Tarot

About the Tarot series

On the planet Tarot, colonized by a breakaway religious sect, the eighty-odd cards of the tarot deck are literal, physical realities: each card corresponds to an actual place, animator, or archetypal force that colonists can enter and interact with directly, turning centuries of occult symbolism into a navigable landscape. Brother Paul, a young man sent to investigate reports of a self-proclaimed god on the planet, journeys through this literalized card-scape while grappling with genuine questions about the nature of religious experience, the psychology of belief, and whether the powerful, godlike entity he encounters is a fraud, a delusion, or something authentically transcendent.

Piers Anthony wrote the trilogy as a serious engagement with comparative religion and Jungian psychology as much as a science-fiction adventure, drawing on the tarot's traditional symbolism (the Fool, the Hanged Man, the Tower) as genuine philosophical and psychological material rather than set dressing. It's denser and more overtly intellectual than his more purely commercial series, structured as one continuous quest across the three volumes rather than three separate adventures.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with God of Tarot. The trilogy is a single continuous story following Brother Paul's investigation and spiritual journey, so the three books should be read in sequence rather than independently.

A one-volume collected edition titled simply Tarot was later published, gathering the trilogy together rather than adding new content — readers should treat it as an omnibus of the same three books, not a fourth entry.