Tarot cards?

Question

I've become interested in Tarot cards and was thinking about buying some. But I want to know a few things about them before I decide.

How exactly do they work & how do you use them? What is the difference between the different decks? Where can I buy a good deck?

Anything other information that you can recommend for me would be apperciated as well!

Answer 1

Hello

They work as a 'tool' a stepping stone to your higher mind via your subconscious mind.

They are wonderful for meditation, guidance, insight, personal growth & psychic development!

The only difference between the millions of decks is the imagery, they all means the same at a basic level.

Sadhara

Answer 2

The Tarot is a form of divination. You use a spread and read them. By read  I mean interpret them by their meanings and where they are in the spread. Each position of the spread focuses on a different part of you and your life.

The different decks are used for different things. I have an everyday deck that I love and a deck  that I only use for sabbats.

You should pick a deck that  feels right to you.

This is a website that has a few that you can look at and see what you like as well as examples of spreads and a free reading  to boot.

http://www.llewellyn.com/free/tarot.php

Answer 3

Well, there is much more to tarot than just fortune telling.

The cards were created in mid 15th century, commissioned by the Duke of Milan as part of the celebrations for his daughter, Bianca Visconti's marriage into the Sforza family. A fifth suit of picture cards was added to the then standard Milanese playing cards, these extra cards took as their theme a traditional Christian triumph procession. Hence they were called trionfi, meaning triumphs, and from which we get our word trump - it was the invention of tarot that marked the invention of trumps in card games!

For their first 350 years tarot cards were known for nothing but games, becoming at one time the most popular form of card game throughout continental Europe. In fact, the games are still played there.

It was not until the very end of the 18th century that occultist Antoine Court de Gabelin first declared the cards to be of ancient Egyptian origin, being a book of coded knowledge, brought to Europe by the gypsies. None of this is backed by any evidence but the idea became very popular in France. It was not until the early 20th century that the occult beliefs began to spread beyond France, thanks to members of The Order of the Golden Dawn in England. English speaking countries had little history of the games and so the cards were unfamiliar with people's first experience of them being as occult objects.

There are a huge range of packs. The old trumps and suits are still used for game play in Italy, Sicily, and Switzerland, though there are some special regional packs (the Tarocco Bolognese and the Tarocco Siciliano). You can still find the odd reproduction of the Minchiate pack, with 97 cards, though the game is no longer played (sadly, it was a masterful game and once played as far as New Orleans!).

In the early 18th century, German card makers began to produce French suited tarot cards whose trumps featured a range of images from local landscapes to exotic animals. This type of pack, often reduced to just 54 cards and has become the dominant pattern for card play. In France, these cards feature everything from Asterix, Droopy, The Foreign Legion, and even Woody Allen films.

Occultists' cards can be divided, very broadly and not always exactly, into three groups. There are those based on the Marseille pattern, a pack featuring the Italian suits and trumps and also used by card players (it was based on the Piedmontese pattern, a fairly late Italian variety of the cards). Then there are those packs based upon the designs of Arthur Edward Waite, it is called the RWS and revolutionised tarot design by redesigning the pip cards to have full illustrations of their occult attributions. The third variety is the Thoth pack, designed by Alastair Crowley, painted by Frieda Harris and is, in my opinion, by far the most beautiful of the occult packs.

However, attitudes of card designers and card shoppers have become rather more post-modernist now, the occult system represented becoming less important than personal appeal.

So, how do they work?

Well, as a card game, they are used to play what we call point-trick games, with the fifth suit acting as a suit of fixed trumps. Like spades, bridge, or whist, players win cards in tricks but unlike them, different cards carry different point values and so it is not the number of tricks that matters but the card points in them. The range of games played is rather impressive and so you should be able to find one that suits your taste (my own favourite is ottocento).

With regards to divination, the question assumes that they do work. IF they do, then it is not the cards that are doing anything - they are just a pack of playing cards and no more know your destiny that a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company. However, there are a huge number of ways to read any pattern of cards, so the suggestion that seems most coherent to me is that it is not the cards that tell the future but the 'reader', who just uses the card as a focus, much like a crystal ball.

For myself, I run into the same logical problems with regards to knowledge of the future that I do with time travel.

Answer 4

Tarot cards are a wonderful method of divination.  They are often excellent for revealing possibilities and connections that you hadn't considered or were not aware of.  But the power they have really comes from your own subconscious.  The cards just make it easier to spot connections, and are often more honest with us than we are with ourselves.

First of all, most decks available use a similar set of symbols and of interpretation based on the Rider-Waite deck, so most of the differences are cosmetic.  That is, the differences are just in the artwork, not the meanings.  However, that's not entirely true, so don't get a book based on the Rider-Waite deck and then buy a deck that differs.  (Most places that sell Tarot decks have "samples" that let you see several cards in the deck, so you can make sure the Major Arcana all have the same names for the same number.  That's your best guide.)

So get a good instruction book (the Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Tarot is good) and pick a deck that you like.  Pick one with art that you enjoy looking at, and that is a comfortable size for your hands.  (Most Tarot decks are a little larger than standard playing cards, so this can be a challenge if you have small hands like mine.)

Then...practice.  Start by handling them daily, getting a feel for how they handle when you shuffle them.  Start drawing a card or two randomly, and looking at the symbols.  Write down what you think it connects to and why.  Then check your book, and note any differences or similarities between the two interpretations.  You will find, over time, that there are few cards whose interpretations are almost always different from the "standard" meanings.  That's ok--remember, this is powered by your own mind.  You have to learn what the cards mean to you.

After that, you can start asking questions, laying out the cards, and attempting to put together a meaningful answer.  Sometimes, this is easy, and sometimes it's like reading Greek in a dark room at midnight.  All you can do is keep working at it.