The Greater Trumps - Softcover

Charles Williams had a genius for choosing strange and exciting themes for his novels and making them believable and profoundly suggestive of spiritual truths. The Tarot pack, the ancestor of all playing cards, is first mentioned in history in 1393; the origin of the deck is not known. Tradition has it that the gypsies brought the Tarot from Egypt and that the cards were used for fortune telling. This deck was conceived of as having magical properties, and the most powerful of all the cards were the Magic Arcana or Greater Trumps, twenty-two symbolic pictures whose mysteries have been interpreted and reinterpreted not only by occultists, but also by religious thinkers, psychoanalysts and literary anthropologists. Perhaps the most exquisite of these interpretations is the one contained in this extraordinary novel. In the universe evoked by Charles Williams, sorcery can still kill, and the supernatural must be fought with the supernatural. But beneath the brilliant and imaginative surface is concealed a meticulously thought-out Christian message. Charles Williams-novelist, poet, critic, dramatist and biographer-died in his native England in May, 1945. He had a lively and devoted following there and achieved a considerable reputation as a lecturer on the faculty of Oxford University. T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis were among his distinguished friends and literary sponsors.

When Lothair Coningsby is bequeathed an antique pack of Tarot cards, he doesn't bargain for the trouble they will cause. The terms of his inheritance mean that Lothair cannot part with the cards in life, and they are to go to the British Museum after his death. But his daughter's fiance, Henry Lee, a descendant of the Romany people, realises that Coningsby has inherited the original Greater Trumps, or Major Arcana, the most important cards in the Tarot. These cards-including the Juggler, the Hanged Man, the Falling Tower and the mysterious, unmoving Fool-were designed to represent the dance of life itself, along with a set of golden images in Henry's possession. If the two are brought together they will unleash an unknown power upon the world-and Henry is determined to gain possession of the pack. First published in 1932, The Greater Trumps is the fifth of Charles Williams's supernatural novels.