About
Tarot
Tarot reading is all about your personal interpretation of the
cards and their meanings.
Not all the meanings will make sense at first.
The Tarot
was originally a deck of 78 cards, divided into 4 suits of 14
cards (the standard ace-10, then page, knight, queen, and king)
and 22 un-numbered 'triumphs' or 'trumps'. Over the years, the
trumps got numbered 1 to 21, with one card (the fool) remaining
un-numbered or sometimes being 0. The 4 suits are commonly called
the 'Minor Arcana' and the trump cards are called the 'Major
Arcana'. More loosely, any deck of cards designed for 'fortune-telling',
divination, meditation, contemplation, or other non-game uses
is popularly called a Tarot deck. The most commonly found suits
for Tarot decks are cups, swords, wands or staffs (probably
originally polo-sticks), and pentacles (originally coins).
The names of the Major Arcana cards frequently change from deck
to deck, but historically they've been The Fool (un-numbered
or 0), The Magician
(I), The High Priestess (originally the Popess) (II), The Empress
(III), The Emperor (IV), The Heirophant (originally the Pope)
(V), The Lovers (VI), The Chariot (VII), Strength (VIII, originally
XI), The Hermit (IX), The Wheel of Fortune (X), Justice (XI,
originally VIII), The Hanged Man (XII), Death (XIII), Temperance
(XIV), The Devil (XV), The Tower (XVI), The Star (XVII), The
Moon (XVIII), The Sun (XIX), Judgement (XX), and The World (XXI).
The Major Arcana cards are usually illustrated, frequently the
Minor Arcana cards are, as well.
Tarot decks come in a bewildering variety these days. You can
find oversized, undersized, or round decks. Some have more than
78 cards, some less. Some are based on a particular mythic cycle.
Some are based on a particular psychological theory. Some are
based on channelled information. Some are just hard to describe.
A 'historical' deck has simply one, two, or however many wands,
cups, or whatever for the number cards.
A.E. Waite first popularised a deck which has illustrations
on all 78 cards (painted by Pamela Colman Smith), which has
become the model for the greatest number of other currently
available decks.
A. Crowley popularised a deck which had arcane symbols,
but not real 'illustrations' on the number cards (painter by
Lady Frieda Harris). Decks which follow those basic set-ups
are descendants from these earlier ones.
No-one knows the 'true' origin of the Tarot. The most common
myth is that it was brought to Europe by the Gypsies - but this
myth come from the fact that very early occultists who used
the Tarot fancied that it came from Egypt. They were as wrong
about that as they were about the homeland of the Gypsies. In
fact, the Tarot came to Europe about the same time as any other
form of playing card, in the early/mid 1300's. It is most closely
related to the 'Mamluk' deck of the Islamic world, which had
suits cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks.
The Tarot was originally used for a game called 'tarocchi' in
Italy, which is sort of a distant cousin to Bridge. Tarocchi
is still played in some parts of the world, not usually with
the same decks the 'fortune tellers' use.
The game was quite popular for a time among the royalty in Italy,
and sometimes a duke would commission an artist to create a
really nice deck. Some of the earliest surviving Tarot decks
come from this source. Plainer decks existed, but were not well
made enough, or well thought-of enough, to survive the intervening
600 years.
The Joker of 'standard' card decks is "not" related to the Fool
of Tarot. The Joker was invented as a wild card for Euchre in
the 1800's, in a part of the world where the Tarot was virtually
or totally unknown.
The Tarot was first associated with the occult by Antoine Court
de Gebelin, a relatively obscure Parisian mason who wrote about
the deck in 1781. He invented a lot of the standard myths about
the Tarot which were later popularised by others (it comes from
ancient Egypt, the Major Arcana is related to the Kabalah, etc.).
The first big popularise of the deck was a contemporary of de
Gebelin, called Etteilla, who published the first 'revised and
corrected' Tarot deck for divination. The fad was caught up
by Eliphas Levi, Oswald Wirth, and Papus, among others. From
Papus, the Tarot caught on with some English mystics, such as
S.L. Mathers (whose mistranslation of Levi brought us the suit
of pentacles), A.E. Waite, and A. Crowley. The Tarot received
a lot of attention from these folks, and they created a fairly
large body of writing on the use of Tarot. For the most part
they thought that divination was a 'lower' use of the cards,
that ideally it should be used to put you in touch with eternal
verities, usually in conjunction with whatever magical order
they happened to be involved with. But of course, divination
was the most popular use for the cards.
Most of the Tarot decks on the market were created this century,
most of those in the last 20 years.
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