Everything You Wanted to Know About Tarot

ABOUT THE TAROT CARDS A HISTORY While playing cards likely originated in the Middle East, the first known 5- suited tarot decks came from Renaissance Italy, and were used in a card game called Tarocchi. Some speculate the 5th suit of tarot trumps was modeled on the Italian "triumph" morality parades of that time period. WHAT MAKES A DECK TAROT? 3 PRIMARY DECK MODELS 78 CARDS MARSEILLES IN A RIDER-WAITE-SMITH TAROT DECK THOTH SUITS # OF CARDS PER SUIT 5 SUITS 1 MAJOR ARCANA 22 liii 4 MINOR ARCANA 14 14 14 14 Cups Wands Major Arcana Antoine Court de "Triumph" cards requested by the Gebelin publishes a chapter on tarot Aleister Crowley publishes his own tarot: the Thoth deck. It becomes another widely copied template. Duke of Milan in a as an esoteric letter - for a wisdom teaching friendly game of from the Tarocchi? Egyptians. 1440 1773 1969 1451 1909 The oldest known Rider-Waite deck tarot deck, the Visconti-Sforza, published, using vivid imagery for is produced for Tarocchi gaming. the minor arcana – a groundbreaking innovation. 3,651,648 POSSIBLE COMBINATIONS IN A 3-CARD SPREAD In a letter dated October 15, 1897, George Pollexen, the uncle of W.B. Yeats, diagrams the famous 10-card "Celtic Cross" tarot spread in a letter to Wynn Westcott, a founder of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society. SO HOW DOES IT WORK? Some readers treat tarot as a complex Roschach test, asking questions that lead the client to interpret their own cards. Others, such as psychics, use the cards as a conduit for their own psychic connection. Jung wrote: “[The tarot images] 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." Perhaps tarot allows us to tap into our subconscious understanding of what's happening, and invoke synchronicity into our lives? The Metaphysical Detective http://kirstenweiss.com Pentacles Swords