Rachel Pollack

I first became aware of her through her writings on tarot, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in a psychological interpretation of tarot. Her Shining Woman Tarot is a deck of her own design, implementing her own insights into tarot. I’m not fond of her artwork, but I like the deck anyway.
More recently I’ve read two of her sf novels, Unquenchable Fire, and Temporary Agency and I highly recommend them to anyone interested in potential future spiritual transformations. They’re set in a common future world, where in our future a spiritual transformation has taken place and the majority philosophy is of earth-centered spirituality and of religious ecstacy with a Witchy/New Agey flavor.

Unquenchable Fire is, in my opinion, the more insightful of the two. It is a chronicle of a woman who is made pregnant by a divine agency and who is not happy about it. It covers the duration of her pregnancy and labor with a flash into her past and a preview of a few future events with her daughter.

It has some interesting things to say about the nature of religious experience and how we seek different things from it.

Temporary Agency, on the other hand, is a detective novel with minor lesbian elements. I liked it, but it didn’t shake my world view or open up any new vistas.

(This is reposted from my static website and backdated.)