The final section of the book is occasioned by Paul's effort to know his True Will, as goaded by Crowley. Still, it is Crowley who becomes Paul's principal guide in the animation zone. Crowley is not quite as spot-on, and is given misogyny as a disproportionate keynote of his character. Anthony gets Waite's diction just right, to the point where I suspected him of simply cribbing from Waite's work for some of the dialogue. As Paul explores it, he encounters simulations of significant historical designers, commenters, and patrons of the Tarot, including Filippo Maria Visconti, Arthur Edward Waite, and Aleister Crowley. The planet's 'animation zone,' in which thought-forms take on physical reality, seems to be Anthony's science-fictional conceit for what occultists would call the astral plane. The general plot concerns Paul's investigation of strange phenomena on the colonized planet Tarot. It is not reflected in Rowena Morrill's cover art, which otherwise accurately shows a scene from chapter 7 of the book, with Paul confronting a dragon who represents Temptation. He is very explicitly an octaroon identifiable as 'black' to his colleagues, a point of occasional relevance to the plot. The protagonist Brother Paul is an adherent of the Holy Order of Vision, a religious body on a future Earth that has been depopulated and energy-rationed into pre-industrial levels of technology, while most of humanity has departed into exoplanetary colonization efforts. But it was just bad enough that I had genuine reason to worry that I would lose that thread. God of Tarot was good enough that I went ahead and ordered an inexpensive copy of Vision of Tarot directly after finishing it, so that I wouldn't lose the thread of the story. There is nothing like a resolution of the larger plot at the conclusion of the book. The author's front matter is very clear that the 'trilogy' is really a single work divided into three volumes for convenience of production and sales, and the text bears that out.

Show More recently, I went ahead and read this first of the three books.

God of Tarot by Piers Anthony