Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards to purportedly gain insight into the past, present or future. They formulate a question, then draw cards to interpret them for this end. A traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. French-suited playing cards can also be used; as can any card system with suits assigned to identifiable elements (e.g., air, earth, fire, water).
The first written references to tarot packs occurred between 1440 and 1450 in northern Italy, for example in Milan and Ferrara, when additional cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. These new packs were called carte da trionfi, triumph packs, and the additional cards known simply as trionfi, which became "trumps" in English.[1][2]
One of the earliest references to tarot triumphs is given c. 1450–1470 by a Dominicanpreacher in a sermon against dice, playing cards and 'triumphs'.[3] References to the tarot as a social plague or indeed as exempt from the bans that affected other games, continue throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, but there are no indications that the cards were used for anything but games.[4] As philosopher and tarot historian Michael Dummett noted, "it was only in the 1780s, when the practice of fortune-telling with regular playing cards had been well established for at least two decades, that anyone began to use the tarot pack for cartomancy."[5]
Claims by the early French occultists that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, the Kabbalah, Indic Tantra, or the I Ching have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination. However, scholarly research reveals that, having been invented in Italy in the early 15th century for playing games, there is no evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century.[6] In fact, historians have described western views of the Tarot pack as "the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed".[7]
Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace the tarot to ancient Egypt, divine hermetic wisdom,[15] and the mysteries of Isis.
The first was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French clergyman, who wrote that after seeing a group of women playing cards he had the idea that tarot was not merely a game of cards but was in fact of ancient Egyptian origin, of mystical Qabalistic import, and of deep divine significance. Court de Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of work Le Monde primitif in 1781. He thought the tarot represented ancient Egyptian Theology, including Isis, Osiris, and Typhon. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known in occult circles today as the High Priestess represented Isis.[16] He also related four tarot cards to the four Christian Cardinal virtues: Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence.[17] He related The Tower to a Greek fable about avarice.[18]
Although the ancient Egyptian language had not yet been deciphered, Court de Gébelin asserted the name "Tarot" came from the Egyptian words Tar, "path" or "road", and the word Ro, Ros, or Rog, meaning "King" or "royal", and that the word literally translated to "the Royal Road of Life".[19] Subsequent research by Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support Court de Gébelin's etymologies.[20] Despite this lack of any evidence, the belief that the tarot cards are linked to the Egyptian Book of Thoth continues to the present day.[lower-alpha 1]
The actual source of the occult tarot can be traced to two articles in volume eight, one written by Court de Gébelin, and one written by M. le C. de M.***,[lower-alpha 2] who has been identified as Major General Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, Comte de Mellet.[22] This second essay is "considerably more impressive" than de Gébelin's, albeit "as full of assertions with no basis in truth",[22] and has been even more influential than Court de Gébelin's.[22] The author makes no acknowledgement of de Gébelin and, although he agrees with all his main conclusions, he also contradicts de Gébelin over such details as the meaning of the word "Tarot" and in how the cards spread across Europe.[22] Morever, he takes de Gébelin's speculations even further, agreeing with him about the mystical origins of the tarot in ancient Egypt, but making several additional, and influential, statements that continue to influence mass understanding of the occult tarot even to this day.[23] He made the first statements proposing that the tarot was "The Book of Thoth" and made the first association of tarot with cartomancy. Meanwhile Court de Gébelin was the first to imply the existence of a connection between the Tarot and Romani people,[lower-alpha 3] although this connection did not become well established in the public consciousness until other French authors such as Boiteau d'Ambly and Jean-Alexandre Vaillant began in the 1850s to promote the theory that tarot cards had been brought to Europe by the Romani.[24][25] In fact, there is "virtually no evidence" that Romani people used any form of playing card for telling fortunes until the 20th century.[26][lower-alpha 4]
wrote a cartomantic treatise of tarot as the Book of Thoth,
created the first society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot.
created the first corrected tarot (supposedly fixing errors that resulted from misinterpretation and corruption through the mists of antiquity), The Grand Etteilla deck
created the first Egyptian tarot to be used exclusively for tarot cartomancy, and
published, under the imprint of his society, the Dictionnaire synonimique du Livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed."[30]
argued that the first copy of the tarot was imprinted on leaves of gold.
In his 1980 book, The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett suggested that Etteilla was attempting to supplant Court de Gébelin as the author of the occult tarot.[lower-alpha 5] Etteilla in fact claimed to have been involved with tarot longer than Court de Gébelin.[lower-alpha 6]
Marie Anne Lenormand
Mlle Marie-Anne Adelaide Lenormand outshone even Etteilla and was the first cartomancer to people in high places, through her claims to be the personal confidant of Empress Josephine, Napoleon and other notables.[4] Lenormand used both regular playing cards, in particular the Piquet pack, as well as tarot cards likely derived from the Tarot de Marseille.[33] Following her death in 1843, several different cartomantic decks were published in her name, including the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand, based on the standard 52-card deck, first published in 1845, and the Petit Lenormand, a 36-card deck derived from the German game Das Spiel der Hoffnung, first published around 1850.[34]
Éliphas Lévi
The concept of the cards as a mystical key was extended by Éliphas Lévi. Lévi (whose actual name was Alphonse-Louis Constant) was educated in the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and was ordained as a deacon, but never became a priest. Michael Dummett noted that it is from Lévi's book Dogme et rituel that the "whole of the modern occultist movement stems."[35] Lévi's magical theory was based on a concept he called the Astral Light[36] and according to Dummett, he claimed to be the first to:[37]
"have discovered intact and still unknown this key of all doctrines and all philosophies of the old world... without the tarot", he tells us, "the Magic of the ancients is a closed book...."
Lévi accepted Court de Gébelin's claims that the deck had an Egyptian origin, but rejected Etteilla's interpretation and rectification of the cards in favor of a reinterpretation of the Tarot de Marseille.[38] He called it The Book of Hermes and claimed that the tarot was antique, existed before Moses, and was in fact a universal key of erudition, philosophy, and magic that could unlock Hermetic and Qabalistic concepts.[39] According to Lévi, "An imprisoned person with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence."[40]
According to Dummett, Lévi's notable contributions included the following:[41]
Lévi was the first to suggest that the Magus (Bagatto) was to be depicted in conjunction with the symbols of the four suits.
Inspired by de Gébelin, Lévi associated the Hebrew alphabet with the Major Arcana (tarot trumps) and attributed an "onomantic astrology" system to the "ancient Hebrew Qabalists."[42]
Lévi linked the ten numbered cards in each suit to the ten sefiroth.
He claimed the court cards represented stages of human life.
He also claimed the four suits represented the Tetragrammaton.
French Tarot divination after Lévi
Occultists, magicians, and magi all the way down to the 21st century have cited Lévi as a defining influence.[43][lower-alpha 7] Among the first to seemingly adopt Lévi's ideas was Jean-Baptiste Pitois. Pitois wrote two books under the name Paul Christian that referenced the tarot, L'Homme rouge des Tuileries (1863), and later Histoire de la magie, du monde surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les temps et les peuples (1870). In them, Pitois repeated and extended the mythology of the tarot and changed the names for the trumps and the suits (see table below for a list of Pitois's modifications to the trumps).[44] Batons (wands) become Scepters, Swords become Blades, and Coins become Shekels.[lower-alpha 8]
However, it wasn't until the late 1880s that Lévi's vision of the occult tarot truly began to bear fruit, as his ideas on the occult began to be propounded by various French and English occultists. In France, secret societies such as the French Theosophical Society (1884) and the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (1888) served as the seeds for further developments in the occult tarot in France.[45]
The French occultist Papus was one of the most prominent members of these societies, joining the Isis lodge of the French Theosophical Society in 1887 and becoming a founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross the next year.[45] Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which attempted to formalize the method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries (1861),[46] and Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards.[47]
Another founding member of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, the Marquis Stanislas de Guaita, met the amateur artist Oswald Wirth in 1887 and subsequently sponsored a production of Lévi's intended deck. Guided entirely by de Guaita, Wirth designed the first neo-occultist cartomantic deck (and first cartomantic deck not derived from Etteilla's Egyptian deck).[48] Released in 1889 as Les 22 Arcanes du Tarot kabbalistique, it consisted of only the twenty-two major arcana and was revised under the title of Le Tarot des imagers du moyen âge in 1926. [49] Wirth also released a book about his revised cards which contained his own theories of the occult tarot under the same title the year following.[50]
Outside of the Kabbalistic Order, in 1888, French magus Ély Star published Les mystères de l'horoscope which mostly repeats Christian's modifications.[51] Its primary contribution was the introduction of the terms 'Major Arcana' and 'Minor Arcana', and the numbering of the Crocodile (the Fool) XXII instead of 0.[52]
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its heirs
The late 1880s not only saw the spread of the occult tarot in France, but also its initial adoption in the English-speaking world. In 1886, Arthur Edward Waite published The Mysteries of Magic, a selection of Lévi's writings translated by Waite and the first significant treatment of the occult tarot to be published in England.[53] However, it was only through the establishment of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1888 that the occult tarot was to become established as a tool in the English-speaking world.
Of the three founding members of the Golden Dawn, two, Samuel Liddell Mathers and William Wynn Westcott, published texts relating to the occult tarot prior to the founding of the order. Westcott is known to have made ink sketches of tarot trumps in or around 1886[54] and discussed the tarot in his treatise Tabula Bembina, sive Mensa Isiaca, published in 1887,[55] while Mathers had published the first British work primarily focused on the tarot in his 1888 booklet entitled The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling and Method of Play.[56]
Folio 32 of the Cipher Manuscripts, which gives the correspondences for the Major Arcana
The tarot was also mentioned explicitly in the Cipher Manuscripts that served as the founding document of the Hermetic Order, both implicitly and in the form of a separate essay accompanying the manuscript.[57] This essay was to serve as the basis for most of tarot interpretations by the Golden Dawn and its immediate successors, including such features as:[58]
placing The Fool before the other 21 trumps when determining the Qabalistic correspondence of the Major Arcana to the Hebrew alphabet
attributing the Hebrew alphabet correspondences to pathways in the Tree of Life
swapping the positions of the eighth and eleventh arcana (Justice and Strength), and
reassigning Qabalistic planetary associations to accord with the re-ordered trumps.
renamed the suits of Batons and Coins to Wands and Pentacles
swapped the order of the King and the Knight among the court cards, renaming them the Prince and the King, respectively
changed the Page to become the Princess
assigned each of the court cards to the letters of the Tetragrammaton, thus associating both the court cards and suits to the four classical elements,[59] and
associated each of the 36 cards ranked from 2 to 10, inclusive, with one of the 36 astrological decans.
The Hermetic Order never released its own tarot deck for public use, preferring instead for members to create their own copies of a deck designed by Mathers with art by his wife, Moina Mathers.[60][lower-alpha 9] However, many of these innovations would make their first public appearance in two influential tarot decks designed by members of the order: the Rider–Waite–Smith deck and the Thoth deck. In addition, occultist Israel Regardie involved himself in two separate recreations of the original Golden Dawn deck, the Golden Dawn Tarot of 1978 with art by Robert Wang, and the New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot[lower-alpha 10] by Chic and Sandra Cicero, released, after Regardie's death, in 1991.[64] The central document containing the Golden Dawn's Tarot interpretations, "Book T", was first published openly, if not under that title, by Aleister Crowley in his occult periodical The Equinox in 1912.[65][66] The volume was later republished independently in 1967.[67]
Golden Dawn correspondences of the Major Arcana[68]
The Celtic Cross spread using the Universal Waite deck, a recolored variation of the original Rider–Waite deck
The Rider–Waite–Smith deck,[lower-alpha 11] released in 1909, was the first complete cartomantic tarot deck other than those derived from Etteilla's Egyptian tarot.[69] (Oswald Wirth's 1889 deck had only depicted the major arcana.[48]) The deck, designed by Arthur Edward Waite, was executed by Pamela Colman Smith, a fellow Golden Dawn member, and was the first tarot deck to feature complete scenes for each of the 36 suit cards between 2 and 10 since the Sola Busca tarot of the 15th century, with certain designs likely based in part on a number of photographs of them held by the British Museum.[70] The deck followed the Golden Dawn in its choice of suit names and in swapping the order of the trumps of Justice and Strength, but essentially preserved the traditional designations of the court cards. The deck was followed by the release of The Key to the Tarot, also by Waite, in 1910.[lower-alpha 12]
The Thoth deck, first released as part of Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth in 1944,[71] represent a somewhat different evolution of the original Golden Dawn designs. The deck, executed by Lady Frieda Harris as a series of paintings between 1938 and 1942,[72] owes much to Crowley's development of Thelema in the years following the dissolution of the Hermetic Order. While the deck follows Golden Dawn teachings with respect to the zodiacal associations of the major arcana and the associations of the minor arcana with the various astrological decans, it also:[73]
reverted to the traditional Marseille numbering of Justice and Strength as arcana 8 and 11, respectively (though it retained the swapped associations with respect to the Hebrew alphabet)
swapped the Hebrew alphabet associations of the fourth and seventeenth arcana (The Emperor and The Star, respectively), in accordance with Crowley's Liber Legis of 1913
renamed several of the major arcana
renamed the suits of Batons and Coins to Wands and Disks (the latter instead of the Golden Dawn's "Pentacles"), and
adopted the Golden Dawn's court cards, except that the Knight was not renamed.
While Crowley managed to print a partial test run of the standalone deck using seven color plates included in The Book of Thoth, it was not until the 1960s, after Crowley and Harris's deaths, that the deck was first printed in its entirety.[71]
Tarot divination in the United States
Two of the earliest publications on tarot in the English language were published in the United States, including a book by Madame Camille Le Normand entitled Fortune-Telling by Cards; or, Cartomancy Made Easy, published in 1872,[74] and an anonymous American essay on the tarot published in The Platonist in 1885 entitled "The Taro".[75] The latter essay is implied by Decker and Dummett to have been written by an individual with a connection to the occult order known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.[76] While it is not clear to what extent the Hermetic Brotherhood used tarot cards in its practices,[77] it influenced later occult societies such as Elbert Benjamine's Church of Light, which had tarot practices (and an accompanying deck) of its own.[78]
Adoption of the esoteric tarot practices of the Golden Dawn in the United States was driven in part by the American occultist Paul Foster Case, whose 1920 book An Introduction to the Study of the Tarot made use of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck and assorted esoteric associations first adopted by the Golden Dawn.[79] By the 1930s, however, Case had formed his own occult order, the Builders of the Adytum, and began to promote the Revised New Art Tarot,[lower-alpha 13] by Manly P. Hall with art by J. Augustus Knapp,[80] as well as Case's own deck. Executed by Jessie Burns Parke, the artwork of Case's deck, the B.O.T.A. Tarot, generally resembles that of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, but the deck also shows influences from Oswald Wirth and the original design of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn tarot.[81] Case promoted the deck in his 1947 book The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, which also marked one of the first references to the work of Carl Jung by a tarotist.[82]
Esoteric use of the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot was also promoted in the works of Eden Gray, whose three books on the tarot made extensive use of the deck. Gray's books were adopted by members of the 1960s counter-culture as standard reference works on divinatory use of tarot cards,[83] and her 1970 book A Complete Guide to the Tarot was the first work to use the metaphor of the "Fool's Journey" to explain the meanings of the major arcana.[84][85]
Tarot divination since 1970
The work of Eden Gray and others in the 1960s led to an explosion of popularity in tarot card reading beginning in 1969.[67]Stuart R. Kaplan'sU.S. Games Systems, which had been founded in 1968 to import copies of the Swiss 1JJ Tarot, was well positioned to take advantage of this explosion and reissued the then out-of-print Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot in 1970, which has not gone out of print since.[86] Tarot card reading quickly became associated with New Age thought, signaled in part by the popularity of David Palladini's Rider–Waite–Smith-inspired Aquarian Tarot, first issued in 1968.[87] Artists soon began to create their own interpretations of the tarot for artistic purposes rather than purely esoteric ones, such as the Mountain Dream Tarot of Bea Nettles, the first photographic tarot deck, released in 1975.[88]
The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of a new generation of tarotists, influenced by the writings of Eden Gray and the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell on psychological archetypes. These tarotists sought to apply tarot card reading to personal introspection and growth, and included Mary K. Greer, the author of Tarot for Your Self: A Wookbook for the Inward Journey (1984), and Rachel Pollack, the author of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980/1983).[89][90] Tarot cards also began to gain popularity as a divinatory tool in countries like Japan, where hundreds of new decks have been designed in recent years.[91] The democratization of digital publishing in the 2000s and 2010s led to a new explosion of tarot decks as artists became increasingly able to self-publish their own, with the contemporaneous empowerment of feminist, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities providing a ready market for such work.[92][93]
Use
Tarot is often used in conjunction with the study of the Hermetic Qabalah.[94] In these decks all the cards are illustrated in accordance with Qabalistic principles, most being influenced by the Rider–Waite deck. Its images were drawn by artist Pamela Colman Smith, to the instructions of Christian mystic and occultist Arthur Edward Waite, and published in 1911.[95]
A difference from Marseilles-style decks is that Waite and Smith use scenes with esoteric meanings on the suit cards. These esoteric, or divinatory meanings were derived in great part from the writings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn group, of which Waite had been a member. The meanings[96] and many of the illustrations[97] showed the influence of astrology as well as Qabalistic principles.
Trumps
The following is a comparison of the order and names of the Major Trumps up to and including the Rider–Waite–Smith and Crowley (Thoth) decks:
Next to the usage of tarot cards to divine for others by professional cartomancers, tarot is also used widely as a device for seeking personal guidance and spiritual growth. Practitioners often believe tarot cards can help the individual explore one's spiritual path.
People who use the tarot for personal divination may seek insight on topics ranging widely from health or economic issues to what they believe would be best for them spiritually.[111] Thus, the way practitioners use the cards in regard to such personal inquiries is subject to a variety of personal beliefs. For example, some tarot users may believe the cards themselves are magically providing answers, while others may believe a supernatural force or a mystical energy is guiding the cards into a layout.
Alternatively, some practitioners believe tarot cards may be utilized as a psychology tool based on their archetypal imagery, an idea often attributed to Carl Jung. Jung wrote, "It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli."[112] During a 1933 seminar on active imagination, Jung described the symbolism he saw in the imagery:[113]
The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king, the queen, the knight, the ace, etc., only the figures are somewhat different, and besides, there are twenty-one [additional] cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example, the symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.
For use as a divinatory device, the tarot deck is dealt out in various patterns and interpreted by a gifted "reader." The fact that the deck is not dealt out into the same pattern fifteen minutes later is rationalized by the occultists by claiming that in that short span of time, a person's fortune can change, too. That would seem to call for rather frequent readings if the system is to be of any use whatsoever.
Tarot historian Michael Dummett similarly critiqued occultist uses throughout his various works, remarking that "the history of the esoteric use of Tarot cards is an oscillation between the two poles of vulgar fortune telling and high magic; though the fence between them may have collapsed in places, the story cannot be understood if we fail to discern the difference between the regions it demarcates."[115] As a historian, Dummett held particular disdain for what he called "the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched", noting that "an entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by the occultists; and it is all but universally believed."[116]
Many Christian writers discourage divination, including tarot card reading, as deceptive and "spiritually dangerous", citing, for example, Leviticus 19:26 and Deuteronomy 18:9–12 as proof texts.[117][118]
↑ See, for example, Alexander and Shannon (2019),[21] who describe as "compelling" theories linking tarot cards to ancient Egypt and the Book of Thoth.
↑ The asterisks and the abbreviations are the actual way Court de Gébelin refers to the second essay.
↑ Miscalled by him "Bohemians". At that time, Romani people were thought to have come from Egypt, until later research established their origin in India.
↑ Despite this, Alexander and Shannon (2019),[27] still claim that "Romani people may have carried the cards to Europe."
↑ Etteilla's "eagerness to establish his claim to priority over de Gébelin..."[32]
↑ Etteilla repeatedly claimed that he had studied the Tarot pack "from 1757 to 1765..."[32]
↑ Waite (2005) made 34 references to Lévi in all, including references to five of Lévi's books in the bibliography.
↑ Dummett (1980) singles out Pitois's writing as one of the worst examples of what he calls false ascription to be found in the occult literature.
↑ No complete copies of this deck are known to exist, but copies of three trumps, one court card, and the entire set of minor arcana painted by Moina Mathers were preserved by the Whare Ra Temple of New Zealand, and a set of court cards believed to be those of W. W. Westcott were also preserved. Israel Regardie's later recreations of the deck were based on color photocopies of his personal deck for which the originals had been stolen.[61][62]
↑ Rereleased as the Golden Dawn Magical Tarot in 2000 and 2010.[63]
↑ Alternately named the Rider–Waite Tarot or Waite–Smith Tarot
1 2 Court de Gébelin incorrectly labeled both Death and Temperance as XIII.[107] The latter is probably a printing error.
↑ Christian, following Lévi, placed his "Crocodile" between Arcanum XX and Arcanum XXI.
↑ Wirth typically placed his unnumbered "Fool" last, but depicted the penultimate Hebrew letter shin (ש) on the card, following Lévi's arrangement of Arcanum 0 between Arcanum XX and Arcanum XXI.[108][109]
↑ While the Fool is numbered 0 in the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot, Waite follows Lévi in listing it between Arcanum XX and Arcanum XXI in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot, despite calling such an order "ridiculous on the surface [and] wrong on the symbolism".[110]
Related Research Articles
Tarot is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini. From their Italian roots, tarot-playing cards spread to most of Europe, evolving into a family of games that includes German Grosstarok and modern games such as French Tarot and Austrian Königrufen. In the late 18th century French occultists made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy. Thus, there are two distinct types of tarot packs in circulation: those used for card games and those used for divination. However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, are occasionally used for cartomancy.
The Minor Arcana, sometimes known as Lesser Arcana, are the suit cards in a cartomantic tarot deck.
The Major Arcana are the named cards in a cartomantic tarot pack. There are usually 22 such cards in a standard 78-card pack, typically numbered from 0 to 21. Although the cards correspond to the trump cards of a pack used for playing tarot card game, the term 'Major Arcana' is rarely used by players and is typically associated exclusively with use for divination by occultists.
The Rider–Waite Tarot is a widely popular deck for tarot card reading, first published by the Rider Company in 1909, based on the instructions of academic and mystic A. E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Also known as the Waite–Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith, or Rider Tarot, the deck has been published in numerous editions and inspired a wide array of variants and imitations. Estimates suggest over 100 million copies of the deck circulate across 20 countries.
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot is a divinatory tarot guide, with text by A. E. Waite and illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith. Published in conjunction with the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot deck, the pictorial version followed the success of the deck and Waite's text The Key to the Tarot. Both Waite and Smith were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Waite was very concerned with the accuracy of the symbols used for the deck, and he did much research into the traditions, interpretations, and history behind the cards.
The Empress (III) is the third trump or Major Arcana card in traditional tarot decks. It is used in card games as well as divination.
The Hierophant (V), alternatively depicted as The Pope or The High Priest (as a counterpart to "The High Priestess") is the fifth card of the Major Arcana in occult Tarot decks used in divination. It was identified as the Pope in early decks like Tarot of Marseilles, while modern decks like Rider–Waite Tarot may use the term hierophant (Ancient Greek: ἱεροφάντης), a person who brings religious congregants into the presence of that which is deemed "holy".
Pamela Colman Smith, nicknamed "Pixie", was a British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist. She is best-known for illustrating the Rider–Waite tarot deck for Arthur Edward Waite. This tarot deck became the standard among tarot card readers, and remains the most widely used today. Smith also illustrated over 20 books, wrote two collections of Jamaican folklore, edited two magazines, and ran the Green Sheaf Press, a small press focused on women writers.
Thoth Tarot is an esoteric tarot deck painted by Lady Frieda Harris according to instructions from Aleister Crowley. Crowley referred to this deck as The Book of Thoth, and also wrote a 1944 book of that title intended for use with the deck.
Antoine Court, who named himself Antoine Court de Gébelin, was a Protestant pastor, born in Nîmes, who initiated the interpretation of the Tarot as an arcane repository of timeless esoteric wisdom in 1781.
Etteilla, the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, was the French occultist and tarot-researcher, who was the first to develop an interpretation concept for the tarot cards and made a significant contribution to the esoteric development of the tarot cards to a wide audience, and therefore the first professional tarot occultist known to history who made his living by card divination. Etteilla also influenced the French divination professional Marie Anne Lenormand. From 1783 to 1785, Etteilla published his work Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots, which is still considered the standard reference work of Tarot cartomancy. Etteilla published his ideas of the correspondences between the tarot, astrology, and the four classical elements and four humors, and in 1789 he published his own tarot deck, which, however, differed significantly from the classic tarots such as the Tarot de Marseille in terms of structure and card designations.
Strength is a Major Arcana tarot card, and is numbered either XI or VIII, depending on the deck. Historically it was called Fortitude, and in the Thoth Tarot deck it is called Lust. This card is used in game playing as well as in divination.
Justice is a Major Arcana tarot card, numbered either VIII or XI, depending on the deck. This card is used in game playing as well as in divination.
The Tarot of Marseilles is a standard pattern of Italian-suited tarot pack with 78 cards that was very popular in France in the 17th and 18th centuries for playing tarot card games and is still produced today. It was probably created in Milan before spreading to much of France, Switzerland and Northern Italy. The name is sometimes spelt Tarot of Marseille, but the name recommended by the International Playing-Card Society is Tarot de Marseille, although it accepts the two English names as alternatives. It was the pack which led to the occult use of tarot cards, although today dedicated decks are produced for this purpose.
The suit of wands is one of four suits in tarot, collectively known as the Minor Arcana. Like the other tarot suits, the suit of wands contains fourteen cards: ace (one), two through ten, page and knight, queen and king. When Tarot cards are to play Tarot card games, where wands corresponds to the suit of batons. Tarot cards came to be utilized for divinatory purposes by esotericists such as Eliphas Levi and were regularized into the divinatory form most known today by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rider–Waite Tarot, created by a Golden Dawn member.
Tarot games are card games played with tarot packs designed for card play and which have a permanent trump suit alongside the usual four card suits. The games and packs which English-speakers call by the French name tarot are called tarocchi in the original Italian, Tarock in German and similar words in other languages.
The Tarocco Bolognese is a tarot deck found in Bologna and is used to play tarocchini. It is a 62 card Italian suited deck which influenced the development of the Tarocco Siciliano and the obsolete Minchiate deck.
The Fool is one of the 78 cards in a tarot deck. Traditionally, it is the lowest of the 22 trump cards, in tarot card reading called the 22 Major Arcana. However, in tarot card games it developed to be not one of the trump cards but a special card, serving a unique purpose by itself. In later Central European tarot card games, it re-developed to now become the highest trump. As a consequence and with respect to his unique history, The Fool is usually an unnumbered card with a unique design; but sometimes it is numbered as 0 or more rarely XXII. Design and numbering-or-not to not clearly indicate its role as a trump or special card in the specific game.
Jessie Burns Parke, a notable American artist of the Boston School (painting), has become best known for creating the art for the cards in the Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.) tarot card deck. An oil painter and watercolorist, Parke created both easel paintings and miniatures as well as graphics, etchings, and illustrations. She focused on landscapes, nature scenes, and portraits.
Gertrude Charlotte Moakley was an American librarian and a Tarot scholar. Moakley is notable for having written the earliest and most significant account of the iconography of Tarot, a card game which originated in the Italian Renaissance. She had worked at the New York Public Library.
↑ Ouspensky, P. D. (1976). The Symbolism of the Tarot: philosophy of occultism in pictures and numbers. Dover Publications.
↑ Semetsky, Inna (2011). "Tarot images and spiritual education: the three I's model". International Journal of Children's Spirituality. 16 (3): 249–260. doi:10.1080/1364436X.2011.613069. S2CID144743688.
↑ Beeb, John (1985). "A Tarot Reading on the Possibility of Nuclear War". Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought. 16 (1): 97. doi:10.1080/00322928508407948.
↑ Nichols, Sallie (1974). "The Wisdom of the Fool". Psychological Perspective: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought. 5 (2): 97–116. doi:10.1080/00332927408409418.
↑ Nichols, Sallie. Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. San Francisco: Weiser Books.
↑ Semetsky, Inna (2010). "When Cathy was a Little Girl: The Healing Praxis of Tarot Images". International Journal of Children's Spirituality. 15 (1): 59. doi:10.1080/13644360903565623. S2CID145713665.
↑ Zalewski, Pat; Zalewski, Chris (2019). The Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn: Divination, Meditation and High Magical Teachings (reviseded.). London: Aeon. p.7. ISBN978-1-911597-29-2.
↑ Westcott, William Wynn; Mathers, Moina (December 1998). Küntz, Darcy (ed.). The Golden Dawn Court Cards as Drawn by William Wynn Westcott & Moina Mathers. Golden Dawn Studies Series. Vol.5 (2nded.). Sequim, WA: Holmes Publishing Group. ISBN1-55818-336-1.
1 2 3 Gillis, R. Leo (Autumn 2009). Katz, Marcus (ed.). "The (Printer's) Devil Is in the Details". Tarosophist International. Vol.1, no.4. pp.39–62. ISSN2040-4328.
↑ Yaccarino, Michael Orlando (Winter 2009). Katz, Marcus (ed.). "Sage of Aquarius: David Palladini & The Art of Being". Tarosophist International. Vol.1, no.5. pp.5–32. ISSN2040-4328.
↑ Jung, C. G. (1959). "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious". In Read, Sir Herbert; Fordham, Michael; Adler, Gerhard (eds.). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol.9, part 1. Translated by Hall, R. F. C. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 38, paragraph 81. ISBN978-0691018331.
↑ Douglas, Claire, ed. (1997). Visions: Notes of the Seminar given in 1930–1934 by C. G. Jung, vol. 2. Bollingen Series. Vol.XCIX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p.923. ISBN978-0691099712.
↑ Randi, James. "Tarot cards". James Randi Educational Foundation. Archived from the original on 2013-05-14. Retrieved 2019-07-03.
Court de Gébelin, Antoine (1781). Le monde primitif. Vol.VIII. Paris: Chez Court de Gébelin, Valleyre, & Sorin.
Crowley, Aleister (1974) [first published 1944]. The Book of Thoth (Egyptian Tarot). New York: Samuel Weiser, Inc. ISBN0877282684.
Decker, Ronald; Depaulis, Thierry; Dummett, Michael (1996). A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Decker, Ronald; Dummett, Michael (2002). A History of the Occult Tarot: 1870–1970. London: Duckworth. ISBN0715631225.
Dummett, Michael (1980). The Game of Tarot. London: Duckworth. ISBN0715631225.
Frater S.M.R.D.; etal. (1967). The Secret Workings of the Golden Dawn: Book "T": The Tarot. Gloucester, England: Helios Book Service Ltd.
Gray, Eden (1970). A Complete Guide to the Tarot. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.
Greer, Mary K. (September 2019) [first published 1984]. Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for the Inward Journey (35th anniversaryed.). Newburyport, MA: Weiser Books. ISBN9781578636792.
Le Normand, Camille (1872). Fortune-Telling by Cards; or, Cartomancy Made Easy. New York: Robert M. De Witt.
Pollack, Rachel (2019) [first published in two parts in 1980/1983]. Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness. Newburyport, MA: Weiser Books. ISBN9781578636655.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
