No, you haven’t landed on the wrong blog. Though I usually only post about Tarot on my other blog, Spirit Blooms, in honor of World Tarot Day, I’d like to share my love of Tarot a bit more broadly, and also to honor some of the people of Tarot, including writers and artists that I think are rather special.
By the way, I understand that today is also World Towel Day for Arthur Dent fans (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
Tarot Writers and Artists
First, I want to introduce you to the blogs of two women and one man who’ve contributed a great deal to the study of Tarot, for me personally and for a lot of others. Mary K. Greer is the author of Tarot For Your Self and The Complete Book of Tarot Reversals, along with many other insightful books on Tarot. Rachel Pollack is an award-winning novelist as well as author of numerous books on Tarot and the Kabbalah, including Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, The Forest of Souls, and a pair of detailed companion books for the Haindl Tarot created by Hermann Haindl. Ms. Pollack also created the Shining Tribe Tarot.
In addition to those who write books about Tarot are a number of people who write articles, publish newsletters, review Tarot decks and books, and operate online forums. Then there are the deck creators who continue to color the lives of Tarot lovers with new and fascinating decks, beautiful images, and deep symbolism. James Wanless, Ph.D., or Captain Pick A Card (notice I’m linking to two different blogs here), is the creator of the Voyager Tarot, which is the first Tarot I owned and learned with, back in the late 80s. It’s a photo collage deck, and it still resonates for me in its beauty and usefulness.
Some of the most innovative modern Tarot decks include Mark McElroy’s Bright Idea Deck, and Emily Carding’s Transparent Tarot. While my preference is for a more traditional look and feel to Tarot, it’s decks like these that bring Tarot to people who never considered it before, and have helped carry it into the 21st century.
Sometimes an established artist decides to create a Tarot deck. Hermann Haindl is a great example of an artist who is also knowledgeable about Tarot, and I find his Haindl Tarot to be phenomenal. Artist decks are sometimes disappointments, either because the artists haven’t studied Tarot in depth, don’t have the right feeling for it, or because some aspect we expect of Tarot is missing. It’s not enough for a Tarot to just have pretty pictures or a novel theme. The best art-based decks are fabulous for reading, as is Elisabetta Trevisan’s deck, the Crystal Tarots.
History and Structure
Tarot is a centuries old phenomenon, the earliest European decks having appeared by the 15th century. No one really knows its origin, or its original purpose, but we know that it’s been used both as a deck of playing cards and as a system of divination for hundreds of years.
A Tarot deck is defined primarily by its structure. The deck typically contains 78 cards and includes two parts, a Major Arcana and a Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana contains 22 archetypal images, or Trumps, and the Minor Arcana is more like a deck of ordinary playing cards, with four suits of numbered and Court cards. Whereas a deck of playing cards includes only three face cards in each suit, a Tarot deck has four Courts, traditionally titled Page or Knave (the Jack in a playing card deck), Knight, Queen, and King. The Joker in modern playing cards is derived from the Fool archetype in the Tarot’s Major Arcana.
Three styles of Tarot decks have developed in modern times. Some use only pip cards, with non-scenic illustrations of the given number of suit elements for the numbered Minor Arcana. Others contain scenic illustrations in the Minors, which many people find richer in symbolism and easier to use in readings.
But enough of the technical details and history. I’m positive that if you’re interested in learning more, you’ll find plenty to intrigue you with a simple online search. For more about Tarot history, check out Trionfi.com or Tarotpedia. You can also learn about the history of specific decks at Wikipedia, such as the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and the much more ancient Tarot de Marseille.
The Art of Tarot
The draw for many people who love Tarot is the artwork. Some collectors don’t read with the cards at all. I won’t post any images here, for reasons of copyright. But I’ll provide a link or two to get you started at sites where samples of both ancient and modern decks can be viewed.
Golden Tarot by Kat Black (Use links at left to view the Majors, Coins, Cups, Swords, Wands.)
Tarot of Transformation by Jasmin Cori and Willow Arlenea is “an innovative deck by two psychotherapists offering an integrated and embodied spirituality.”
If you want to spend about two full days browsing samples of Tarot decks, you might want to try Aeclectic Tarot. This site also links to the Aeclectic Tarot Forum, one of the biggest and best places on the Internet to learn about and discuss Tarot, thanks to its most generous hostess, Solandia.
Last but not least, the German site Albideuter.de
compares the same cards from a staggering number of different Tarot decks.
Uses of Tarot
Tarot is most useful for gaining valuable insight into our lives, which is something that can’t be measured except through the experiences of those who use it or benefit from it. I don’t typically set out to use Tarot to predict the future, though there are times when it does that anyway, a mystery I won’t go into here in any depth, because frankly I can’t explain it. If someone is interested in how Tarot might do that, or how any kind of psychic ability or extra-sensory perception works, there are many theories, ranging from spiritual beliefs to quantum physics, and there are scientific studies going on all the time. Carl Jung experienced events that he classified as ESP, and as a scientist he thought the subject deserved further study. He also coined the term Synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence,” which is what a lot of students of Tarot, including me, tend to think is at least partially behind how Tarot works.
If you’re interested in following some of the latest research into psychic and other related phenomena, you might want to check out these links:
Institute of Noetic Sciences
American Society for Psychical Research
Consciousness Research Laboratory
The Veritas Research Project, University of Arizona
I find that my personal use of Tarot helps me most with insight, helping me to understand what’s going on in my life — especially inside my own psyche. It sometimes helps me make decisions by pointing out options or perspectives that I hadn’t thought of on my own, and it helps me by pointing out where I have either deluded myself about something or I have a lot of unconscious stuff going on that I need to be more aware of. I’ve also at times used it as a tool for meditation. Some psychologists and therapists use Tarot in their practices to help clients understand their projections, archetypes at work in their lives, and other unconscious issues. Sometimes an image is much better than words at bringing unconscious material into the open or into greater clarity. Tarot could be compared to dreams in its symbolism, and to literature in how it provides a metaphor for typical situations and processes that all humans experience.
I’ve used Tarot to spark my creativity, either to inspire the topic of an essay or to help me work out plotting puzzles in my fiction. The solution to the mystery in Snow Angels came almost entirely from a series of Tarot readings. I’ve read of other Tarot users who also find Tarot helpful in their creative work.
Additionally, Tarot is used, mostly in Europe, to play a card game known as Tarock, Trionfi, or Tarocchi (more instructions here). I’ve never played this game, and the instructions look complex to me. (I grew up playing Canasta and Cribbage.) My understanding is that it’s something like Bridge.
I discovered my love of Tarot more than 20 years ago, and to this day it remains my favorite mystery.
Happy World Tarot Day!
Fascinating and educational!
Some of those Tarot decks really are gorgeous.
I have very little experience with Tarot. I had a deck back in the late sixties, of course. Not to mention a book of I Ching, a Ouija board, books on astrology and other things I’ve forgotten probably. My thought is that all these tools might be helpful in getting at what you actually, unconsciously, know or have decided, but for some reason can’t manage to bring to your consciousness. Maybe because you don’t want to.
We even had a Tarot deck as kids, but mainly, then we’d deal the cards and have a fit whenever a picture with a skeleton came up!
Only astrology did I delve into to any extent. I had a huge, fat how-to book from Llewellyn publishers and I actually drew up charts with a protractor, taking into account all the exact data of the birth and the positions of all the planets. Among other charts I made ones for myself and my then wife reaching decades into the future. Alas, they are long since lost, nor do I recall what I predicted. Couldn’t have been too exciting.
I do like to think we don’t yet understand how the universe works and so it is a poor idea to dismiss things out of hand just because we can’t find a ready explanation for them.
I also am willing to believe such tools benefit those who work diligently with them, as I usually did not. I would, for example, ask the I Ching whether I would have a book published within two years and it would tell me I was standing a stream, which wasn’t what I wanted to hear. (Was it saying I was all wet?)
Eric — I’m not as familiar with the I Ching, and I find it more enigmatic than Tarot, but also fascinating. My earliest metaphysical interest was in astrology, way before I discovered Tarot.
This was very enjoyable.
Perhaps the I Ching meant the stream in a proverbial way. If you do not get in the stream, you will never get what you want?
Arwen — Thanks for visiting. Your I Ching interpretation makes some sense.
Eric — I think you’re in the stream now! Book number eight on the way … that’s some swimming.
I got my tarot deck in high school. It is now browning around the edges and getting some cracks but I wouldn’t part with it for the world. And if you want to read some of my ‘paranormal’ happenings writing, try my blog at http://valentinois.typepad.com/greenlight
We have a pretty good idea now of the origins of tarot cards. Tarot cards are not really ancient and they were not made for divination. They first appeared in 15th century Italy for playing a type of card game. It was only in the 18th century that the cards began to be used for divination. It is wrong for the psychic tarot industry to continue to misrepresent people’s culture in this way. There are some people who think tarot is most useful for playing card games. That’s what tarot was really made for, card playing!
I have two tarot decks that I use intermittently throughout the year when I have need of a possible solution to a current situation. It works through the higher self’ connection to the universe, no mystery there.
tarotgameplayer — You make a good point about my use of the term “ancient”. I didn’t use it in the same way that a historian would.
There is written evidence of the use of cards, though not necessarily Tarot cards, for divination as early as 1507. If you’re interested, you might want to visit the Tarot history links I provided to learn more. However, I think that most people who use Tarot for divination and who know anything of its history would concede that its original use was most likely for playing card games. I don’t think I’ve indicated otherwise here, though obviously my preferred use of it, today, is for divination.
I usually describe myself as a rationalist and say that I do not believe in Tarot nor in astrology nor in divination of any kind.
However, having said that… around 35 years ago I met someone who did Tarot divination and she read the cards for me. She made two definite predictions: (1) She saw me in a classroom — I protested that was easy, I was a teacher at the time — but she said she saw me as a student. I laughed. A few years earlier I had left a doctoral program, swearing that I was leaving the world of grad school forever. (2) She saw me in a serious relationship with a woman who was blond and a Leo. I was single at the time, having been divorced about a year after I left grad school, but was not in any serious relationship and had no particular interest in one.
As I said, I laughed at both predictions… but I was suddenly taken aback a year or so later when I remembered those predictions when I found myself in a serious relationship with a very blond woman (germanic/nordic ancestory) who had, indeed, been born under the sign of Leo. Not only that, but I had made a sudden career change and had gone back to school to work on a master’s degree in systems science.
So… I don’t know… I do know that I can’t explain many things in this world and those two Tarot-derived predictions are among them. I know that many so-called prognosticators throw out tons of predictions and gulable people only point out the few that come to pass and ignore the vast majority that fail to come true, but in this case I remember quite clearly those two predictions and how much I had scoffed at both of them. Maybe Carl Jung’s “synchronicity”?