|
|
Tarot Cards
Tarot cards are used today mainly in fortune-telling. A few years ago,
tarot cards would have conjured up images of Gypsies, but today the cards are
popular among occultists and New Agars in all walks of life.
The modern tarot deck has been traced back to fifteenth century
Italy and a trick-taking game
called triumphs (tarots in French) . The traditional tarot deck consists of two
sets of cards, one (the
major arcana) having
22 pictures, such as the Fool, the Devil, Temperance, the Hermit, the Sun, the
Lovers, the Juggler, the Hanged Man and Death. The other set has 56 cards (the
minor arcana) with
kings (or lords), queens (or ladies), knights, and knaves (pages or servants)
of sticks (or wands, cudgels or batons) , swords, cups and coins..
(Gypsies didn't begin using tarot cards until the twentieth
century.) Today, there are many different tarot decks used in
cartomancy. The
meanings of the figures and numbers on tarot cards vary greatly among tarot
readers and advocates, many of whom find connections between tarot and the
cabala,
astrology,
the I Ching, ancient
Egypt, and various other occult and mystical notions.
The
oldest playing cards date back to tenth century China, but the four suits of
tarot and modern playing cards probably originated with a fourteenth century
Muslim deck . According to de Givry, in the modern 52-card deck of ordinary
playing cards, sticks or wands = clubs (and announce news); swords = spades (and
presage unhappiness and death); cups = hearts (and presage happiness); coins =
diamonds (and presage money). The Muslim sticks represented polo sticks, and as
Europeans were not yet familiar with polo, they changed the suit of sticks to
that of wands, cudgels or batons.
Tarot
cards are usually read by a fortune-teller, who, in the past was usually a
woman. There has been a strong belief for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years,
that one's future is contained in the cards and that the fortune-teller can see
what that future is. Centuries of "scientific" training have not diminished the
popularity of occult guidance systems such as the tarot,
ouija boards,
astrology,
the I Ching,
palmistry,
iridology,
reflexology,
ink blots,
graphology,
enneagrams, crystal
balls, tea leaves, etc.
|
|
