"Happy Birthday, Llewellyn George!" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Llewellyn Tarot: 20th Anniversary Edition"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 17
Happy Birthday, Llewellyn George!
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On
August 17th, 1876, a boy was born in Swansea, Wales, whose own first name would
eventually become one of the most recognized words in American occult
publishing, printed on the spine of thousands upon thousands of books he'd
never personally write. His father died young; his mother remarried and moved
the family to the United States, where the boy grew up in Chicago before
eventually making his way west to Portland, Oregon, around the turn of the
century. There, under the name Llewellyn George, he built something that has
now outlived him by well over seventy years and counting: the legendary
publishing house that shares his own first name…
Astrologer to Publishing Legend
George
studied astrology formally under L. H. Weston before striking out on his own,
and the astrology he initially set out to build was a deliberately different
creature from the tradition he'd inherited. Rather than grounding his practice
in the hermetic philosophy that had underpinned astrological thought for
centuries, George positioned himself as a champion of a more scientific
astrology, one built on then-current understandings of gravitational and other
measurable physical forces at work in the solar system. It was an ambitious,
genuinely of-its-moment project, an astrologer trying to drag his own
discipline into conversation with contemporary physics rather than leaning on
tradition alone.
Early
twentieth-century science simply had little to offer in the way of a mechanism
that could support astrology's core claims, and George eventually found himself
falling back on the same occult speculation he'd initially hoped to move
beyond. It's a genuinely sympathetic arc rather than an embarrassing one, a
serious thinker running his central premise into the actual limits of the
physics available to him, and choosing to keep working within his tradition
rather than abandoning it.
Yet, George's publishing instincts were entirely sound. He founded the Llewellyn Publishing Company and the Portland School of Astrology around the turn of the century, began issuing the Astrological Bulletin in 1908 (a quarterly he'd go on to edit for nearly twenty years), and wrote roughly twenty books across his career, starting with The Planetary Hour Book in 1907 and continuing through The A to Z Horoscope Delineator, Practical Astrology for Everyone, How Planets Affect People, and Astrology: What It Is and What It Is Not. He also founded the Llewellyn College of Astrology, offering home study courses that dramatically widened astrology's audience beyond students able to travel to Portland in person.
His
most enduring creation, though, is one still sitting on shelves today: the Moon Sign Book,
published annually without interruption since the first years of the twentieth
century and still issued every year by Llewellyn Worldwide, now well past its
120th consecutive edition. George eventually relocated his operation to Los
Angeles, where the company continued to grow, publishing prominent astrologers
including Donald Bradley and Grant Lewi, until George's own death in
1954.
After George's death, the Moon Sign Book was carried on for a time by astrologer Sydney Omarr, but the company drifted for six years until 1960, when it was purchased by a Minnesota businessman and distant relative of George who moved it to St. Paul and built it into the publishing giant it remains today: Carl Llewellyn Weschcke. Weschcke's own biographical accounts consistently describe him discovering Llewellyn Publications for sale as a listing in Publishers Weekly. Whether that's a remarkable coincidence or not, what isn't in question is what Weschcke built on top of what he had found: a company that grew from George's mail-order astrology house into one of the largest independent publishers of occult, Pagan, and metaphysical books in the world, the same Llewellyn Worldwide whose books and authors have filled so many of these very pages.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
“DAILY OCCULT REVIEW”
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the man whose first name has graced this publisher for well over a century, we're delighted to spotlight a genuinely exciting new release rather than reach back into the archive.
The Llewellyn Tarot: 20th Anniversary Edition
By
Anna-Marie Ferguson | Llewellyn Worldwide
Fittingly
for a post about the man whose name still opens this publisher's door, this
month brings the return of the deck that actually carries that name into the
world: The Llewellyn Tarot, back in a deluxe 20th Anniversary Edition
after two decades out of print in its original form. Illustrator Anna-Marie
Ferguson, who grew up steeped in the folklore of England's New Forest before
emigrating to Alberta as a child, built the original deck around Arthurian and
Celtic myth, and this new edition doesn't just reprint the old cards; it
color-enhances every image, reduces the borders to let Ferguson's detailed
illustrations breathe, commissions an entirely new Strength card, and adds a
full-color guidebook alongside premium packaging that includes a magnetic-close
box with a built-in card altar.
Ferguson's
particular gift, evident throughout the deck, is treating Celtic and Arthurian
legend as a living landscape rather than museum material; her own account of
her process describes long periods spent simply living inside a story's
atmosphere before a single brushstroke goes down, and it shows in cards that
feel populated by specific, remembered places, ancient forests, mist-heavy
seascapes, waterfalls with real weight to them, rather than generic
fantasy-tarot backdrops. For a deck built around Welsh and Celtic mythology,
sharing a name and a cultural throughline with the company's own founder, the
fit is almost too tidy to be coincidental, even if, as today's post already
established, the far stranger coincidence in this story belongs to a different
man entirely.
This
is a deluxe collector's kit as much as a working deck, and readers looking for
a lightweight, portable everyday tarot may find the premium box and 312-page
guidebook more substantial than they need. But for longtime fans who remember
the original Llewellyn Tarot fondly, or readers building a serious
Celtic-tradition collection, this anniversary edition is exactly the kind of
release worth clearing shelf space for.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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