This is one of the best resources for understanding the Tarot's mystical symbolism. It includes an updated history based on Place's The Tarot: History Symbolism and Divination, which "Booklist" said " may be the best book ever written on ...the tarot." This edition adds color illustrations of key works and comparative illustrations from the Renaissance, from alchemical texts, from ancient Egypt, and from occult sources. It views the Tarot as a 500-year visual conversation between artists, mystics, and occultists. The work is based on the 2010 Tarot exhibition at the LA Craft and Folk Art Museum, curated by Place, and includes the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, the 1st Italian printed deck, the oldest Tarot of Marseille, The 1st occult reference, the 1st occult Tarot, the 1st modern Tarot, the 1st New Age Tarot, and examples from popular modern decks including the Twilight Tarot, the Legacy Tarot, the Deviant Moon Tarot, the Annotated Tarot of the Sevenfold Mystery, and Place's Alchemical Tarot.

Previous studies have viewed Lenz's religion as a largely pathological phenomenon that was linked to the temporary lapses into insanity that he experienced after he was banished, at Goethe's insistence, from the court and city of Weimar. Pope reveals, however, that a dynamic shift in Lenz's faith had occurred four years before the debacle of Weimar. Coherent statements during those four years concerning the articles of his new faith, and a consistent application of faith to questions of poetry and dramatic theory, indicate that Lenz's contribution to the literary revolution of the 1770s was conditioned as much by a personal religious renewal as by enthusiasm for the aims and ideals of his generation. Theologically, Lenz's new convictions followed a path that led away from the neology of the late Enlightenment and pointed not only back to conservative traditions but also forward to the Christology of more modern times.

There had been rumors in the air, for some months, of a strangely mysterious organization, said to be spreading over the Southern States, which added to the usual intangibility of the secret society an element of the grotesque superstition unmatched in the history of any other.... Here and there throughout the South, by a sort of sporadic instinct, bands of ghostly horsemen, in quaint and horrible guise, appeared, and admonished the lazy and trifling of the African race... -from "Chapter XXVII: A New Institution" Subtitled "A Novel of the South During Reconstruction," this 1879 bestseller, by a participant in that great social experiment, is the barely fictionalized account of the career of a Northern lawyer in North Carolina after the Civil War. A champion of the poor and landless of any race, and a keen observer of the dilemmas facing uneducated Negroes in the postwar period, Tourgée offers us an important eyewitness account of one of the most tumultuous eras of American history, one that continues to influence the course of the American experiences of race and class to this day.