What is Tarot?
It is a psychological and philosophical system consisting of 78 cards divided into the Major Arcana (22 cards), and the Minor Arcana with four Suits, each containing four Court cards and ten Number cards. While references to playing cards appear in Europe from the mid-1300s, one of the oldest Tarot decks, the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza deck of Milan, Italy (c. 1450), may have been based on allegorial parades called Trionfi. In 1781 Court de Gébelin claimed that the symbols on the cards had ancient sacred and magical meanings. Soon they began being used for fortune-telling.
The tarot is most commonly viewed as a tool for divination. A traditional tarot reading involves a seeker - someone who is looking for answers to personal questions - and a reader - someone who knows how to interpret the cards. After the seeker has shuffled and cut the deck, the reader lays out the chosen cards in a pattern called a spread. Each position in the spread has a meaning, and each card has a meaning as well. The reader combines these two meanings to shed light on the seeker's question.
The question becomes - what can we do with them?
The answer lies with the unconscious - that deep level of memory and awareness that resides within each of us, but outside our everyday experience. Even though we ignore the action of the unconscious most of the time, it profoundly affects everything we do. In his writings, Sigmund Freud stressed the irrational, primitive aspect of the unconscious. He thought that it was the home of our most unacceptable desires and urges. His contemporary, Carl Jung emphasized the positive, creative aspect of the unconscious. He tried to show that it has a collective component that touches universal qualities.
We may never know the full range and power of the unconscious, but there are ways to explore its landscape. Many techniques have been developed for this purpose - psychotherapy, dream interpretation, visualization and meditation. The tarot is another such tool.
This section can be further divided into 8 different sub-sections: - "Intepretations of Cards", "Selection of Decks", "Preparing to Consult the Cards" and "Tarot Spreads".
