Beneath The Moon by Yoshi Yoshitani

I purchased (that’s right, I BOUGHT a book! Granted this was in 2023 and I’m only now getting around to reading it, lolsob) this beautiful collection of fairy tales, myths and divine stories because I deeply love Yoshi Yoshitani’s Tarot of the Divine, with which this book is inextricably linked. In order to illustrate the tarot deck, Yoshi meticulously researched folk tales from all over the world before matching them with the traditional Tarot imagery and creating Yoshi’s own extraordinary art to synthesize the two.

Given that this is the second year in a row that I’ve used Yoshi’s 12-Month Spread to kick off the year — with the TotD also being my deck of choice for the month of January, two years running, in addition to the deck I prefer to use for the 12-Month Spread when reading for friends — I felt that it was high time I finally dove into this book. And what a sumptuous treat it is, filled with seventy-eight abridged stories from all over the world! The tales are all condensed to a single page with a facing illustration. While each of the art pieces is from a card in the TotD, they’re not explicitly labeled as such, tho there is a brief reference to the Tarot in the introduction. I’m not entirely sure why this choice was made: I certainly spent more time trying to figure out which card each story represented than I really wanted to. Perhaps the editors wanted to keep the focus more on the folklore than on the symbolism — there is a separate TotD Handbook, after all, that I presume fills that purpose.

I was also a little confused by the way the entries were organized. Honestly, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for why any of the stories were arranged in the way that they were. I’m used to books like these being organized by geographical region or timeline or theme/category, none of which was apparent here. Tbh, I rather wished they’d been sorted by their order in the TotD deck.

That said, there’s such a wealth of folklore here, from very well-known tales like Sleeping Beauty to obscure yet archetypal ones like Tatterhood. You have classics from the Ramayana and Sumerian legend rubbing elbows with the stories of John Henry and Turandot. Even the Malaysian saga of Hang Tuah is included (tho in a very sanitized form that leaves out perhaps the most controversial and thought-provoking aspect of his history: his falling out with Hang Jebat.) As a lover of world mythology and Tarot, I deeply enjoyed reading all these stories and relating them to Tarot symbology. Honestly, I’m thinking I might have actually bought the wrong book and should have purchased the Handbook instead, lol.

Perhaps that will be a future purchase for me, but I’ve definitely enjoyed learning more about just the stories depicted on the cards. And, frankly, Yoshi’s art alone is worth the price of entry. Expressive and colorful, each full page perfectly illustrates the classic story it accompanies. As a grab bag of folk tales and art, this is a terrific collection. As a companion piece to Yoshi’s superlative TotD, this is a much valued part of my Tarot/book library.

Beneath The Moon by Yoshi Yoshitani was published September 1 2020 by Ten Speed Press and is available from all good booksellers, including