The U.K,’s Scarlent Imprint has announced the February 2017 publication of The Game of Saturn by Peter Mark Adams. This is the first book-length, scholarly study of the Renaissance’s Sola-Busca tarot. The publisher’s site states:
“Beneath its beautifully decorated surface, its imagery ranges from the obscure to the grotesque; we encounter scenes of homoeroticism, wounding, immolation and decapitation redolent of hidden meanings, violent transformations and obscure rites.
“The clues embedded within the cards reveal a dark Gnostic grimoire replete with pagan theurgical and astral magical rites. Careful analysis demonstrates that the presiding deity of this ‘cult object’ is none other than the Gnostic demiurge in its most archaic and violent form: the Afro-Levantine serpent-dragon, Ba’al Hammon, also known as Cronus and Saturn, though more notoriously as the biblical Moloch, devourer of children.
“Within the violent and sorcerous milieu of the elite families of the Italian Renaissance, the pagan vision of a theurgically enlightened elite mutated into its dark shadow – a Saturnian brotherhood, operating within a cosmology of predation which sought to utilise the draconian current to preserve elite wealth, power and control. This development marks the birth of an ‘illumined elite’ over three centuries before Adam Weishaupt’s ‘Illuminati.’ The deck captures the essence of this magical tradition and constitutes a Western terma whose talismanic properties may serve to establish an initiatory link with the current. It is very much the tarot of the Archons, physical proof of a cult of Saturn.
“As befits the subject, we have prepared our most ambitious and physically imposing book to date; printed in full colour, extensively illustrated and sumptuously bound. ”
Edition details
Quarto (280 x 222 mm)
312 pp printed in full colour throughout
Limited to 800 standard hardback copies and 71 fine exemplars.
The standard ‘Algol’ edition of 800 copies bound in black shantung cloth with imperial purple endpapers: £66 plus postage.
The fine ‘Drakon’ edition of 71 copies handbound in quarter black python and shantung with custom marbled endpapers, gilt edged, finished with a silk ribbon and enclosed in a solander box: £275 plus postage
Due to the format there will be no paperback or digital edition of this title.
To pre-order The Game of Saturn, please follow this link: http://scarletimprint.com/books/the-game-of-saturn
