In 15th-century Italy, the cards were known as trionfi. Even at the very birth of tarot, card-makers cherrypicked from diverse traditions, seizing on the allegories that suited them. In , the writer on the occult Paul Huson linked them to the late-medieval artistic tradition of the Danse Macabre, in which a host of tarot-like characters — the Pope, Emperor, Death — processed to the grave.
Most recently, in A Cultural History of Tarot , the Australian scholar Helen Farley detailed close allegorical correspondences between the trumps and the values asserted by Filippo Maria Visconti, the early 15th-century Duke of Milan whose court produced the most influential painted deck. Which allegorical figure made it to which pack might have been arbitrary or accidental.
Even at the very birth of tarot, then, card-makers were cherrypicking from diverse traditions, and seizing on the allegories that suited them. The beguiling obscurity of the symbolism lent itself to the process.
A reader might thus ascribe particular meanings to the cards drawn, according to which way round they faced. He devised a system of arcane correspondences, disgorging a fresh wave of potential symbolic associations between individual cards and occult wisdom traditions, incorporating astrology, Mesmerism and alchemy, as well as the Kabbalah.
The contribution of Yeats and Waite was even more influential. If the tarot deck has been subjected to intense research, much of it imaginative, the techniques that tarot readers use are rarely discussed. This might be because of their embarrassingly prosaic origin.
Informal cartomancy, or fortunetelling using playing cards, is probably as old as cards themselves, and relates to folk practices including Bibliomancy, or opening the Bible at random, and the Biblical casting or Roman drawing of lots. The major figure seems to have been the early 19th-century celebrity fortuneteller Marie Anne Lenormand.
She used a card deck derived not from ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah, but from a German parlour game published in around the Game of Hope. The cards would be laid out in a square, and players would move their tokens around the cards as on a conventional board, seeking to get home. When the philosopher Michael Dummett wrote the first scholarly, and skeptical, history of tarot in , he attracted stung responses for his focus on the game, not its occult significations. The same is true of tarot today.
There is a hardcore of occult-minded tarotologists, but many others dabble, collect or simply play. Anecdotally, tarot appears to be relatively popular among adolescents and young people. The cards now sit alongside other commodified and highly marketed occult play objects, notably the ouija board itself dreamed up and marketed as a parlour game by a US inventor and lawyer in the s.
Tarot cards, in short, are a packaged form of folk wisdom you can buy for a small sum. They mostly come with a Little White Book tucked into the box, offering a basic guide to methods and interpretations. This presumably explains the practice of wrapping the cards in a black or otherwise precious cloth that, or apeing the religious practices surrounding holy books for visual effect. Julie, my tarot reader, encompasses both soft and hard positions.
Then you rephrase what he has told you into a coherent sketch and feed it back to him. The true power of tarot reading, however, is not based on simple or cynical guesswork. The querent is complicit in the process. You too? Their average score, astonishingly, was 4. When a tarot reading is momentarily inaccurate, we ignore or forget it. When it hits the mark, we are struck by its success. Confirmation bias is also at work.
We prefer to have our existing beliefs confirmed, and selectively pay attention to statements that perform this happy function for us. So when a tarot reading is momentarily inaccurate, we ignore or forget it. Tarot reading works, ultimately, because we make ourselves the willing victims of our cognitive biases.
Under the influence of false-pattern detection, or apophenia, we turn the string of necessarily disconnected statements made by a medium or tarot reader into a coherent narrative in which we are the hero. And plain old flattery amplifies the effect. I certainly came away from my reading feeling pleased with the thoughtful, insightful, loving nature Julie so rightly identified. It has long been advantageous to our species to pay close attention to the context within which messages emerge.
Still, the question remains as to whether tarot readers are well-meaning but credulous, or cynical and exploitative. You support the makers of the tarot deck.
If you support the makers author and illustrator , they can make new decks again. This is especially true for Indie decks. The quality is much, much better Cheaply produced tarot decks only last a short time. In addition, the cards do not feel the same soft instead of firm and the details are less sharp. Your readings can lose power and meaning as a result. Negative energy can be attached to the cards You may be familiar with the positive energy that honestly produced cards carry.
Counterfeit decks may have received a foreign or negative energy during the production process. Keep in mind that this can be different with Indie decks. If an Indie deck finds its way to the general public through a publisher, the price falls because the circulation increases.
Quality and dimensions An original tarot deck is of good quality and the cards are often larger than their counterfeit variants. In addition, you can watch YouTube videos about the deck to see what the cards should look like in terms of color, size and quality of the cards. With counterfeit tarot decks, little attention is often paid to the packaging. When you look at it, you often get the feeling that something is not right.
These are often thin, simple boxes. There is no text on the boxes, so the deck can be sold in many different countries. A QR code on the box can very well!
Indicate that it is a counterfeit deck. Counterfeit boxes often consist of one piece, while original decks have a box with a lid. And counterfeit boxes open in a different way than original boxes. Through reviews and social media you can find out whether a deck is fake or real. So do your research first if you have any doubts about the deck you want to buy. A deck that is often copied is the Wild Unknown Tarot deck. There are so many editions of it that it is difficult to keep track of which ones are original and which are counterfeit.
Standing on the porch, I think I smell incense coming from the house and wonder if this is one of the tools she uses to contact the spirits, but soon recognise it as the stench of weed emanating from God-knows-where. Sandra answers almost immediately. The setting is far more low-key than I expected. Yet, despite the apparent mess, every item has its place. When you went round to visit her as a kid, you never expected her to fuck you over.
Even her choice of outfit is surprisingly everyday. Now, the pleasantries are over, Sandra gets down to business.
This cuts. My dad did indeed die when I was 18, with this funeral three days before my Oxbridge interview. Was this a message from the spirit world? I could find your age, profession and personality within five minutes.
Friends often rebuke me for oversharing and making virtual strangers uncomfortable in cyberspace. She looks vacant. Besides, I never told you had lost a parent or that this information came from the spirits.
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