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tarot
Moon, the
eighteenth card of the Major Arcana
Death,
the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana
Hanged
Man, the twelfth card of the Major Arcana
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Any
of a set of cards used in fortune-telling and in certain
card games. Claims have been made for tarot cards'
having originated in China, India, or Egypt, but their
true origin remains obscure. Tarot cards approximating
their present form first appeared in Italy and France in
the late 14th century.
Early
tarot decks were of several types, each varying in the
number of cards. The standard modern tarot deck is based
on the Venetian or Piedmontese tarot. It consists of 78
cards divided into two groups: the Major Arcana, which
has 22 cards (also known as trumps), and the Minor
Arcana, which has 56 cards. The cards of the Major
Arcana have pictures representing various forces,
characters, virtues, and vices. The 22 cards are
numbered from I through XXI, with the Fool being
unnumbered (other
variations include 0, 00, and 22 - additional comment by
Dawn).
The tarots of the Major Arcana are, in order: I Juggler,
or Magician; II Papess, or Female Pope; III Empress; IV
Emperor; V Pope; VI Lovers; VII Chariot; VIII Justice;
IX Hermit; X Wheel of Fortune; XI Strength, or
Fortitude; XII Hanged Man (see photograph); XIII Death
(see photograph); XIV Temperance; XV Devil; XVI
Lightning-Struck Tower; XVII Star; XVIII Moon (see
photograph); XIX Sun; XX Last Judgment; XXI World, or
Universe; and the Fool.
The
56 cards of the Minor Arcana are divided into four suits
of 14 cards each. The suits, which are comparable to
those of modern playing cards, are as follows: wands,
batons, or rods (clubs); cups (hearts); swords (spades);
and coins, pentacles, or disks (diamonds). Each suit has
four court cards (usually named king, queen, knight, and
page) and 10 numbered cards. In ascending order, the
value progression in each suit is ace to 10, then page
(knave, or jack), knight, queen, and king (though the
ace is sometimes assigned a high value as in modern
playing cards). The standard deck of modern playing
cards was historically derived from that of the Minor
Arcana (with the elimination of the knight).
At first the tarot was probably used for playing games,
though Gypsies may have used it for fortune-telling.
From the 18th century, the cards began to take on
esoteric associations, as certain European writers
connected them to diverse traditions of mysticism, divination,
alchemy, and ritual magic. The cards have retained these
associations and are now widely used for
fortune-telling.
For
fortune-telling, each tarot card is ascribed a meaning.
The cards of the Major Arcana refer to spiritual matters
and important trends in the questioner's life. In the
Minor Arcana, wands deal mainly with business matters
and career ambitions, cups with love, swords with
conflict, and coins with money and material comfort. The
tarot deck is shuffled by the questioner, and then the
fortune-teller lays out a few of the cards (either
selected at random by the questioner or dealt off the
top of the shuffled deck) in a special pattern called a
"spread." The meaning of any card is modified
according to whether or not it is upside down, its
position in the spread, and the meaning of adjacent
cards.
quoted
from Britannica.com
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Medieval
Tarot Cards
Tarot cards were originally used in the game of
tarot; today they are used in fortune-telling. These
cards symbolize, from left to right: 1) romance, 2)
the devil, and 3) a forceful or willful nature.
THE
BETTMANN ARCHIVE
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(please
note: The Strength card, or LeForce, is actually a
card of spiritual strength overcoming the
material or animal nature. - Dawn) |
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history
The
earliest record of a deck of cards carrying tarot
symbology can be traced back to Northern Italy, where
for the first few centuries they were used as a parlor
diversion called "Cartes de Trionfi".
According to tarot historians Ronald Decker, Thierry
Depaulis and Michael Dummett ("A Wicked Pack of
Cards"), the earliest surviving set of tarot cards
is the few remaining hand-painted cards created in
approximately 1441 for the court of Filippo Maria
Visconti, Duke of Milan. A hundred years prior to this,
packs of 52 playing cards bearing the suit symbols of
Cups, Coins, Swords and Polo-Sticks could be found in
Islamic countries, from whence they migrated into Europe
via the British. It was only with the addition of the 22
trump cards sometime after the 18th Century that the
pack came to resemble what we now recognize as the
modern Tarot deck.
Speculation
about the Egyptian origins of the Tarot springs almost
exclusively from the conclusions and assertions of one
person - Antoine Court de Gebelin, a Protestant pastor
born in 1695. Caught up in a period of wide-spread
fervor over the mystery of all things Egyptian, Court de
Gebelin's essay in his work "Monde primitif"
says that he discovered this mysterious work while
visiting a Lady acquaintance occupied in playing with
the game of "Tarots." Within a short time (15
minutes, the essay declares) he prounouced them to be a
mysterious book of knowledge of Egyptian origins which
had survived the ravages of time. Similar conclusions
were drawn in another essay by Court de Gebelin's peer
Comte de Mellet. The belief that the Tarot originated
with the Gypsies sprung from the same fount of
speculation based on the mistaken idea that the Gypsies
originally came from Egypt.
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Cards
from the recently restored TAROT
of MARSEILLE
Le Bateleur or The
Magician, the 1st card of the Major Arcana
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mystery
Despite the lack of
hard evidence as to the "mystical" origins of
the Tarot, the symbology of the tarot can be traced to
the ancient Greeks as well as to the myths and legends
of other ancient cultures. From these convergent and
divergent points, a school of thought developed that
compared the cards to the intricate Judaic system of
Qabalah and the Tree of Life, an important component of
the early development of modern hermetic magickal
systems, developing further into the founding of the
Order of the Golden Dawn and Freemasonry. Early hermetic
Tarot scholars, including Papus, MacGregor Mathers,
Eliphas Levi, Aleister Crowley, and Arthur E. Waite
contributed vastly to the body of mystical knowledge
which comprises the basis of modern Tarot - Crowley and
Waite being the creators of the two most popular systems
extant today - the "Thoth" and
"Rider-Waite" decks (respectively).
While Crowley's
Thoth deck developed to incorporate Qabalistic theory
along the lines of the developing OTO ("Ordo Templi
Orientis") and Golden Dawn systems, A.E. Waite's
interpretation of the Tarot stands today virtually as
the standard by which all Tarot decks are judged. Prior
to this, the minor arcana (or "pip" cards) of
the Tarot were illustrated with various geometric
arrangements of the four suit symbols - Cups, Swords,
Batons and Coins. With the aid of artist Pamela
Coleman-Smith, Waite incorporated scenes, symbols and
imagery into the pip cards, which, although continuing
to be of hermetic/qabalistic interpretation, assigned a
more graphic meaning to the cards, bringing them within
a more accessible reach to the general public, or at
least those with an interest in the occult. In the
process, he also changed the suits of Batons to Wands
and Coins to Pentacles to realign them with his ideas
about their connection to the magickal disciplines.
Crowley's deck, oriented more toward the hermetic
tradition, continued with the geometric suit design of
the pips. However, his "Book of Thoth" written
as an explanatory text for the deck, is considered basic
required reading by Tarot authorities.
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La
Movrevx or The Lovers, the 6th card of the Major Arcana |
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evolution
The creation of the
Waite deck began a veritable avalanche of new decks into
the marketplace. Many artists saw the medium as a way to
present variations of artistic genre, creating decks
which were veritable galleries of miniature artwork. The
occultists saw it as a way to broaden and further the
study of other magickal/spiritual traditions, and began
to assert a universal connection between Waite's
assigned meanings and their own traditions. Thus, today
we see decks containing images from many spiritual paths
and historical time periods, including Native American,
mythological, Celtic, Arthurian, pagan, aboriginal,
Renaissance, and even combinations thereof into a single
deck.
However, despite
the variations in presentation, the basic structure of
the standard or archetypal tarot deck consists of two
groups of cards known as the "Major Arcana"
and the "Minor Arcana" ("arcana"
meaning "secret" or "hidden").
Briefly, the Major Arcana deal with images that
represent the broader, universal, often
spiritually-oriented issues, ideas, beliefs and
experiences of life. The Minor Arcana deal with the more
mundane themes of everyday living. The Majors contain 22
cards numbered from 0 to 22. The Minors contain 56 cards
divided among four "suits" - Cups, Wands,
Swords and Pentacles. Each of the suits have their own
over-arching associations, and the cards within each
suit have a their own meaning.
The standard method
for "reading" the cards involves the use of a
"spread," which means the card or cards chosen
from the deck are placed in a certain position that has
a designated meaning and interpreted from there. Methods
of choosing the cards vary widely from reader to reader.
Some allow the querant full range to shuffle and choose
the cards and place them where they please, relying
heavily on the random aspect of chaos to reveal the
issue at hand. Some never allow anyone to touch their
cards, and insist on placing the cards in a certain
design in specific ways, feeling more comfortable in a
highly structured reading environment. Readings can fall
anywhere between the two extremes depending on the card
reader.
Spreads, of which there are hundreds, vary widely as
well. The most widely used spread is called the
"Celtic Cross" (the origins of which are a
topic for another dissertation) consisting of ten
positions for the cards which are generally labeled as
follows:
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Le
Chariot, or the Chariot, the 7th card of the Major
Arcana
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- Significator
(a card representing the querant)
- Central
issue
- Crossing
(What blocks the issue at hand)
- Basis
of the issue
- Recent
past
- Possible
outcome
- Near
future
- Self
- Environment
- Hopes
and fears
- Outcome
Readers have come
to rely on this spread as an all-encompassing
containment of information that provides the querant
with answers to most of the details surrounding the
central issue of the reading. If questions remain after
reading this set of cards, additional clarification
cards are sometimes pulled from the pack and read as a
part of the session. Most all Tarot readings follow this
same simple structure, with little variation.
The divinatory system of Tarot, at face value, is quite
simple. It's a deck of cards with pictures, placed in
positions that have their own meanings. The card reader
interprets the relationship of the card meanings to the
positions. Anyone can learn how to do it. The new
student of the system should, however, realize that
their study of this subject can quickly deepen and
broaden, given the history of the cards and the
symbology they contain. Given the potential breadth of
the subject, experienced readers often urge beginners to
choose the Rider-Waite deck to learn the basic meaning
and symbology of the system before branching out to
other interpretations of the Tarot.
There are literally
hundreds of decks on the market, with new ones being
developed and published almost daily. Although
definitely confusing for the new student of the Tarot,
it is a collector's paradise for those who are
interested in the historical origins and further
development of this fascinating activity. The study of
the symbology of the cards alone has caught the interest
of many scholars who have written reams on the subject.
Harking back to the
ancient symbology of the cards, another important
influence on the understanding and interpretation of
Tarot was the work of Carl G. Jung and his study of
archetypal imagery arising from the human collective
unconscious. In an introductory statement to Sally
Nichols' book "Jung and Tarot" Laurens van der
Post stated that "He (Jung) recognized at once, as
he did in so many other games and primordial attempts at
divination of the unseen
and the future, that Tarot had its origin and
anticipation in profound patterns of the collective
unconscious with access to potentials of increased
awareness uniquely at the disposal of these
patterns." Nichols herself states early on that
"It seems apparent that these old cards were
conceived deep in the guts of human experience, at the
most profound level of the human psyche. It is to this
level in ourselves that they will speak."
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La-Rove-De-Fortvne,
or the Wheel of Fortune, the 10th card of the Major
Arcana |
| "fortune"
telling?
Many believe it is
this view of the cards that explains the development of
the cards for "fortune telling." Waite himself
despised this aspect of the cards, and took every
opportunity to denigrate this idea. Yet for this topic,
Jung's system of archetypal psychology suggests that we
reevaluate our definition of the term "fortune
telling."
Most people who
hear the word instantly think of the rag-headed Gypsy
with the crystal ball and smoking incense in the dark
tent with a name preceded by "Madam." However,
modern uses for the cards has elevated this image from
the darkened tent into the light of developmental self
awareness, plumbing the depths of psychology and
spiritual enlightenment. Today, "fortune
telling" with practiced readers can more often be a
participatory session with an active and dynamic
interplay between reader and querant, with the reader
helping the questioner divine their own sources of
problems and solutions through the story presented in
the images.
Given today's rash
of less-than-honest psychic pretenders, a good Tarot
reader is a rare find. Anyone can learn the Tarot card
meanings by mere rote memorization. However, the skill
of a good reader becomes obvious when they can tune in
to that numinous interface between the energies of the
cards in the spread and the energies of the querant and
the issues that need to be discussed. You'll notice the
word "need" is used, because inevitably the
cards will most often speak to the issue of what the
querant needs to know instead of, or in addition to,
what the querant wants to know.
In a good Tarot
session, the reader will develop a rapport with the
querant and involve them in the reading, rather than
listening to a "talking head." According to
Mary Greer, a good reader will be able to pull all the
cards in the spread together to interpret not only the
message of each individual card, but the spread as a
cohesive whole, so that the querant can see the entire
story.
The best Tarot
readers today will often set up a dialog about the cards
in the reading, asking the reader's ideas about what
"they" see in the cards, which almost
inevitably acts as a "Rorschach" test of sorts
that helps the querant reveal issues that might have
been deeply buried within their unconscious. Many who
seek the services of a Tarot reader or psychic are
concerned with a "surface" problem that has
manifested in their life, but refuse to deal with the
underlying issues that cause the problem. Often, Tarot
cards can reveal these issues and provide a forum where
the querant can bring them out to discuss in an
atmosphere of comfort and safety, much as in a
professional counseling session.
The good reader
will also be able to recognize when a problem surfaces
that is far beyond their scope of practice, and suggest
the querant seek additional counseling when the issue
warrants this step.
If the querant does take the advice of the reader about
seeking further counseling, they might just find
themselves (if they're lucky) with a professional who
uses the Tarot as a basis for understanding their
clients problems. In a foreword to Mary Greer's book
"Tarot Mirrors," tarot author Rachal Pollack
comments that "a growing number of people have
realized that readings can serve as a primary means of
penetrating into the layers of a person's life - a way
of exposing desires and fears, the conditioning of past
experiences, the future developments that exist now in
the immediate reality."
by Evelyn Henry,
quoted from the Mythica Encyclopedia |
Le Jugement, or the
Judgement card, the 20th card of the Major Arcana
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