The images on the Marseille Tarot cards started out as illustrations of Sumero-Bablyonian myths, preserved through the centuries on cylinder seals. They were copied by people who didn't understand them but who also had access to some form, whether written or oral, of the wisdom encoded in those myths and in Bible stories. That wisdom is identical with Sufi teachings as espoused by teachers like Ibn al 'Arabi, Rumi, and others, including Gurdjieff and his teachings about the enneagram. The myths and stories are decoded in this book using the multiple meanings conveyed by Arabic consonantal word roots and by reference to those doctrines and to modern discoveries about conditioning and the hemispheric specialization of the brain. Arabic is the closest existing descendant of the ancient Protosemitic language. The Kabbalah, long rumoured to be linked to the Tarot, is shown to come from the same sources, and originally had eight, not ten, sefiroth. The visual evidence alone is overwhelming: the mystery of where the Tarot comes from has been definitively solved.

The Starving Artist features works by 20 different artists, photographers, and animators including: Michael Ananian, Marilynn Barr, J A Barr, S A Belluardo, Barbara Campbell-Thomas, S Foust, Anna Godden, Alex McKenzie, Maurice Moore, Christopher H Morris, J Neff, Steisha Pintado, Herbert Richardson, Graciela Rivera, Miranda Robinson, Ibrahim Said, Bennett Shipman, Mariam Stephan, Nicholas Swift, and Suzanne Tisdell.