There are 56 cards in the minor arcana.
In This Article...
What kind of religion are tarot cards?
Tarot cards also include four suits, but they are different depending on the region: French suits are found in Northern Europe, Latin suits are found in Southern Europe, and German suits are found in Central Europe. Each suit contains 14 cards: four face cards (King, Queen, Knight, and Jack/Knave/Page) and ten pip cards, numbered from one (or Ace) to ten. In addition, the tarot features a unique 21-card trump suit and a solitary card known as the Fool; this 22-card group of cards is referred to as the Major Arcana in the world of divination. The Fool may serve as the top trump or alternatively may be played to avoid doing so, depending on the game. In parts of Europe, these tarot cards are still used to play traditional card games without any occult connotations.
Tarot cards are mostly employed for amusement and divination in English-speaking nations where these activities are less popular, typically with the aid of specially created packs. Although academic research has shown that tarot cards were partially invented in northern Italy in the 15th century (16 of the modern 22 Major Arcana cards) and combined with a deck of four suits, “the Mamluk deck,” some people who use tarot for cartomancy believe the cards have esoteric links to ancient Egypt, Iran, the Kabbalah, Indian Tantra, or the I Ching. The Mamluk deck of cards was created in or before the 14th century and arrived in Western Europe after paper was produced in Asia (see Playing Card – Egypt and following sections). By the end of the thirteenth century, Europeans were making the Mamluk deck with customized “court cards” and suit symbols.
Although some people think that tarot cards were not used for divination until the late 18th century, there is evidence of an early tarot deck that was “used in divination to determine the querent’s prospects in love” (Fernando de la Torre’s “Juego de Naypes” deck of Spain, 1450), each card having an image and verse.
Where did Tarot card reading begin?
Things become a little mystical around Halloween, when horror movies are playing nonstop on TV and your holiday-loving neighbors’ yards are decorated with grotesque decorations. We decided to explore the background of tarot cards in honor of one of the most enchanted seasons of the year.
Tarot cards were initially just another card game, one that was a lot like the bridge that is played today, despite the fact that we now link them with the occult. Like other decks, the earliest known tarot cards appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century, with the wealthiest households in Italy purchasing the most well-liked sets. It was expensive to commission what was practically dozens of tiny paintings because there was no printing press and only hand-painted cards were available.
These early tarot cards, known as tarocchi in Italian, included suits, trump cards, and even pips, just like any other deck.
While others experimented, the mainstream use of tarot cards for divination didn’t begin until Frenchman Jean-Baptise Alliette produced the first comprehensive book on tarot card reading in the late 1700s. Under the alias Etteilla, he published his own deck along with a user’s manual for the cards. He incorporated ideas about astronomy and the four elements to give each card a purpose. He asserted that he had taken extensive inspiration from the Book of Thoth, a work purportedly penned by Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom.
He incorporated ideas about astronomy and the four elements to give each card a purpose.
Etteilla was the first to allocate the cards to a certain sequence and spread, including a front-to-back method that is still in use today. He issued a revised edition of his manual in 1791 when his writings gained popularity, making him the first known professional tarot reader.
The next significant change to tarot cards occurred in 1909. You’ve probably seen the pictures for the Rider-Waite deck, created by publisher William Rider and tarot reader A. E. Waite. The Rider-Waite deck, like Etteilla, came with a written manual explaining how to interpret the cards and what each one meant. When the cards in this deck were arranged together, the intricate scenes presented a narrative. The Rider-Waite Deck was updated and reprinted in the 1970s, along with a new instruction manual by Stephen Kaplan, which led to the most recent tarot card renaissance.
Is astrology a branch of tarot cards?
These days, almost everyone you know possesses a tarot deck and regularly receives readings. Tarot is no longer simply for the esoteric. Tarot has evolved over time into an intuitive art that may assist you in planning for both the best and worst scenarios. Tarot cards are filled with symbolism, but you might not be aware of how closely it is related to astrology. For instance: In the Major Arcana, a card corresponds to each sign of the zodiac.
What are the tarot cards supposed to mean?
What do tarot cards generally stand for? As shamans like to say, “medicine around what is happening in your particular orbit: love, money, work, aspirations, and general life path” is what tarot cards are there for.
Spirituality: Is it a religion?
Religion and spirituality might be difficult to distinguish from one another, but there are some rather clear differences between the two. A community or group usually shares a particular set of organized beliefs and behaviors that make up religion. It has to do with finding serenity and meaning in life and is more of an individual discipline.
Tarot cards or playing cards: which came first?
With the surge in popularity of alternative religions, witchcraft, and paganism, tarot reading and tarot cards have grown increasingly popular in recent years. It seems fitting that the Tarot is one of the most obvious and approachable gates to that path as topics like astrology, energy work, and more become more widely known. But how did the Tarot come to be used as a tool for divination and self-examination, and where did it originate?
At first glance, one may think that the Tarot has some kind of ancient history; some have even asserted that the cards represent the remains of an old Egyptian manuscript that was destroyed in the Alexandrian library fire. Were they aliens? the divine? Actually, no. We are aware of no ancient origins for tarot. It was most likely developed much more recently.
Since nobody actually knows who made the original card decks that would later develop into the Tarot as we know it, I suggest “probably.” It turns out that conventional playing cards work the same way. Sometime in the 14th or 15th century, playing cards initially arrived in Europe from, well, somewhere that wasn’t Europe. We don’t know if it was Arabia or China, but considering the lack of connection between Mah Jong and our current card decks, my money is on China. Therefore, it is difficult to say for sure whether Tarot or playing cards emerged first, while either might have happened and it is possible that they both descended from a single, long-lost ancestor.
Do you know how to say “tarot”?
Depending on whether British English or American English is being used, the proper pronunciation of “tarot” in English significantly changes. The “t” in “tarot” is never uttered, in any scenario. The word “tarot” is pronounced “tah-row” in British English and “teh-row” in American English.
What is Carl Jung’s opinion of tarot cards?
With his concept of archetypes, it is stated that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung uncovered “the internal Tarot of the human mind. Additionally, it may be argued that Tarot was a part of the collective mind from the beginning, which is where archetypesthe basic images that make up a person’s psychic constellationare imprinted.
An complete mutant mental cosmos is ciphered in a deck of 78 Tarot cards, similar to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, which can be used to make predictions. When we understand how the present moment changed from the past, according to Jung, we can foresee the future. The Tarot card or the hexagram is a visible manifestation of this connection, a type of synchronicity that forces itself to rise to the surface but necessitates, just like an oracle, an accurate interpretation. This evolution of the present is connected to the past, just as the conscious mind is subjected to the unconscious.
According to Visions: Notes of the Seminar given in 19301934, Jung discussed Tarot during a seminar in 1933. He claimed that these cards are the ancestors of the gambling decks we use today, where red and black represent two opposites and the division of four spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs also relates to the symbolism of individualization. They are psychological representations, symbols that we manipulate in a similar way to how the unconscious seems to manipulate the things it contains. They are joined in a specific way, and the various ways they are mixed reflect the playful evolution of humankind’s history.
The Tarot’s historical background and whether it genuinely predates the playing cards that are most frequently employed for entertainment reasons are still up for debate. However, the most frequently recognized theory is that Tarot cards appeared later. Some occultists refer to the Tarot as the “Book of Thoth,” and they assert that the cards are derived from ancient Egyptian mysteries. Regardless of its origins, the card sets utilized by contemporary sorcerers like Aleister Crowley or Alejandro Jodorowsky contain elements of its arcana that have been lost to time yet have a sinister past.
Tracing the similarities between mental processes and alchemical procedures that aim to turn (symbolically) matter into gold was one of Jung’s greatest contributions to psychology. In a similar way, the Swiss thought of the Tarot as an alchemical game:
The diable, a hermaphrodite figure, appears in the Tarot. That would be the gold in alchemy. In other words, the Christian worldview sees such an endeavor as the union of opposites as demonic, something bad that is forbidden, or anything associated with black magic.
The collection of images discovered in alchemy are useful as examples if one wants to create a mental image of the symbolic procedure. Additionally, it appears that the Tarot card images are descended in some way from the archetypes of change; this impression was verified for me in a very insightful presentation by professor Bernoulli. The symbolic process is an encounter with and via images. It typically develops in an enantiodromian* manner, much like the I Ching text, and as a result, exhibits a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.
In Heraclitean philosophy, the term enantiodromia, which means “that which becomes its opposite,” is used by Jung. This may be thought of as the constant mobility required for optimum psychic health. The Sun must change into the Moon; alchemy is found in the coincidence of life’s cycle.
What distinguishes astrology from a tarot card reading?
“While astrology offers more general predictions, tarot cards take a highly individualized approach to making predictions. Numerous people at once may be affected by astrological predictions. Tarot allows you to delve deeply and intricately into any subject you are interested in, whereas astrology does not. That’s not to suggest you can’t receive a comprehensive prognosis; astrology can provide one, but it requires complex computations of your birth chart. It is regrettable that so few astrologers today go into great detail in order to provide an accurate prognosis.”
