tarot

Seventeen years ago I received my first tarot reading, and it changed my life. I can’t remember anything that my friend said, and I am not exactly sure if anything she said came to pass. However, it was that moment I remember falling in love with tarot.

Like anyone who has suffered at the hands of awe, I cannot recall exactly what enthralled me first. My friend was a gifted lady, highly intuitive, and tarot seemed to draw out her strength in ways I had never witnessed before. She generously gave me a deck (the same one I practice with today) and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have a character set in paradigms (as we all do). I do not, and have never really believed in a future. But for the last seventeen years I have learned that divination is possible: I have seen, via tarot, outcomes for clients that did come to pass.  The only possible conclusion I can draw is that the future is a multiple choice; your free will is, and always will be, the deciding factor. Tarot is simply a tool to aid your choosing.

History of Cards

Playing cards first entered Europe in the 14^th Century, travelling up with merchants coming out of Mamluk, Egypt. They were divided into four suits, still used in modern tarot, they are: swords, staves (or wands), cups and coins (or pentacles).

First known tarot cards were created in Milan between 1430 and 1450, when additional allegorical illustrations were added to the four suits. These cards were originally known as Carte Da Trionfi (Cards of Triumph), with the additional cards becoming known as Trionfi, or Trumps. They were used to play card games such as Italian Tarocchini or French Tarot, which are still being played to this day.

In 1442 Fillippo Maria Visconti, daughter of the famous ruler of Milan, commissioned a set of cards from an anonymous artist, but it wasn’t until 18^th Century France when records show tarot beginning to be used for other purposes. It was another famous name from history, Casanova, who was among the first to document that his Russian mistress frequently used tarot for divination.

16 years later, in 1781 the Comte de Mollet published a paper illustrating the connection between the Hebrew Letters and the Higher Arcane, illustrating the connection of the higher Arcane to the 22 pathways of the Kabbalist Tree of Life. (That is for another blog!)

It wasn’t until 1790, when the Ettiella’s deck was created that a set of 78 tarot cards were designed specifically to reflect divinatory and esoteric meanings. Etteilla was the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738 – 1791), the French occultist who was the first to popularize tarot divination to a wide audience, and therefore the first professional tarot reader known to history who made his living by card divination.

In December 1909, the publisher William Rider & Son of London changed the future of tarot by publishing a new deck designed and conceived by Pamela Coleman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite. Today, the Rider/Waite/Smith tarot deck is still the most popularly used in the west. It was the first tarot deck to have fully illustrated scenes from the lower arcane, and also made radical changes to the higher arcane, transforming the figure of the Pope into the Hierophant and the Papess became the High Priestess.

A year later, a small guide by A.E Waite entitled A Key to the Tarot was added to the deck to offer instruction on how the cards could be interpreted. This was the first time any novice could learn, and tarot as we know it today was born.

Relative to other divination tools, such as the Book of Changes (or I Ching, which is believed to date back to 223 BC) tarot is relatively young. Since the first publication of the Smith Rider Waite deck (complete with guide book) tarot has only really been available to us all for 101 years. There is still a great deal to learn. And this is why it appeals to me.

There are a few myths I would like to debunk about tarot.

They tell you your future.

What tarot deals with best is not your future, but your past. If you think about it, your past is the most significant part of your life, and certainly where 99.9% of your problems come from.

Your future is what will be made from this moment onwards…but as we can never go beyond this moment (without a time travelling device) then we are stuck with the conclusive fact that the future cannot exist.

I have read the cards for others for over 15 years, and nine times out of ten, people maybe curious about what is going to happen, but they want to talk about what has happened.  And they don’t want advice about how to deal with it in the future; they want advice on how to deal with it now.

If tarot did not deal with helping the individual in resolving the past as one of its primary functions, and told futures outright instead, it would not be nearly as useful.

TAROT descends from ancient occultist schools in Egypt

As discussed earlier, playing cards probably arrived from Egypt – but it wasn’t until much later in Europe that Tarot became what we know it to be today.

 It was Antoine Court de Gebelin, a Swiss clergyman in 1781, who first claimed that tarot was linked to the mysteries of Egypt, in particular to the Gods Isis and Thoth. He further claimed that the name tarot came from the Egyptian words TAR (royal) and RO (meaning road), and that tarot was therefore the royal road to wisdom.

In 1822 Jean Francois Champollion decoded the Rosetta Stone which made the understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs possible for the first time in history.  Later Egyptologists found nothing to support the fanciful etymologies of tarot proclaimed by Gebelin. Unfortunately these myths stuck, and still to this day the tarot is associated with the Egyptian book of Thoth, some even refer to the Higher Arcane as Thoth’s Attus.

Probably the most truthful theory of the origins of the word tarot links it to the Taro River in Northern Italy near Parma, where it is believed that the game originated. As history has demonstrated, nothing gets in the way of a good story quicker than the truth.

The fact of Tarot is simple; it is human wisdom in pictorial form, and it does not really matter where it comes from. It is open to interpretation just like life, but there is nothing supernatural about tarot. It deals with human life, human problems, and human experiences that all humans travail at some point in their life.  If it did not, it would not be useful.

Divination is the same as Fortune Telling

For me, the words Fortune Teller evoke images of gypsy caravans and crystal balls, and the smells of toffee apples from the fair. I would put warning against anyone who tells you something is going to happen for a fact.

No one can tell you with absolute certainty what is going to happen to you, unless that person is you.  Fortune telling states that something must happen. Whereas divination simply indicates what could happen if you continue on the course you are currently traversing. It is a very subtle difference, but the difference is you.

Tarot, used as a divination tool, can be very useful in seeing where you have been, where you are, and where that could possibly lead if you do not become more aware of your self and more responsible for your actions. If the future does not exist outside of this moment for you, how can it for tarot?

I’ll be writing way more about this through my blog.