The Sacred India Tarot: Inspired by Indian Mythology and Epics (With 78 Cards + 4 Bonus Cards)

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The Sacred India Tarot is unique in its synthesis of two mystical and meditational streams of world culture - the Tarot and Indian mythology. They blend amazingly well without compromising their own truths and cultural integrity. This is the first and only Tarot deck to work solely within the parameters of sacred Indian mythology almost the only living mythology today. Millions of people daily worship, or meditate upon, the deities depicted within. This gives The Sacred India Tarot an unmatched spiritual power and contemporary resonance.

The Major Arcana depicts the archetypal forms of the gods and goddesses of India. The Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, form two of the themes depicted in the suits of the Minor Arcana. Other themes in the suits include the life of the Buddha, and the great love story of the culture-that of Shiva and Parvati.

This stunningly beautiful deck is designed for readings as well as for meditation. The comprehensive, knowledgeable text in the accompanying Handbook explains the illustrations as well as their context within the Tarot. It provides insights on various aspects of Tarot, Indian mythology, card meanings, doing readings, and also includes unique spreads using Indian symbolism.

Jane Adams (a personal statement) I was a child born with a highly developed gift, and became a full-time artist when I was just five years old. I began to draw the human landscape - faces, people, expressions absorbing myself in this for several hours each day, filling up big drawing-books of cheap paper, as fast as my mother made them for me. My first teachers were the Italian Renaissance masters my parents encouraged me to copy the beautiful madonnas and angels from reproductions in books.

When I grew up, I made my living drawing and painting portraits. In many of these, a 'soul connection' awoke between myself and the sitter and the work entered a subtly different dimension. My ability to draw accurately anything and anyone I observed became frustrating, the tantalising surface of an unexpressed inner world.

So, being deeply fascinated by the creative process itself and propelled inwards by the pain of life, I began to look at my dreams and to follow the scent. An extraordinary path of creativity opened up, combining drawing, painting, writing and music. To 'unlearn' my clever drawing habit, I drew like a child and with my left hand. After a year or two of this, I discovered that my 'new' map of inner archetypes was not confined to my personal life. It was a key to wisdom teachings from the ancient world. The metaphysical laws of nature, reincarnation and Karma revealed themselves experientially, and I knew that I have never died.

The saga of the birth of The Sacred India Tarot is rather unusual – the result of seemingly unrelated events in the fabric of life and living, and proof that some things are simply meant to 'be'.

One day in August 2000, Rohit mentioned to me that his love affair with the Tarot was now more than ten years old and he had, in the interim, studied a large number of Tarot decks. He had worked out the basic structure for a Tarot deck to emerge from India the cradle of eastern spirituality. I knew that Rohit, being a mythologist and a polymath, had more than an adequate knowledge and experience base to develop a deck based on Indian mythology- something that had not been attempted before. He mentioned that Indian literature and spirituality lent itself so magnificently to the Tarot that, in the Minor Arcana, each suit could tell a story and that too, in sequence. What's more, the story naturally matched the Minor Arcana sequence and did not have to be 'bent' to fit it. This was rare and, perhaps, the one deck that had managed this well in the past was The Mythic Tarot.

Now, the question arose of illustrating the deck. We needed an artist who was familiar with both the Tarot as well as Indian mythology. This was not an easy task. The Indian artists we met showed a deep interest in the subject but, unfortunately, had no knowledge of the Tarot. So, the project was kept on the backburner. The next year, a chance encounter put the wind in its sails again.

In May 2001, I was on a business visit in London. At dinner with a UK publisher, I met Jane who was also at the table. At first, I could not converse much with Jane but once the business talk was over and out of the way, I turned to Jane and asked her what she did. To my utter surprise, she mentioned that she was an artist deeply interested in Indian mythology and the Kabbalah. I then asked if I could visit her studio to see some of her work.

The Tarot is a system for raising consciousness.

Externally, it manifests in the form of a deck or pack of cards that are usually 78 in number. The Tarot has multiple uses. The most popular is to serve as a predictor of the future; that is also its least significant aspect. It is a tool for generating answers to life-questions, a trigger to intuition and creativity, an aid to meditation, as well as a complete spiritual path or process in itself. The Tarot defies easy classification as its uses continue to mutate as societies change.

The most intriguing and significant aspect of the Tarot is its universality. It's applicable across historical time and cultural differences. This is not a new insight. One new Tarot pack currently emerges every week of the year, linked invariably to some cultural or historical theme. It is Protean to an incredible degree. The Tarot resonates with archetypal imagery; indeed it is archetypal itself, and is so inherently compatible with mythic structure that it seems as if this was deliberately designed to be so. It brings to the surface latent and unexpressed aspects of mind and psyche, which is why its answers are so relevant and germane. In more objective terms, one may venture to say that the "Tarot is a schematic substratum that arouses the imagination and projects into the schema, the images and thoughts that dominate the subconscious. By surfacing these thoughts or images and interpreting them in the knowledge of the Tarot, we learn to understand ourselves better." I have come to realise that the intuitive, predictive power of the Tarot its foresight - flows from what the classical world called the 'Gates of Horn'.

The ancient Greeks held that visions and dreams, practically synonyms, were not all of equal value. Some were significant and true, while most others were irrelevant and deluding.