, oracle, destiny, prediction, prophetic, and so on, I sometimes find interesting texts. At the moment not much is available, but I hope that more divination texts will appear in the future.
At the Gallica search site, I've found interesting text using search words such as cartomancie, cartes, divination, prédiction, oracle, astrologie, etc.
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