The Book of Séances: A Guide to Divination and Speaking to Spirits

Tarot artist Goodchild (The Antique Anatomy Tarot) delivers a generous grab bag of strategies for connecting with the spirits of the dead. She explains that anyone with patience, dedication, and compassion can learn to perform séances, use tools of divination, and interpret occult signs and messages. Discussing death rituals in ancient Egypt, Madagascar, and Tibet, she offers detailed advice on how to hold séances, enumerating the pros and cons of conducting them in churches, graveyards, or parks and urging readers to summon spirits by focusing one’s “intention” on the spirit one wishes to summon. She provides a bounty of alternative methods for receiving messages from the beyond, including reading tea leaves, analyzing randomly chosen passages in books, and interpreting dominoes. For example, Goodchild explains that cartomancy involves divining messages from tarot cards, and she outlines spreads—or card configurations—readers can use to glean meaning. Goodchild’s impressive variety of divination techniques that encompass the common and obscure, paired with straightforward instructions for interpretation and execution, makes for a bountiful volume that practitioners will find easy to follow and customize. Readers of the occult will want to check this out. Agent: Meg Thompson, Thompson Literary. (Nov.)