A Wonderful deck

This is a brightly coloured deck with Rider-Waite influences and a wiccan slant. You don't have to totally understand wicca as all tarot readers know, its what you feel intuitively that counts! I don't understand wicca but still use this deck as my main reading deck. I love the Death card - so different from the archetypical skeleton on a horse that many decks show; Robin Wood's grim reaper dressed in a beautiful red robe. The Devil card showing two people chained in a tunnel to a treasure chest with a chink of the light at the end of the tunnel, again very different from the usual Devil card with an actual devil taking centre stage. I found 4 Swords to be very calming even though swords are"triumph through adversity".<br /><br />I must say that I (and maybe its me!) found that some of the cards looked like celebs - 7 wands (Kenneth Brannagh); 7 swords (Sean Bean); Wheel of Fortune (Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls). As I said, maybe its me!<br /><br />Two good books to accompany this deck would be Anthony Louis - Tarot Plain and Simple but better still, is The Robin Wood Tarot - The Book, which goes into more detail of the author's belief in wicca and how she has incorporated this into her deck e.g. looking at The Empress I didn't realise that the eight spokes on the spinnng wheel represents the quarters and cross-quarters of the wiccan year and am having a little wiccan insight as I read the book and compare the cards.<br /><br />Enjoyable deck - do give it a try.<br /><br />

A nice little companion book

Only 55 pages long this is a little gem that i enjoyed reading but I can only recommend it as a companion to 'Gods and myths of northern europe' (see my reviews) or something similar. This is not suitable for a first time reader of the old Gods as it doesnt give you enough information.

More than I bargained for...

I realise that I didn't read the description properly before ordering this volume. I'm embarking (as a pure dilettant) on a course of reading to a/ Rediscover the magic of the Grimm's German Legends that I read enthralled very young, in a 19thC English edition (long gone, and I can't find an affordable translation). The Northern Gods offer a taste of Proust's madeleines for me! b/ Acquire a simple reference basis to tie together the various cultural manifestations of these legends, from Wagner's Ring to Tolkien (I'm a fan of both).<br />As a reference guide, one could do far worse for one's money, the Gods and events are succinctly but well described; a useful starting point indeed before going on to the more substantial works available.<br />I didn't however count on the promotion of Heathenry that the book offers (mentioned in the Amazon description). Neither insiduous nor obsessive, however, and indeed presented in a quite interesting and intelligent manner (although my religious attachment is firmly elsewhere).<br />So, no regrets, this is a book I will read and return to.<br />Technically, full marks to the publisher, a well-made volume for its category.

Very detailed account of classical mythology

A very good all rounder. It gives lots of details about East and West mythology even though it is not specialised towards either of these areas

breath taking & inlightening

Zecharia Sitchin, One of the most breath taking
autobiographical accounts I have ever read.
It answers so many questions that to date have never had real answers too, like how we humans came in to being, & how the people of the past could know so much about the universe,
"things that we are only becoming aware of now!"
the book left me totally speachless, congratulations Zecharia.

The complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt

On opening the cover of this Book,I little realised it would be so hard to put down again, seduced by lavish illustrations and a very understandable format of what is after all a very diverse, though interesting subject, yes there are many other books on the market covering this subject, we can all argue about Egyptian religion,but I feel this book is a sound fountation for anybody with that initial interest in this subject,It makes a worthy addition to the rest of the Thames and Hudson series, if you only ever buy one book on Egyptian religion look no further

Fascinating subject, uneven quality

The re-issue in paperback by a general publisher of an academic work originally from the CUP is a rare event. But even the original edition cast a sidelong eye at the general public, who might be willing to bear with academic minutiae for the sake of its astonishing revelations (to all but professional historians) on a subject they thought they knew about.

If you're going to write an academic work, footnotes and all, for the"educated layman", you'd better be a good writer, lively and stylish, as well as a good academic. From that point of view, the essays in this collection are very uneven, ranging from the occasionally tongue-in-cheek polish of Hugh Trevor-Roper (on the invention of the Highland Tradition in Scotland) to the convoluted and occasionally asyntactic sentences of Prys Morgan (on"the hunt for the Welsh past"). The one invites you on an enthralling voyage of discovery, the other requires you to wade through a viscous Sargasso Sea. Nonetheless, both journeys are well worth undertaking, as are the others in the collection.

But perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is that it encourages us to reflect in general, quite aside from the specific examples studied, on the human need for a link to the past and evidence of superiority, if not now, then at least in a prior Golden Age. If human communities divide the world into"them" and"us", how do they define who"we" are? And what makes"us" special? On the lines of Voltaire's famous comment that"if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." we are forced to the conclusion that if a national history and culture do not exist, it is necessary to invent them. (A process traced also by Y. Nevo and myself in our study of the early history of the Umayyad State). It appears that the need to define one's community as valid -- by reference to an historic past -- is most acute when that community is only just established or is in decline. The lessons of this book should be kept in mind when reading the history of any nation.

Great to read, but a bit of a cheat

I loved this book along with all the other ones in the dragon series, they provide a gateway to the imagination of anyone who likes dragons.<br /><br />BUT, 1 thing that I must inform you of id that this book and another book entitled:<br /><br />Tracking and Taming a Wild Dragons (Hardcover)<br /><br />By the same author are almost exactly the same, the only differences that I can see is that this book has a little bit more information on certain pages and there is a dragon model inside it, so if it comes down to buying one or the other I would buy this one as; if for nothing else it looks more impressive on your book case

An amazing classic story

Shahrazad is forced to marry a king, who on the next night has a nasty habbit of killing his wives the next morning. Her idea to save her life and women after her from the king's evil ways it to tell him a story each night, always finishing with a cliff hanger ending, so that he will spare her life, to find out what happens next. This goes on for 1001 nights; hence the former title. This box is made even better by the fact that it list what happens each night. In this volume nights 1 to 271 are covered.

Fantastic bedtime book

Full of short stories for a different one every bedtime. My daughter loves to hear them and manages to get me to read two most nights. The best bedtime book I have found so far.