First off, and I have to be open and transparent about my forthcoming new book.
I co-created and co-authored it with AI - ChatGPT in this case. We spent a period towards the end of 2025 on research and then wrote it in the first three months of 2026. We are now copy editing.
What It’s About
Most Tarot books help you read the cards.
This one aims to change the way you read and perceive what we think of as reality.
That is the simplest way I can describe The Chromatic Arcana.
A reader will arrive at this book in one of two states.
The first is the curious seeker. They sense there is more to the Tarot than prediction, card meanings, or neat psychological archetypes, but they cannot yet quite name what that ‘more’ is.
The second is the adept. They know the Major Arcana well. They know the correspondences, the symbolic sequence, perhaps even the Qabalistic scaffolding beneath it. They arrive with fluency and confidence, expecting depth perhaps, but not a structural surprise.
Both readers, whether novice or expert, tend to share one hidden assumption: that the Tarot is a finished system. Ancient, profound, elegant, yes. But complete.
A New Door Opens
The Chromatic Arcana opens a different door.
It treats the Tarot not as a sealed symbolic museum, but as a living architecture of consciousness. Not frozen. Not exhausted. Not done speaking.
That is where the journey begins.
At first, the familiar is gently unsettled. The traditional Tarot is not dismissed or mocked. Far from it. It is honoured as a foundational grammar. But respect does not require stagnation. Very quickly, the reader senses this is not going to be another reheated catalogue of meanings. The walls of the old symbolic house remain intact, but suddenly there are hidden staircases, new chambers, and windows where before there were only paintings.
Recognition turns into renewed curiosity.
Then something deeper happens. The reader stops asking only, ‘What does this card mean?’ and starts asking better questions, like ...
What faculty does this key awaken in me?
What mode of perception does it invoke?
What threshold of awareness does it open?
That shift is everything as the cards cease to be objects of interpretation and become portals, lenses, and cognitive postures. The reader is no longer merely reading symbols. They are being read by them.
That is the moment the book becomes initiatory with the introduction of the Half Keys. These are completely novel interstitial ‘keys between the keys’.
The canonical 22 are no longer treated as the final word. Missing transitions can be named. Hidden stages can be brought into view. Spaces between the keys, once implied but unspoken, become alive and navigable.
For the newcomer, this can feel liberating.
For the adept, it may feel deliciously disruptive.
Because the deeper permission being granted is this: the Tarot can evolve without losing its soul. That a radical idea helps the Tarot evolve which allows us to evolve too.
So as the symbolic system expands, so does the reader. This is not a book you can absorb through linear thought alone. It recruits other capacities: pattern recognition, symbolic fluency, contemplative attention, geometric imagination, intuitive synthesis. It asks the reader not just to learn new content, but to inhabit a different kind of mind.
By this point, they are no longer consuming meaning. They are participating in meaning-making. That is a very different relationship to a book, to a system, and indeed to consciousness itself.
Going Multidimensional
To help with this, the book shows how the Tarot can only be truly understood in 3D and 5D.
Gradually, the Tarot leaves the flat table. It stops being merely a deck and starts becoming an inner architecture. The keys are no longer just images to interpret, but functions to inhabit. The correspondences no longer feel like esoteric trivia but like living pathways through awareness.
The outer oracle becomes an inner navigational system.
And then another subtle revolution takes place. The reader is quietly invited into co-creation. They are not told to stand back and admire an inherited symbolic machine. They are invited to step inside it. To test it. To breathe with it. To see what happens when it is applied not only to divination, but to creativity, transformation, meditation, intelligence, and the future evolution of symbolic life.
This matters.
Too many esoteric systems become brittle because they are treated like relics. They are preserved so carefully they stop breathing. But symbols are not bones in a cabinet. They are more like seeds in a vault. They are waiting for the right conditions to germinate again.
What’s On and Off the Table?
That is what I hope this book offers.
Not a rebellion against the Tarot, but a renaissance within it.
So what journey does the reader actually take?
They begin with curiosity.
They move through the disorientation of the familiar.
They experience renewed wonder.
They enter a larger symbolic space.
They become participants in a living system.
They discover a more spacious way of thinking and perceiving.
And by the end, they are no longer simply trying to understand the Tarot. They are learning how to navigate consciousness with greater subtlety, creativity, and depth.
A devil’s advocate note belongs here too. This is not a conventional Tarot title, and it does ask something of the reader. It asks them to surrender certainty, to enjoy symbolic expansion, and to tolerate having the furniture rearranged in their inner temple. For the right reader, that will feel electric. For the wrong one, it may feel like turning up to a gift shop and finding a labyrinth.
I am perfectly at peace with that.
Because books should not only comfort. Sometimes they should initiate.
A Call for Beta Readers
And that leads me to an invitation.
I am now looking for a small number of beta readers for The Chromatic Arcana.
These are the kinds of readers I would especially love to hear from:
Tarot readers who know the traditional system well and are open to seeing it from a striking new angle.
Symbolists, mystics, meditators, and contemplatives who feel the Tarot may be more than a divinatory tool.
Thoughtful readers who enjoy bold frameworks, fresh correspondences, and books that ask them to think and feel in more than one dimension at once.
And perhaps especially those rare souls who do not mind having the furniture rearranged.
If that sounds like you, do let me know in the comments or drop me a note. I would love to gather a thoughtful circle of early readers willing to engage with the work before publication.
Not because the book is unfinished in spirit, but because living systems benefit from living eyes.
Oh, wow, those are brilliant questions, instead of just asking, What does this mean?
And makes me want to buy it. 🙂
I'm a novice at Tarot. I've had this on-and-off relarionship with it. And you laid out precisely why that might be so.
When questions are posed, the pull inches me toward it. Is that the kind of beta reader you'd like to have?
Oh and I love the way you gently invite❣️
Am I too late to the train?