What does an eccentric obsessive-compulsive pagan collect? Holy cards, of course. I'm not a Catholic and never have been. In fact, I am a Wiccan. I have long enjoyed the study of what pagan author Stewart Farrar has called the goddess-shaped yearning as it manifests in religions other than that of Wicca.

I find the archetypes represented by the many saints to be similar in some aspects to that of the various gods and goddesses of pagan religions. I have been interested in the lives of the saints most of my life and I think that is because of the vivid drama associated with so many of them. By definition there is something superhuman about them.

Holy cards are the perfect instrument for displaying these larger than life tendencies. The art is idealized and exaggerated. It deals heavily in symbolism and emotionalism. By association the holy cards and the simplistic descriptions they offer up help to illustrate aspects of Catholicism that I find highly interesting. They convey mythology that is spectacularly manipulative and whether that is for good or ill doesn't matter a fig to me. I just love looking at them...they're usually beautiful, peopled with ethereal beings with enraptured faces. Sometimes they have gilt accents and they almost always have lots of detail. I've learned a lot about the various sacred orders of priests and nuns from the cards.

As they say in baseball, you gotta have a scorecard if ya wanna know the players. This lovely book is the perfect scorecard for holy card enthusiasts and collectors or just the merely curious. It is a medium size (not quite coffee table) hard cover book fully illustrated on every page with colored images of actual holy cards of varying degrees of antiquity and of many different styles. It contains a well written but brief history of holy cards in general at the beginning but other than that the text is in the form of short descriptions under each card that sketch in the key aspects of the saint's life. The descriptions are intended more to explain the imagery on the cards than they are to fully express the details of the life of any given saint.

This book does not try to be a conclusive collection of the hundreds and hundreds of saints. It focuses on 31 different saints, many of them quite obscure, though some famous ones like Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Patrick are here, too. It contains holy cards of saints from many different eras of the Catholic Church including a few modern ones like my personal favorite, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who wasn't canonized until 1925.

Each page shows a holy card that is enlarged to about 5x7". The cards are arranged in groups under the headings of Prophets and Angels, Disciples and Evangelists, Martyrs, Hermits, Visionaries and Mystics, Religious Orders, Missionaries, and Holy People. There is a short description about each of these different groupings that explains their significance and the characteristics that qualify a saint for inclusion in them.

There is an explanation of the various types of halos and their significance as well as a detailed glossary of symbols broken down into groups of Plants, Trees, Flowers and Fruit, Objects, Colors, Birds, Shapes and Numbers, Animals, Fish and Insects, Clothing, and Body Parts.

For example under the symbol of the iris flower it says, "Mary's sorrow at Christ's passion. Rival of the lily as a symbol of the Virgin Mary."

Under the symbol of the pomegranate it says, " Because there are many seeds in a single fruit, it is the symbol of The Church. Also, immortality, fertility, hope, and royalty."

I find this symbol glossary particularly interesting because many of the same symbols are employed in my religion with different meanings. There is also some overlapping. The five point star that the seeds within a pomegranate reveal when it is sliced in half certainly does not represent the Catholic Church to me but it does symbolize my "church" of the five elements and the created web of life. It represents the Goddess and fertility. I find this book interesting for its perspective on sacred iconography.

I think this would make an excellent gift for a practicing Catholic or for an art lover of any faith. The paper is good quality, the inks are clear and true and the art speaks for itself. I love the romanticism in the imagery but some of the images are gruesome and the stories macabré. We see St. Lucy holding her eyeballs in a little dish, Saint Apollonia holding a crude set of pliers used to pull out her teeth, standing before the pyre upon which she was burned alive, and Saint Laurence, the patron saint of cooks, holding the grill upon which he was cooked by order of the Roman Emperor for failing to hand over the Church's treasures. These are some of the Martyrs, of course. The holy cards also depict pious and humble people as well as great thinkers and holy examples of faithfulness.

As a complete book of saints this will disappoint but for an excellent introduction into the lives of the saints it is superb, offering a good cross section of types and thus a good primer of the whole concept of sainthood.

Many of the cards shown in this book are from the private collection of Father Eugene Carrella, Pastor of St. Adalbert's Parish on Staten Island, who is the foremost collector of holy cards in America. The authors of the book, Barbara Calamari and Sandra Dipasqua are a freelance writer and a graphic designer respectively and have written other books about Catholic religious subjects, including Holy Places: Sacred Sites in Catholicism and Novena: The Power of Prayer. They treat the subject of devotional art with a loving hand and have produced a book that is lovely to look at and which illuminates this subject. I thoroughly enjoyed it and think there is plenty here to interest people of any religion. ( )