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One of the driving passions of humans has always been their curiosity about what is to come. The unknown future intrigues with the possibility that ones situation will be improved and what dangers can be avoided. Systems to divine the future have been created by practically every culture on the planet in order to garner a glimpse of that undiscovered country we are headed toward. One of the most popular and widespread of these fortune telling systems is the Tarot Card deck.
The favorite fortune telling deck of the twentieth century has been the 78-card kabalistic imagery inspired deck popularized by Arthur Edward Waite with the illustrations drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Released in late 1909 this colorful and artistically rendered edition of divinatory cards quickly became codified in the minds of fortune tellers especially in the English speaking countries of the world. Regardless of rumor and unsupportable theories that the system originated from ancient Egyptian mysteries, history shows a quite different picture of the evolution of the tarot deck.
Playing cards first appeared in written history around the middle of the fifteenth century. The existing artifacts cannot determine it whether the hand-painted playing cards or the printed ones created from woodblocks came first. What is known of them shows that they were created to play a game of chance. At the time card decks were rare and mainly reserved for the upper classes. It was not long after that that the cards used to play the game of trumps had been commandeered by the ladies of the court to read fortunes with.
The synchronicity of the results using the cards was such that by the mid sixteenth century students of the occult arts had begun to give serious thought to the interplay of the numbering system and began developing rudimentary layouts by which one could use the cards for specific divinatory outcomes.
Much of the confusion surrounding the origins of the Tarot deck occurred near the last part of the eighteenth century. The Frenchman Antoine Court de Gébelin, writer, linguist, clergyman and Mason, developed an interest in the occult. Using the popular belief that the cards contained magical symbols from the wisdom of ancient Egypt, he put forth the theory that they originated there. This was before the discovery of the Rossetta Stone and subsequent translations of the Egyptian texts. Another Frenchman, Alliette, took this idea further and added his own 'Ancient Egyptian' twist to the cards.
It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the Tarot began to be incorporated into the magical workings of the kabala and Jewish mysticism. Alphonse Louis Constant, a former Catholic deacon, did a serious study of the cards in relation to kabalistic mathematics and ideology. Writing under the nom de plume, Eliphas Levi, he incorporated Pythagorian theory and Rosicruician mysticism to draw parallels and associations between the Major Arcana and Hebrew letters. He found similarities with the four suits of the card decks and the Tetragrammaton.
Following the occult work of Eliphas Levi, other occultists added to this body of knowledge. As this was going on the English Order of the Golden Dawn, led by MacGregor Mathers began and took up the codification of this powerful occult tool. They created a Tarot deck incorporating kabalistic imagery for their members. A.E.Waite, after breaking away from the Golden Dawn of which he had been a member, revised the deck and as was mentioned earlier, created the deck most popular for the last century.
While Tarot cards may not in themselves be ancient objects, the ideas they present are as old as humanity. The Tarot can be used to study and learn about the life condition and the workings of the human psyche. With this well of human subconscious so well entrenched within the symbology of the cards, synchronicity also makes them ideal for use in looking into the past and future influences that affect reality.
As well as writing and researching on the paranormal and occult phenomena that intersect our reality, Douglas Mefford can also be found helping spread literature to the world at Bell, Book & Candle Publications or hanging out at his bungalow in Greenwoods Village.
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