The Tarot.

In recent years the Tarot, with Astrology, has become the most universal and popular divinatory system, so we thought we would include an exercise on it. You will need to obtain a Tarot deck and there are many to chose from. Before the exercise let’s talk a little on the Tarot cards.

Cards of any kind first appeared in Europe in the 14th century and the Tarot, of which include many images from the Renaissance period, was one of the first. It was primarily a card game and still is played in some parts of Northern Africa. In 1781 a man named Antoine Court de Greblin proclaimed that he had discovered the legendary ancient Egyptian book of secret writings, the Book of Thoth, and that the pages of this book were actually the cards in the Tarot deck. He said that if the cards were read properly they could be used for divination. He probably came to this conclusion because the Romanies or ‘Gypsies’ used the cards for fortune telling. (Gypsy being a derivation of the word Egypt, where they were thought to have come from, but they in fact came from India.)

Later, in the middle of the 19th century Eliphas Levi took this idea further and linked it with the Kabbalah and other mystic systems. Then, in the turn of the century the Order of the Golden Dawn, who we will talk about later, developed the idea even further and two of the members, Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, created the ‘Rider’ pack, which, because it is so picturesque, has became the most common pack on the market today. Prior to the Golden Dawn, the cards had their own interpretation, for example, some had ‘journey by water’ on. With the advent of the Rider pack the diviners were able to offer their own interpretation of the image.
There are probably as many ways of reading the cards as there are of laying them down and there is no right or wrong way. If you go to a Tarot card reader today they tend to lay them out like a clock with 12 positions depicting the 12 coming months. When you ask questions you usually get told what you want to know and whatever advice they give you it is usually to take a more positive control with your life. Certainly a good Tarot reader does manage to find out things about their subject without knowing anything at all about them. The cards do reveal something but whether knowing this is helpful is questionable. Sometimes being told what might happen can be very bad, for some people can go through life expecting to meet a tall dark stranger, and when they never do they are forever anxious and disappointed.

Most Tarot readers today ignore what the original definition of the cards were and change or adapt it to suit their own interpretation of what they ‘feel’ when talking to their subject. This can work but it takes years of experience and thousands of sittings to be able to do it properly. This exercise will be a little more immediate and should give you the same results.

With your pack of cards you should have received instructions, don’t read them just yet. Become familiar with your cards, look at all the pictures, mix them up, turn them around whilst shuffling, for it matters which way round the cards are. Meditate for a while and become quiet, expect that the cards will divulge something to you. When you are ready turn over the first five cards, or pick five from within the pack (it doesn’t matter which). The first one will be the most important and the last the least. You could turn over more cards but, as they become less influential as you turn them up, it’s not worth it.

You now have five cards in front of you in order of importance. Now look up the meanings of them, with the instructions that came with the cards, and see if they mean anything. Only do this exercise once, if you get no results try again in a couple of weeks or so. The Major Arcana, those with no numbers on, are more significant than the others, the Minor Arcana.

Remember the results are just to show you that life is very much more magical than you realise.

How magical?

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