by Marcus Katz
However, the interpretation of the deck of cards as a Christian cosmology can be traced back to tracts such as The New Game at Cards, or A Pack of Cards Changed into a Perpetual Almanack. This is also known as the Soldiers Tale and here we use a version printed in Stirling, Scotland, in the 1800s.
The tract takes the form of a dialogue between a nobleman and his servant, or sometimes a soldier. Having been caught with a deck of cards, the speaker (the rogue) makes an impassioned defence that the cards as being entirely a Christian prayer-book. As he says, because he is “no scholar,” “My Lord, if you call these cards, I do not; neither do I use them as such.” This is a response that many tarot readers might still find themselves giving when people presume to know how we use the cards.
Here is the reasoning for the cards providing, first, an almanac. In this, we have a 52-card pack.
Four suits = Quarters of the year
Thirteen cards in each suit = Weeks in a quarter = Lunations in a year
Twelve court cards = Months of the year = Signs of zodiac
Fifty-two cards in pack = Weeks in year
Total number of pips = Days in a year
The reasoning concludes that by having this reminder, we can count then the number of spots (pips) in the deck, coming to 365, then multiply by 24 and then by 60 to calculate the exact number of hours and minutes in a year.
We can see here how the structure of the pack has been turned into a temporal device using the deck’s structure and design as correspondence to the way in which we measure time.
Our narrator then goes on to demonstrate to his accuser that “I sometimes convert cards into a Prayer Book.” The accuser relents a little and gives him space to continue, as the almanac’s method has impressed him.
Here is the reasoning for the cards providing a prayer book.
Four suits = Four principle religions; Christianity, Judaism, Mahometanism [sic] (Islam), and Paganism.
Twelve court cards = Twelve patriarchs = Tribes = Apostles = Articles of faith
King and queen = Allegiance to Royalty
Ten = Cities destroyed in the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah = Plagues = Commandments
Nine = Hierarchies = Muses = Noble Orders
Eight = Beatitudes = Altitudes = Persons saved in Noah’s Ark = People resurrected in scriptures
Seven = Administering spirits before throne of God = Seals of Book of Life = Angels with veils = Liberal arts and sciences = Wonders of world = Planets = Days of week
Six = Petitions in Lord’s Prayer = Days of working week
Five = Senses
Four = Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell = Theological virtues = Evangelists = Seasons
Three = Trinity = Days Jonas in belly of whale = Hours Saviour hung on cross = Days in tomb
Two = Testaments, Old and New = Law and gospel = Virtue and vice
Ace = One Lord and God = One faith = One truth = One baptism = One master
In this manner, we can see that whilst it is of a popular and uncertain source, the system of making correspondences can bridge any system.
Conclusion
As we move through time, we see the tarot returned to its playing card origins in the surprising manner of a morality game, as were many original card decks. Cards have always been used as a portable book, a game, and a teaching device and tarot is no exception to this tradition. Artists and philosophers, esotericists and poets have all taken to the tarot as a sequential piece of art on which to write a spiritual narrative. These meanings are applicable to everyday readings when they provide the “big picture” of the situations we read on the most mundane level. The time travelling tarot reader can provide more profound and productive readings when they are aware of these higher levels of meaning for the cards.
Now, as we start to come to the end of our present jaunts through time, we will push further ahead into the moment now—and look at what might be considered cutting-edge in tarot.
[contents]
161 Paul Foster Case quotes re-worded from A Book of Tokens: Meditations on the Tarot, and the event was recalled by Anne Davies and re-printed in full by Paul A. Clark, Paul Foster Case: His Life and Works (Covina, CA: Fraternity of Hidden Light, 2013), 96–100.
162 Gareth Knight, Experience of the Inner Worlds (Cheltenham, UK: Skylight Press, 2010).
163 W. W. Westcott (trans.), Sepher Yetzirah (Lynnwood, WA: Holmes Publishing Group, 1996), 20.
164 http://www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk/decorations_for_the_hospital.htm (Last accessed 28 June, 2016). Also the Gloucestershire Echo—Thursday 16 January 1936 in the British Newspaper Archive.
165 www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk/taro.htm (Last accessed 28 June, 2016).
166 www.alchemywebsite.com/tarot/art_tarot19.html (Last accessed 28 June, 2016).
167 The Lantern, Vol. 8, No. 4, Summer 2007 (California: BOTA), 15.
168 http://www.holyorderofmans.org/Book%20of%20Alchemy/Alchemy-9.htm (Last accessed
28 June, 2016).
169 Anon, Jewels of the Wise (San Francisco, CA: Epiphany Press, 1979) 197.
170 Ibid., 1.
171 Translations by Peter Endebrock, taken from http://www.wopc.co.uk/germany/geistliche (Last accessed 1 July, 2016).
172 Anon, Meditations on the Tarot (Longmead, UK: Element Books, 1991), 164.
12
Tarosophy
Now that we have seen these greasy pieces of cardboard become a museum of old masters, a theatre of tragedy, a library of poems and novels, the silent brooding over down-to-earth words bound to come up along the way, following the arcane pictures, we can attempt to soar higher, to peal forth winged words, perhaps heard in some theatre balcony, where their resonance transforms moth-eaten sets on a creaking stage into palaces and battle-fields.
—Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies 173
The Present Moment: Here
Our time-pod returns you now to the present moment, holding this book as your guide to travels both past and future, literally in your hands. We have visited here just a few of the selected moments that took tarot in unexpected directions; perhaps the world’s greatest gift carried through time by the most unlikely of people. We have watched how people spent their own time creating and developing the art and methods of cartomancy, and now it is our turn—and yours. As you leave the time-pod for now, consider the future, which we have not yet visited.
Shuffle your cards—tarot, Lenormand, oracle, or playing cards—and feel them connected to the whole of this history we have travelled together. Place three cards down.
What do they tell you about your future with the tarot?
In this penultimate chapter, we travel no further in time than today and look at contemporary methods of tarot reading developed from Tarosophy, our term for the living wisdom of tarot. It is a way of working with tarot that encourages us to engage with life, not escape it using techniques that employ tarot to initiate change in our lives. 174
These techniques include “gated spreads,” chains of specifically designed spreads that take the real-life action divined by one spread into the question directed to the next spread. You cannot follow a gated spread without making changes in your life, as the next spread will not make sense without the result of the change being presented to it, hence the term.
We have seen throughout our time travels how the very first meanings were applied to dream symbols by the nature of the objects, animals, and events within the dream. These meanings were applied to the events of the time, so whilst a flock of birds might have signified a good hunt to our earliest ancestors, to an Edwardian gentleman the same symbol would have meant idle chatter and gossip in the park, and to us in the present might mean freedom of self-expression.
None of these meanings are a
ny truer than the others; all derive from the divinatory core of birds in flight having the nature of noisy freedom … and perhaps in the beginning, the nature of food or an approaching winter.
Over time these signs, portents, and symbols in the real world became symbols in dream and in language, for example Sirius rising on the horizon, a star that heralded the flood of the Nile. Such symbols were elevated in consciousness and became divine. As we evolved, they turned into systems that could be found in the entrails of animals, the shape of the clouds, or the way shells or sticks fell on the ground when cast with appropriate ritual. More time passed, and the symbols were also seen in the bottom of sherbet cups and coffee and tea cups, providing a convenient way of divining to everyone, not just the shamans, priestesses, priests, and oracles.
Time continued to pass; selections of these symbols were categorised, formulated, and pasted into fortune books at a time when such fortune-telling arts were falling by the wayside in a grand renaissance of human civilisation.
The symbols found their way to print onto cards, a far more accessible and portable way of manufacturing and selling them as products for teaching … as well as gambling. Along the way, their meanings were being taken (recovered all the way back from their source in our primitive life and dreams) from the fortune books and applied directly to the very cards often used to navigate the books.
In this way—as we have seen throughout our time travel—playing cards (including tarot) became divinatory tools and were then adopted by esotericists who projected their own systems through history, linking a chain of meaning from the very earliest religions to the present day.
Yet for all the enthusiastic and mistaken notions of their history, the cards remain an incredible link in the same manner we might suggest alchemical symbols reveal our inner psyche. The cards are tools, a blank bible upon which we write our own stories—and those stories have not changed in their core since the beginning of history.
We continue our search for meaning in life throughout time, with the cards at our side. Now it is up to us to write the next chapters beyond this one—for there is no final chapter in the cards; we can shuffle them and start anew at any time.
As we close this present work, we will first look at how tarot tells us about its own future, allowing the cards to speak for themselves. We have learnt in our travels through time that tarot is a language—now let us listen to what the twenty-two major arcana would say about their own future. Then we will provide a range of cutting-edge Tarosophy techniques for you to take tarot into your own future.
Tarot Tells Its Own Future
If the major arcana cards could speak, what would they suggest about the future of tarot?
Magician: It will be more magical: And as more is revealed more will be concealed. The Law of the Trickster’s Table is that the ball under the cup was in the hand of the one moving the cups.
High Priestess: It will be more spiritual. And it will take its place again between the pillars. The Law of the Scroll is that what is written in the future will always look the same as what was written in the past until you change your tool of writing.
Empress: It will become alive. And it will unfold in ways which only she imagines. The law of the Robe of Water is that what is on the surface is shaped by what is deepest. We must learn to hold our breath, then, and leave our shorelines far behind.
Emperor: It will be more influential. And it will shape more decisions even as it resists its own regulation. The Law of the Throne is that those who take it are not alone in sitting in their own blood.
Hierophant: It will become more traditional. And it will recover its dignity from its own roots. The Law of Revelation is that it is only the Resurrection of the Forgotten.
Lovers: It will be more popular. And it will become surfeit of its own choices. The Law of the Lovers is that you cannot have something without there being something else.
Chariot: It will head in new directions. And as it becomes drawn by the few, it will be driven by the many. The Law of the Reins it that when you pull, you are no longer in charge.
Strength: It will be resisted. And even as it struggles to retain its shape, it will create that shape. The Law of the Lion is that we become that which we fight.
Hermit: It will become more individual. And we will each own our own possibilities. The Law of the Lamp is that you have created everything before you even recognised it. Technology will allow for everyone to have their own unique deck which is unlike any other and can be changed instantly.
Wheel: It will change the way we see time. And the way we see time will change tarot. The Law of the Sphinx is that the riddle is its own answer.
Justice: It will become accessible to all. And new channels for its manifestation will be found between the pillars. There will be no singular deck, style, or approach favored above any other—all will be found and considered equal in the balance.
Hanged Man: It will rise in its value. And in ways we cannot yet imagine its value will be a place-holder in culture, society, and our psyche. There will always be a necessity for divination and tarot, to remind us of that from which we depend.
Death: It will transform itself as a language. And there will be new ways of inscribing and designing the tarot which will be almost unrecognizable to us today. Yet these will be obvious developments each arising from the other.
Temperance: It will be more integrated. And people will use it more regularly and engage with it in new ways to create projects, make decisions, and guide themselves daily. The rise of apps is merely the first part of this development.
Devil: It will be abused. And people will be concerned about its use, in the same way that people might be concerned about addiction to computer games or other distractions.
Tower: It will re-invent itself. And the way we talk about it will change, with new words to describe how the cards interact with each other, their names and meanings, and the way they offer advice—all these things will accelerate their change.
Star: It will go with us into space. And as we develop as a species, it will continue to guide us even in the far darkness of the heavens.
Moon: It will become more psychological. And it will be used as an adjunct to insight and personal development long after personal development is called something else.
Sun: It will become even more open and expansive. And even as it rises and falls several times in celebrity and popular culture, it will cycle round each time in a new way, lighting our future.
Judgment: It will provide a calling. And for many it will be a calling for life as a career, passion, or interest—a constant companion from cradle to grave.
World: It will become global. And in doing so it will provide a common language that is as unique as every person. It will reflect our common heritage, our common inheritance whilst at the same time celebrating our diversity and independent will.
In short, tarot has only just begun.
We will now look at a selection of contemporary and innovative methods of using tarot that may inspire you to experiment further and develop your own uses of this time-transcending tool.
Long-Term Prediction with the Major Arcana
You can use the predictions we have made above for your own situations by simply doing a reading with the twenty-two major arcana, and asking for a long-term prediction. Select one card and apply it to your own question.
So if you asked, “What is the long-term prediction for my relationships over my life?” and received the Sun card, it would be a positive prediction. It would suggest your relationships will become more expansive and open to more people in your life, rather than living in the future with fewer contacts, family, and friends. You can apply any global meaning as we have given in the list above to your own life or the life of a long-term project or situation.
Having made these predictions from the major arcana
themselves, let us look to more practical key phrases of the minor arcana for use in contemporary readings. In modern or clickbait parlance, here are “just two words you need know to master every card—and you won’t believe number four!”
The Tarosophy Lexicon
Wands
Own it
See it
Start it
Befriend it
Fight it
Ride it
Stand it
Move it
Master it
Carry it
Cups
Give it
Share it
Celebrate it
Ignore it
Lose it
Remember it
Imagine it
Leave it
Enjoy it
Recognise it
Swords
Cut it
Balance it
Split it
Hide it
Settle it
Transport it
Watch it
Free it
Mourn it
Stick it
Pentacles
Offer it
Juggle it
Build it
Save it
Invest it
Distribute it
Abandon it
Work it
Own it
Protect it
These simple key phrases can be used to perform a one or two card reading with a deck of just the forty minor arcana (four suits, ace to 10). These methods are unique to Tarosophy and are called split-deck methods. They were developed from the work of Papus, whom we met in an earlier chapter.
