[The Tarot is] a book of knowledge – an encyclopaedia of magical memory images representing a system of mythical wisdom encoded in the pictures.1
The Tarot is a book of 78 cards telling an ageless story of our journey through life on the path to self-fulfilment. It is told in terms of the Hero’s/Heroine’s quest to fulfil his or her destiny. The Tarot’s deck of cards speaks to us in a covert, symbolic language of archetypal pictographs and numbers; it is an unbound book of illustrations for the teaching of mystical doctrines to those who could not read and write.
An authentic Tarot deck is made up of 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana cards. ‘Arcanum’ is from the Latin word arcere meaning ‘to keep’. In English, the word ‘arcane’ means ‘hidden’, ‘magical’ or even ‘transcendental’; ‘arcana’ suggests a secret, a remedy, an elixir or ‘having therapeutic value’. Sometimes, the Major Arcana are referred to as Trumps which may be a corruption of the word ‘triumphant’, meaning to reach one’s goal or to reach one’s spiritual destiny. ‘Arcane’ also means something known or understood only by those who have been initiated into a special or secret knowledge: Minor Arcana means ‘Lesser secrets’ and Major Arcana means ‘Greater secrets’.
The Major Arcana comprises 22 cards numbered from I to XXI (1 to 21), and one unnumbered card called The Fool. They have been described as The 22 Steps to Freedom; The Path of the Spiritual Warrior; The Sacred Procession; The Path of Self-Understanding and Self-Realization. The images on the cards depict archetypal characters who represent the stages and pitfalls along a metaphoric pathway that leads from initiation to mastery. They symbolize an allegorical journey through life, expressing the full spectrum of human nature and human endeavour in the language of the soul. (See plates 1 and 2.)
The 56 Minor Arcana cards are made up of 14 cards in each of the four ‘suits’ comprising an ace (number one) and numbers two to ten and the four ‘Court’ cards – the Knave, the Knight, the Queen and the King. These 56 cards signify the patterns and cycle of events that occur in our everyday life. The four suits are known as Money, Cups, Swords and Clubs, although some decks refer to Money as Pentacles and Clubs as Wands. (See plates 6–11.)
The Tarot’s images of mythical archetypal characters and numbers mark the milestones that measure our steps as we take courage to journey into the veiled shadows of the mind. Each step forward signals a release from the shackles that restrain us from living by grace and from becoming a fully realized human being. It is a transformational journey from naivety to self-knowledge.
It could be said that the cards are a universal synthesis – an encapsulation – of the archetypal characters and events encountered in the classical myths and fairy tales found throughout the world from ancient history to modern times. Here I am not referring to the myths and fairy tales that have been bowdlerized in mundane adaptations by Walt Disney for Hollywood-style entertainment for children and adults. (Perhaps the one exception is L Frank Baum’s modern classic The Wizard of Oz, the story of a young girl’s spiritual transcendence and psychological maturity. Amazingly, Hollywood did not adapt or change any of the story’s inherent symbolism.)
The Tarot is just one of several esoteric teachings based on the perennial story of the psycho/spiritual quest of the Hero or Heroine to become a self-realized human being or, in the words of CG Jung, ‘to become that which you already are’. Its profound wisdom charts the milestones and pitfalls we have to encounter and overcome if we choose to progress along our life’s path.
To do so, we must recognize and acknowledge these archetypal characters who reside in our unconscious minds and control and manipulate our thought processes and responses. Although each of us experiences these characters in different guises, there are certain processes, responses and aspects of human nature that are common to us all. Of course, we are unconscious of these manipulating, driving forces and the way they govern our behaviour and thoughts but they can be brought to our awareness through the vocabulary of archetypes that are communicated to the conscious mind through dreams, myths, fairy tales, visions, meditations and, of course, the Tarot. The cards show us how we can meet these characters face to face and then enjoy the hidden treasures they have to offer as they deliver profound messages through our innate inner wisdom in a language of ageless symbolism that can light the pathway to ‘freedom’.
Every one of us has an insidious, powerful, self-manipulating drive to be loved and to feel wanted. This drive causes us to disregard our instincts, ignore our intuition and do things we positively know we do not want to do. But often we reluctantly agree to do things just to please others in the hope that they will love us, which inevitably leads to resentment. How can we escape from begging others for their unconditional love unless we first graciously accept ourselves – unconditionally? In a sense, it could be said that this is what the modern day psychotherapist does for a client.
As an oracle of perennial wisdom, the Tarot is particularly pertinent to us today. Outwardly, at a conscious level, we live in a one-dimensional fractured society in which:
• honour and ethics in politics and business have been abandoned;
• there is no acceptance of personal responsibility;
• relationships, traditional values and the care and respect for others and Planet Earth have been expediently discarded;
• the profound teachings that have endured throughout the ages go unheeded and unacknowledged;
• the young are left to fend for themselves without any moral or spiritual guidance or sense of personal discipline.
And yet, at a deeper level there is a tangible movement to reach out for a new vision to reconnect ourselves with our selves and the Cosmos. We are searching for some sense of meaning that we hope will further our personal development. And because we cannot seem to find this through the doctrines of orthodox religion, we search for alternative paths to follow that will lead to the top of the same mountain. It is therefore not surprising that ten per cent of all book sales are works on self-development, with young people in particular recognizing that our current pursuit of material goods and our consumerism are at the expense of our inner personal fulfilment.
How can we strengthen our souls to begin such a journey? I believe the Tarot offers one such path.
The Tarot’s oracle has invaluable insights to mark out our path and keep us on it: the cards can also be read to help us, the Enquirer – sometimes referred to ‘in the trade’ as the Querant – to tap into our intuitive understanding to deal with and respond to our own, often pressing issues. When we are in the zone – in a focused listening mode – the Tarot can put us in touch with our innate knowingness and thus guide us further on the journey towards our fulfilment.
For the cards to be comprehensible and readily understood, a Tarot Reader needs to be able to decipher the symbolism of the enigmatic archetypal characters and the sacred meaning of numbers. This means that the Tarot’s symbolic language of pictographs and numbers must follow certain conventions of grammar, syntax and vocabulary.
The Tarot is a tool for divination that reveals where we are now standing on our path through life and what needs to be the next step forward towards both healing ourselves and further evolving our consciousness. It has the potential to unite and create a balance between the laws that govern the visible world and the laws that govern the invisible world of divine order that transcends our outward experience of the day-to-day events and movements in life. As we learn the Tarot’s language we begin to unlock the enigmatic secrets of the cards, and a pattern emerges that can give us clear and precise directions to reach our ultimate destination of self-knowledge and self-realization.
For those new to the Tarot, a typical question might be: ‘What can the cards do for me?’ This can best be answered by asking another question: ‘What do I want in life?’ The most common answer to this second question can be summed up as ‘leading a happy and fulfilled life’ and/or ‘self-knowledge’. Everyone will have their own answer but the varied responses could be summed up in the one word Freedom. We want freedom to express ourselves; freedom to be creative; freedom to be happy and fulfilled. It could be said that to reach these goals all we need is Courage. We need the courage to free ourselves from the conditioning that manipulates every thought and move we make; to free ourselves from the fear of removing the mask of our persona; to free ourselves from egotistical protection and to accept that total, unconditional love is an unrealistic expectation. (However, the Sun does shine unconditionally on both the righteous and the wrongdoers!)
When we dream, read a book, see a play or a film, or view a painting, often we can receive extraordinary and important insights. It may be like a lightning flash: suddenly, we have an insight into something of extreme significance to us personally. Others around us will have seen, heard, felt or tasted exactly the same stimulus but for each individual the experience will create a different response. When this happens, something has triggered our intuitive understanding rather than our critical, intellectual mode of thinking. This is how the Tarot can motivate us to take a step towards the next milestone on our pathway through life.
Energy follows thought and so, depending upon our willpower, tenacity and commitment, our thoughts can either be fully realized or they can float around in the ether and never come to anything. To realize or manifest something it must first be created in the mind. When we adopt a mental attitude that is both receptive and non-judgemental, and in which we trust our inner wisdom by listening to our intuition, we open ourselves to receive great insights that can lift us out of the stress of indecision and the feeling of being lost, not knowing what to do or where to go next. Understanding the Tarot can keep us to our path and help us find the answer to the perennial questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my destiny?
One of the questions most frequently asked by Tarot sceptics is the matter of random choice. An Enquirer – who from now on will be referred to as the Querant – is asked to shuffle the deck which is already stacked in a haphazard sequence. Under such apparently chaotic conditions, how is it possible for such a random set of cards to have any specific relevance for the person concerned? However, the idea of randomness or coincidence, which may now be explained by the modern, scientific Theory of Chaos, was well understood by the ancient seers because they were aware that the Cosmos is governed by a mysterious power of structure and order.
It is said that ‘today’s mysticism is tomorrow’s science’. Bizarre, almost unbelievable facts about our Universe are presented to us by today’s hard-nosed physicists. We are told that there are many planes of time and that an electron can be a particle or a wave as well as being in more than one place at the same time. In the subatomic world there are protons and anti-protons that have energy but no mass, which means that a non-mass world interpenetrates the material world we call reality. Mystics – those seers who concern themselves with the invisible aspects of reality and its relationship with the reality or actuality, visible to us all – were the first to describe these phenomena. Scientists only caught up centuries later when technology evolved and they were able to investigate these happenings ‘scientifically’. The Tarot itself acts as a bridge between these two realities – the invisible and the visible. Acceptance of the workings and efficacy of the Tarot is no less a matter of leaping the credibility gap than a general acceptance of current physics concerning time, space, random chance, the unseen worlds of other realities and the oneness of the Universe.
Many psychologists and philosophers such as CG Jung and Rudolf Steiner have written extensively on the transpersonal and spiritual aspects of the meaning of the 22 Major Arcana Tarot cards but have tended not to include the meaning and interpretation of the 56 Minor Arcana cards. At the other end of the scale there is an extensive range of books that are, more or less, ‘teach yourself’ manuals on how to read the cards for the sole purpose of fortune telling.
The word Tarot can evoke responses that range from the conviction that it is the sinister, malevolent ‘work of the Devil’ to the view that the cards are nothing more than a harmless after-dinner game for amusement. Others who find the cards enthralling – even magical – are inclined to seek out the fortune tellers in the hope that they can predict how and when they are likely to meet their lover/soulmate/saviour who will bring about momentous changes to their career/health/wealth, and so on. Ironically, however, if the Tarot is consulted as a means of self-discovery, it can reveal that Miss/Mr ‘Right’ – the hoped-for perfect lover and benefactor who will change our life and fortune – is not ‘out there’ but is already residing within us. Although a traumatic experience, an accident, a relationship issue or just simple curiosity can lead a person to consult a Tarot Reader, it is unlikely they will find a pathway to their life’s destination by consulting fairground fortune tellers.
Any deck used for fortune telling not only debases the Tarot, it also debases us by its implication that our purpose in being here is for material rather than spiritual fulfilment. Fortune telling takes us into the realm of prediction about future events and thus feeds our expectations, hopes and fears, whereas the Tarot is about taking responsibility for ourselves by dealing with the here and now in order for us to take the next step along life’s path. In other words, it is about the present. With fortune telling, we avoid taking responsibility for ourselves by handing our future over to what someone else predicts it holds for us. Such prediction could possibly invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Tarot Reader can and should act as a facilitator or bridge for the Querant to cross by lifting the veil which, at that moment in their life, prevents them from seeing a particular aspect of themselves. In the right hands, the cards are neither sinister nor malevolent, but in the sense that they appeal to the ‘left hand’ – our intuitive, instinctive understandings – the cards hold a portentous wisdom to guide us to self-discovery.
There are currently dozens of different Tarot decks and ‘Angel’ cards available in bookshops and on the Internet. Unfortunately, most if not all of those designed over the past 100 years or so are decorated with highly personalized illustrations that look attractive enough as ‘art for art’s sake’ but can often either distort or completely ignore the fundamental essence that underlies the arcane meaning of each card that is intrinsic to the Tarot’s language. Some designers even introduce signs and icons imported from other esoteric systems such as the Kabbalah, astrology, the Runes and so on which further degrade, corrupt and obscure the wisdom the authentic Tarot can impart. Of course, it is immaterial whether the design of a Tarot deck is of ancient or modern origin, provided that the integrity of the established precepts and accepted conventions of the Tarot’s ‘language’ in terms of grammar, vocabulary and syntax – i.e. the orderly or systematic arrangement of the various elements – is adhered to in the symbolic pictographs. If any language, whether verbal or pictorial, is not rational and logical then there is little chance anyone will be able to understand what is being conveyed.
Probably the most popular modern deck used by the majority of Tarot teachers is the Rider Waite, conceived by AE Waite and designed by Pamela Colman Smith in 1910. I too was taught the Tarot with this deck several years ago and gradually learned off by heart the Rider Waite interpretations of each of the 78 cards. Undoubtedly the illustrations are explicit and, after a time, easy to remember. But as with other relatively modern decks, they tend to express the designer’s subjective, sometimes spurious and usually ‘New Age’ interpretations which pay no regard to the integrity of the ancient system. For many years I read spreads according to the rather rigid definitions for each card that were dictated by various teachers, and I have to admit that I used these definitions in my private readings and during a three-year period when I was the Tarot Reader for Marie Claire magazine and broadcasting on LBC Radio London. Since then I have come to realize that the meanings attributed to the Rider Waite and several other decks are not entirely in accord with the fundamental, sacred wisdom embedded in the enigmatic pictographs and numbers of an authentic Tarot deck.
One of the oldest complete sets of Tarot cards was published by BP Grimaud in 1769. Known as the Ancien Tarot de Marseille, it depicts costumes and decorations that can be dated back to at least the early 14th century. This deck has been used throughout this book because the symbolism of both the pictographs and the numbers follows the conventions of a comprehensible language not found in other packs. By contrast, it may also serve as a response to the plethora of ‘designer’ Tarot packs with their whimsical illustrations and introduction of various other divinatory systems and symbolisms.
When I came across the Marseille deck a few years ago, I was at first surprised and puzzled by the diagrams/patterns that differentiate each suit and which particularly appealed to me as a student of sacred symbolism and the ancient, esoteric meaning and interpretation of the numbers one to ten. Delving further, it became obvious that all the pictographs of the Major and Minor Court cards in the Marseille deck had been designed using a common bond that unifies all the cards into one, co-ordinated symbolic system. In other words, the colours, clothing, postures, weapons and other artefacts illustrated in the pictographs and the sacred meanings of the numbers are grammatically consistent and correct. This creates a cohesiveness and rationality to enable us to comprehend the imparted wisdom. Studying the Tarot is, at first, like trying to learn a foreign language but gradually we can become familiar with all the subtleties and nuances of interpretation. It also became clear that an ‘authentic’ deck – by this I don’t just mean one that is several centuries old – such as the Marseille pack has a profound depth of wisdom that, hitherto, I had not begun to fully understand even though, as mentioned above, I had been reading the Tarot for several years previously.
My intention in writing this book is not only to respond to the current widespread use of the Tarot as little more than a system for fortune telling, but also to re-establish the cards as a tool to provide us with insights into the hidden workings of the mind, thus enlightening us as to why we do the things we do, why we attract certain people into our lives, and why certain events in our lives seem to keep repeating themselves.
Writing a book about the Tarot inevitably requires deciphering the allegorical input of the 78 cards and their specific, individual meanings or symbolic expression. The pitfall is that the very criticism levelled at other decks that they express the designers’ very personal interpretations of the cards could be levelled at anyone who submits their own – again subjective – interpretations.
In an attempt to be objective and circumspect, I have offered an interpretation of the graphic symbolism by drawing the reader’s attention to the detail in each of the 22 Major and the 16 Court cards of the Minor Arcana. I have also set out what may be considered to be a consensus of the universally accepted esoteric meanings of the card numbers one to ten for each of the four suits. These personal suggestions are not put forward as ‘the truth’ but merely ‘a likely story’, with the intention of leaving the Tarot student and Reader with a wide scope for their own insights and perceptions to be explored.
This book attempts to decipher the language symbolism to show how the pictographs and numbers can reveal some of the hidden secrets of our human nature, as well as showing how the cards can be read without resorting to prediction or the forecasting of some future event. It invites experienced Tarot Readers and teachers to review and compare the symbolism and applied meanings of the pictographs in whatever pack they are currently using. It is also written as an introduction for newcomers to the Tarot and will, I believe, appeal to both beginners and those with some knowledge of the cards. Primarily, it is intended as a practical guide for those who are consciously travelling along a path searching for their truth and meaning of life which might best be discovered through myths and symbols that draw us toward an infinite unity.