

Introduction



This book was written for a narrower range of readers than the much broader set of Tarot aficionados. As the title suggests, this will attempt to re-envision the study in a way that is specifically useful in counseling, and to better understand the core meanings of the cards in these terms. Since effective counseling assumes something akin to agency or self-directed behavior, the aspects of Tarot that concern fortune-telling or predicting the future will be dropped from this study. But the goal here is more ambitious than that. The Tarot, as a system of symbols or a symbolic language, has something to offer to an even more rigorous skeptical inquiry, almost in an anthropological sense, and certainly in a psychological one. It is a cognitive tool kit, and descriptive of an attitudinal skill set. There is little in print that is dedicated to such an approach. The intended reader here is an intelligent skeptic, with an unabridged set of critical thinking skills. This means that there will also be other casualties in this analysis, such as ‘new age’ metaphysics and fanciful misinterpretations of Jungian psychology. Number symbolism will remain, in some detail, but numerology will be dismissed. Religious symbolism and iconography, where not completely gratuitous, might be treated as symbolic of psychological processes rather than analogs of metaphysical realities. However, it is sincerely hoped that enough valuable information about the cards will be presented here that even readers pursuing more conventional approaches, and especially those writing their own books on the subject, can still come away from this thinking that their time here was well spent. One should not, however, expect this to be an easy read, and one might suspect the author of taking some delight in sending the reader to the dictionary. This is for the education, not entertainment, barring the occasional bit of dark humor.

Such a purging of the field, done for the sake of readers with more rigorous intellectual standards, may prove unpalatable to many, but this book is not written for market, or to profit from the gullible. Ergo, you may have noticed already that this book will not try to spare the sensitive feelings of the “true believer.” This is a technical term for someone who has personally identified with a belief or set of beliefs, such that any challenge to these beliefs, or mockery thereof, must be taken as a personal or existential threat, and defended against at all costs, even at the cost of foregoing any new input. There are a lot of these thin-skinned people studying Tarot. There are also a lot of relativists, who believe that all perspectives are valid. Many cannot even be told that two plus two does not equal five. It may be just as well that these people set this book down now. Even at the expense of sounding arrogant or patronizing, I don’t intend to hesitate to call something wrong. As an Aspie, tact is not a big priority. As a classical Cynic, I like my parrhesia. And as a Nietzschean, I like my swordplay. Having waded through more than 150 books in preparing this text, I've seen far too much nonsense, and I feel no duty to perpetuate any of that. I want to see the Tarot grow in respectability. I don’t want new age cooties. I feel an obligation to the future of Tarot as an evolving, open-source culture.

The Tarot presented here is simply a system of symbols that makes up an interesting language that is useful in talking about attitudes and mental states. The approach for our purposes here is narrower than usual in a couple of ways, and sets aside a number of associations and structural dimensions that might be thought peripheral, extraneous or irrelevant. This might be done with a dismissive attitude. Many of these set-asides will have allies and champions who regard them as absolutely essential. Among the offended may be strict adherents to the Golden Dawn approach, to which this work adheres with at least some degree of fidelity. This is because it is asserted here that this system contains errors: not a lot of errors, but a few in important places. It may well be asked where the qualifications are to make such corrections, or where the ancient authority lies. But this is merely a reluctance on the part of the author to continue such errors under the watchful eyes of skeptics, who are often armed with logic, and even common sense. It is important to understand that actions taken here are for the purposes stated here, and there is no way to stop anybody who wants to add any deletions back into their personal system.

It is also important to note that there will be ideas presented here, and mentioned in matter-of-fact tones, that sound suspiciously like mystical or even religious experiences. But skeptics ought not concern themselves overmuch, as these experiences are simply part of the inherited human lebenswelt and even good scientists can be subject to having them. No theories of objective reality will be constructed thereon. Wherever the word psychic is used, it refers to the subjective mental world and not to the paranormal. No mention will been made of how or whether the cards work. This will be left to the readers or their querents. It would be nice to approach this subject with the same intellectual rigor that is at last being seen in studies of Tarot history, at least as far as historical evidence allows, but standards of scholarship must necessarily be different for history than for meanings. Rigorous standards are simply not as applicable when the exercise is primarily creative. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is the honest voice of the child who calls out in mid-parade: “Why is the Emperor naked?”

Mary Greer identifies 21 reading styles or ways to read Tarot cards (21 Ways, p. 271). Many of these are outside the purview of this book. Only a few of these approaches will fit the language model that is being explored here. Others remain important, however, as vehicles for subjective experience. In a reading, we want the cards to take us on journeys, to take us as far as necessary from any idea of consensual, central, or core meanings to get the information that we are looking for. In cultural studies and depth psychology we want to explore the symbolisms and mythologies in all of the rich detail that can be uncovered or extrapolated. The images of the cards, particularly those of the much older images of the Trumps, offer us enriching travels through the imagination. In magick, we want to invoke these cards and their meanings as entities and explore them from the inside as experiences, out to the edges of where they can take us and even beyond the known and expected. In pathworking, or imagining ourselves transitioning between symbols on a diagram such as the Tree of Life, we can further enrich, detail and, texture our metaphors. In meditation, we can make use of the cards as Tattwas or Kasinas. In spellworking, analogs of cards may be burned, immersed, altered or buried as charms. If superstitiously inclined, we can use them as talismans and amulets. We may bifurcate the methods by contrasting magickal and intuitive with rational and analytic. One of the primary distinctions in approaches concerns whether the meanings of the cards are expanding or contracting, diversifying or narrowing. When we are simply allowing the cards to take us places, by letting go of the mental reins, letting the symbols speak, freeing the imagination, and reading intuitively or pathworking, the potential meanings multiply. But even in the more expansive modes, consensually affirmed centers of meaning will offer us a known place from which to begin the wider journey.

Some approaches will require hyperbolic exaggeration, going over the top and getting carried away, all full of emotion and ecstasy. Magick seeks attainments, and mysticism, first-hand experiences. In spellworking, there is a role for hyperbole in raising magical energy through states of excitement. Meister Eckhart describes the invocation process simply: “When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” Of course the common error subsequent to doing this is in reifying the experience, thinking that first-hand experience is identical with objective knowledge, that the discoveries made in experience are in fact dimensions of reality. We mistake our interpretations for facts. And as humans, we tend to find exactly what we are predisposed to find by our expectations and insecurities. But an idea common to both the therapeutic and the intuitive approaches is that we can invoke our way into different states of mind using different symbols, images, or cards, and into a variety of attitudes, as though this array were some kind of cognitive tool kit or wardrobe. This aspect of the approach here is not entirely analytic or rational, although it does call for a rationally pragmatic notion of truth to assess the effect of the process. In counseling, this effect is often a change in maladaptive behavior. It’s about what you do with the cards, not what they tell you to do, or what they do to you, or what they say will be done unto you. A word of caution, though, on spellcraft and the cards: each card has a wide range of meanings, including those seen by readers who read reversals. If you are casting a spell with a card, be sure to grasp the wider range of meanings. Magick loves irony, and irony will find you. Be careful what you wish for.

In ceremonial magick there is a distinction between evocation and invocation. In both cases, you’re calling some force. In evocation, that something stays outside of you, and is confined to some area like a triangle, while you are protected by a magic circle. In invocation, you bring the force inside you while you both remain within the circle. Tarot cards should be understood in both of these ways as well. A card can be something objective and outside of you, maybe doing something to you, or offering a problem to be solved, or it can be internalized, as a personal experience or a skill to be used, or an attitude to adopt. Or, in the case of Pip cards, a third option might be that you internalize the number while the suit becomes your object or tool.

Book of Changes, but this symbolic system also has a lot in common with Tarot and most of what is laid out here is also relevant to understanding the cards. You may, without great consequence, skip or fail to understand any of the portions that use the more technical Yijing terminology.

As for a general note on learning Tarot, we should note that beginner's books are a bad idea, given the way people learn and unlearn. People have a tendency to learn and accept things without a complete understanding of the implications of what it is they’re learning. But once they believe the first thing they have read, they must then disbelieve the next half-dozen things that contradict it. This is in part called the sunk cost fallacy, and in part the fact that unlearning later is considerably more effort than learning in the first place, and there’s also something of self-criticism in there that says they were foolish to allow an error to come live in their heads. Now the error has a long-term lease. These are the main reasons to build a basic knowledge of Tarot with the best materials we can find, and avoid beginners’ books. We should challenge ourselves to do things well from the start, since we will be living with the results and they will be proportionate in quality to the effort invested. We don't want to build a real house on a Play Dough foundation. Start off with shortcuts and books for the lazy and you build on a crap foundation. Finally, no matter how creative you may want to get eventually, a solid foundation means taking fairly conservative approaches at first. We should avoid anything too idiosyncratic. There’s nothing wrong with artists expressing themselves and going nuts with the Tarot's potential to inspire. But Tarot is a language, and you want to begin with a dialect that most people understand, not one known to only a few, unless you want to live in some distant province.

We will assume that you are not a never-ever level of beginner to the Tarot and that you already know at least few basic things about the subject. If you are a novice, some introductory reading is recommended first. This need not be book length. It can even be something as basic as the main Wikipedia article. There are also a number of other links to be found at my Hermetica site. Try browsing the first section for introductory material. Before going too far beyond this Introduction, there is also a 35-page pdf Supplement to this work. This contains a lot of excerpted material that is specific to working with the symbolism of the Yijing or, but this symbolic system also has a lot in common with Tarot and most of what is laid out here is also relevant to understanding the cards. You may, without great consequence, skip or fail to understand any of the portions that use the more technical Yijing terminology.As for a general note on learning Tarot, we should note that beginner's books are a bad idea, given the way people learn and unlearn. People have a tendency to learn and accept things without a complete understanding of the implications of what it is they’re learning. But once they believe the first thing they have read, they must then disbelieve the next half-dozen things that contradict it. This is in part called the sunk cost fallacy, and in part the fact that unlearning later is considerably more effort than learning in the first place, and there’s also something of self-criticism in there that says they were foolish to allow an error to come live in their heads. Now the error has a long-term lease. These are the main reasons to build a basic knowledge of Tarot with the best materials we can find, and avoid beginners’ books. We should challenge ourselves to do things well from the start, since we will be living with the results and they will be proportionate in quality to the effort invested. We don't want to build a real house on a Play Dough foundation. Start off with shortcuts and books for the lazy and you build on a crap foundation. Finally, no matter how creative you may want to get eventually, a solid foundation means taking fairly conservative approaches at first. We should avoid anything too idiosyncratic. There’s nothing wrong with artists expressing themselves and going nuts with the Tarot's potential to inspire. But Tarot is a language, and you want to begin with a dialect that most people understand, not one known to only a few, unless you want to live in some distant province.

Prediction and Divination

One of the more radical changes in a counseling approach is the move away from fortune-telling or predicting the future, and avoiding attempts to explain how the future might be known, or what mysterious forces are translated into the mechanics of drawing the cards. The assumption is that if counseling is to be effective, present directions in life need to change. Free will, or agency, or self-directed behavior, is brought into play. This also throws up a challenge to conventional wisdom by suggesting that no card should be regarded as inherently good or bad. There aren’t any necessarily ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ outcomes or predictions, unless these words are understood without attached value judgments. Each card represents a lesson to be learned, sometimes after we needed to learn it, sometimes before. It is a positive skill to be used well or poorly. Sometimes what we already know needs to be negated. The card becomes information to be employed, perhaps in avoiding the very trouble that it might be a warning about. This might be regarded as the difference between fortune-telling and divining. We might accept that such an approach is still a form of divination if we can strip out the mumbo jumbo and regard the process as penetrating and elucidating some of the hidden dynamics of situations, activities of perception that are accomplished with nothing more supernatural than your ordinary human mind.

I see divine as a verb, not as an adjective. We divine to penetrate and understand appreciatively. Any atheist can still see an important place in life for a sense of sacredness, reverence, and gratitude. For me, Tarot is a language about psychological states, sort of a wardrobe of attitudes and approaches to life. Readings recommend tools of understanding with which to approach your question. There is nothing supernatural about it, but the natural is underestimated. Tarot simply uses native heuristics like pareidolia to get us closer to the subliminal, to places in the mind where consciousness can't go. In order to come up with the images. used like Rorschach-blots, to receive and reflect our projections, the inventors of divination systems have created finite sets of substitutes for seeing omens in the wild. We no longer have to wait to see lightning strike the steeple of a church to get our omens.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the question of freedom, we might have the skeptics raising their eyebrows and asking who here is really free to choose different courses for their lives. It may be that, for most people most of the time, the exercise of real freedom only happens on rare or special occasions, while the norm is almost fully predictable. We might point to the effectiveness of human political propaganda, advertising, and religion in herding the obedient and predictable masses at will, and with some degree of precision. Simple manipulation of fears and insecurities is effective enough to bypass most people’s version of rational thought, and it seems an easy job to plant those fears and insecurities. This may be the challenge, in which case our divining here must concentrate on the rare and special occasions. It’s the important decisions, when we are undergoing some stress consequent to previous choices, when we are most likely to seek out better counsel and acknowledge a need for better options. And it may be that the exposure in counseling to alternative directions in life might lead to a person’s first true exercise of freedom of choice.

Rosengarten suggests Tarot cards offer the ‘benefits of psychological insight and depth, without the baggage of affiliation that invariably accompanies any single set of beliefs… . Tarot operates on many levels of profound meaning from a purely non-affiliated platform in the truest sense. Tarot makes accessible to awareness a full spectrum of psychological and spiritual possibilities with little preference for its user’s qualification or beliefs.’(p. 5). Importantly, with all due respect, this is only a pack of cards. Querents might not get as defensive against a deck of cards as they might with a friend or counselor. This makes it easier to open up subjects for further inquiry. There is a sense of safety in this.



An Open Source Project

The lore of Tarot is full of mysteries and secrets. But we are at last permitted here to divulge the greatest of these: Tarot is the continuing effort of a bunch of men and women making stuff up, and then trying to find acceptance for the stuff they made up. Some stuff sticks in the culture, some doesn’t, just like life in evolution. This confession was in no way authorized by the Secret Chiefs of the Brotherhood of Light. Tarot is simply an open source project, an ongoing effort that is several centuries old now. It has not descended to us in degraded form from some golden age of original perfection. It is an evolving human endeavor. For some reason, this mystery often appears to necessitate telling lies about its origin, or its current redaction, particularly lies about its antiquity or authorship. It is generous to think that many of these lies began as hunches that turned into delusions. Perhaps Nietzsche explained this best: “At bottom, it has been an aesthetic taste that has hindered man the most: it believed in the picturesque effect of truth. It demanded of the man of knowledge that he should produce a powerful effect on the imagination.”

As we reach back through the known history of the cards, the designs get progressively more primitive and the commentators more foolish or deluded. It appears that assorted groups of noble families, enterprising artists, game makers and scholarly folk, versed in more than one of the many schools of learning that were reawakening in the Renaissance, decided to combine some ambient cultural symbols with resonant counterparts in Western Gnostic philosophies and the newfangled cards recently imported from the Middle East (which were themselves derived from Chinese cards), all in a book without a binding. This had promise as a game, and this helped insure longevity, diffusion across cultures and popularity. It is unknown how many cards were in the first decks, but over the years two discrete decks emerged, the original gaming pack of 52 cards and the later fortune-telling pack of 78 cards.

In a way, we are creating an artificial entity that is seemingly intelligent and moves through time gaining wisdom as it goes. It is an attempt to flesh out a skeletal pattern of organized meaning. It is not a static legacy. It crosses many cultural lines and integrates other disciplines into itself. It grows by accretion. It evolves spontaneously until cultural pressures are minimal to add something missing or eliminate something redundant, until it attracts less desire to change it, and arrives at a wieldy number of pieces for the mind to make use of. It will shed dead flesh now and then, and failed experiments. Sometimes a scribe will put the right eye where the left ear should be. Often a monk will leave off the genitals, or make them abnormally large. Given the ages involved, slips add up to slop and the work stands in need of some major revision, or even radical surgery. Growth by accretion has proven its value. Divergent thinking generates an excess of ideas until all of the needed ideas are present. Then it is time to re-converge and synthesize, cut out and leave behind the excess. Like evolution elsewhere, an experimental diversification is followed by selection for the fitness of forms to their niches. What works best tends to stay longest. This will be the spirit behind some of the negative thinking, the suggestions for corrections and emendations, seen here. And in a few places we might note a greater value in something that has at present been abandoned, such as an older version of one of the Trumps. But we will generally want to study the system as it has evolved, or in the same direction in which it has been evolving. And there is no reason to allow outmoded ideas in Tarot to conflict with more modern ideas, particularly those of science. An open source project must be capable of learning.



Core Meanings

There’s a dynamic tension in Tarot evolution that mirrors the evolution of life. People are always coming up with new ideas that may or may not survive. The value in “doing your own thing” parallels mutation. When that innovation is ignored or rejected by the larger Tarot community, we get the equivalent of selection. Nobody wants to mate with that mutant. We get some interesting art that way sometimes, but it goes no further as a widely-used new deck. Lots of experiments get way too far out to be viable, mostly because they don’t pay enough attention to the core elements that are at the heart of what Tarot really is, or its basic genome. And every now and then we get major branchings, like the Marseilles, Golden Dawn, the Smith Pips, or the Crowley deck. These are like speciation events, where it becomes harder to share information between branches. We have a few species now, almost enough for a zoo, but some can still interbreed.

Basho, the 17th century poet, sounding a bit like Rumi, once wrote “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.” When we don’t, we move from having first-person experience to second and third person vicarious thrills. This holds a warning for both Tarot readers and designers of new decks. Let’s say we’re looking at one of Pixie’s Pip images. Most of the people who write the Tarot books usually get their own reaction to the image, check it against a few others, and then write their own interpretation of what the card means. There is some very general agreement there, and a bunch of gray area. This accumulates into a body of accepted ideas, but most of the lore is just from riffing off of Pixie’s pics. Very few seem to ask where Pixie was getting her inspiration. What was she looking into, and how did that influence what she tried to convey. Unless people go back to the same well she was drawing from, we get the equivalent of the Chinese Whispers or Telephone game, where something is whispered around the room and loses a bit of its original nature with each iteration. More of us should be retuning to the well Pixie drew from, and a big part of this was an understanding of what the number symbolized, what the suit meant, and how the two combine to form a new meaning, a whole that's more than the sum of its parts. The exact kind of flower in the background of the card, and what its color symbolizes, is a lot less important than that.

Each of the 78 cards has a huge range of meanings. You might think of each one as 1/78 of the human experience. By itself, that’s too much information to be practical. When divining, we narrow that down two times: first by fitting the card into a specific position in a spread, and second, by asking it to focus its meanings on the specific question we ask. It’s similar to doing research: we narrow the findings to the information we need by learning to look in the right places, and by learning to ask better questions. But this also suggests that we not start with too narrow a meaning for the individual cards, such as making the mistake of having only one favorite keyword for each card.

Verbatim memory or memorizing is too specific and not effective or flexible enough for reading. But we do need a gist memory or a gestalt, a sense of core meaning for each of the cards that both experience and several keywords can help you develop. Gist memory carries essential meanings rather than words or pictures, and yet can serve as a trigger for words and pictures from elsewhere in the brain. Many pull their meanings from the artist's pictures (and the artists personal symbolism), but this is closer to reading the artist than reading the Tarot, so you want an artist who knows Tarot if you want to really do Tarot. We can look for core meanings in four places for each card. There remains a lot of work to be done here. The glosses of Tarot’s vocabulary are still very fluid, and not at all standardized, and the language still has multiple dialects, some of which are mutually incomprehensible.

1) Images. The first source is the dimension of the image or picture, what the sense of it is, how it has evolved over the centuries, and in some places, where it perhaps should not have changed so much. There is a danger in getting overly fussy here: the little stick in his right hand has two branches because this symbolizes x, there are three bells on her toes because this symbolizes y. An excessively detailed description is little more than a detailed description of the Rorschach blot that is tickling our subconscious. We will not sweat these details. Probably the majority of decks within the range being studied here are inspired by the RWS designs, but most artists add their own details and flair. This stuff should be saved for when you are desperately fishing for peripheral meanings during a particular reading. The core will be in the overall impression, a picture that can be adequately described in the space of a couple of sentences. We will be looking more at the larger impressions, which may include figure, postures, and more universally seen accessories. This work, then, is not a companion to one particular deck. This approach is more useful with the Trumps because of their greater longevity and their evolutionary history. Depictions of the Court have some longer history as well.

It is problematic to rely primarily on the pictures on modern Pips. With the exception of a very old deck called the Sola-Busca Tarot, most Pip images began with Pamela Colman-Smith sketching her impressions of what the Golden Dawn symbols might look like if translated into lifelike vignettes. Most decks since, and most books interpreting them, are derived from this effort, now just over a century old. Many authors do little else but free-associate with their impressions of Smith’s work, riffing endlessly on, and often in error, with no attention to or regard for the underlying symbolism of number and suit. Smith’s work is brilliant, but the pictures still do not, or cannot, fully surround the core meanings, and many are subject to serious misinterpretation. Payne-Towler has another useful take on this issue: “Instead of being shown the formula that represents a certain natural law operating at a certain stage of the cycle in a distinct elemental realm, the Tarot reader encounters a cartoon of people enacting specific behavior and undergoing a particular emotional experience. This overemphasizes the sense of self in the situation, narrowing the possibilities of meaning and interpretation for that card.” At the same time, attempts to return to the former direction by eliminating the vignettes, as with Crowley’s deck, often become incomprehensibly abstract, or laden with inappropriate values from the attached narratives.

People get overly fussy about minor details and don't prioritize the importance of the symbols. Pixie's images have almost become canon, and it seems most deck artists feel compelled to reproduce some version of what she did. There's rebellion in the ranks against that, but not many other models to follow. That's just a work in progress, and lots of artists are loving the challenge, often in pretty idiosyncratic ways. Waite clearly drove most of the Trump imagery and his western religious imagery is obvious, offensive to some, and just wrong in places. And he’s pompous and bombastic about it. He grasped next to nothing about the Pips and how their meanings are formed. The rest of the deck shows more of Pixie's creativity, at least beyond what she was able to glean from ideas suggested in the ambient Golden Dawn culture. Unfortunately, several RWS images are easily misinterpreted, which adds to the confusion. The energy of Eight expressing itself through the suit of Cups is a thousand times more important than whether the hiker’s staff is crooked or straight, or his cloak is yellow or brown. That’s mostly the artist instead of Tarot, and your reaction to that is more of a reaction to the artist’s idea, not to the core meaning of the card.

High resolution symbolic detail may easily tell us more about the idiosyncrasies of the artist than about the meanings of the cards themselves, although this may still be useful in contributing raw data to the pareidolia heuristic. There are plenty of books in print for those who need to go this route, especially Graham, Esselmont, etc. for the RWS. But only minimal or sufficient attention will be paid here to any of the images. Card descriptions will generally not take more than a couple of sentences. In many cases these will be preceded by the note (modified) or (modified slightly) just to note that some new suggestions are about to be made. The intent is not to create a new deck or align with any particular deck. Suggested modifications are meant to live only in the mind or add to the mental gestalt more than the visual. The reader should simply be aware that many cards have several options. Core meanings should remain independent of the picture and useful with any deck. This particular attitude will have its detractors as it seems to assert a supremacy of conceptualization over imagery, and many would call Tarot essentially non-verbal and visual. Jorgensen asserts that it is “imaginative intensity which gives experiential content to otherwise content-less words.” But who among us has not felt the heat of Mt. Doom on our face, just from reading a book without pictures? Once again, this approach is with specific respect to core meanings and linguistics.

2) Key Words. Each card represents an attempt to cover 1/78 of the human experience, each one a fairly broad field in itself. We cannot expect single names and words to cover this much terrain. It requires a number of terms even to surround the center of the territory. Core meanings are broad compared to everyday words and their definitions. Key words will be used a lot in the present work, but even though their number may be expanded, their range of meanings will be narrowed somewhat from the aggregated assignments of all the books in print. Narrowing may be seen as an attempt at defining the cards, but it is not that. Rosengarten (p. 17) offers a too-narrow-minded criticism of the process, calling such an attempt at standardization “abhorrent to the essential vitality and versatility of this intuitive art.” This is view is taken to the extreme in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass, “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’” But Alice is right. Words and ideas without some core level of consensual meaning will only render a language useless for anything other than babbling to oneself or for having private experiences. Tarot is a discipline that is shared by many others, and as such it needs at least some discipline, some constraint and resolution, and an agreed upon place for two or more minds to meet.

A core meaning is not a collection of key words, but a gestalt that emerges as a synergy from such a collection, like a sense of the gravitational attraction that holds those key words together in their orbits and relationships. In turn, this gestalt becomes a well for the intuition to draw from. If the Tarot is going to have any value as a language, one which we might use to communicate with each other, its vocabulary is going to need something to take the place of definition. Any useful language requires at least some consensus and standardization or it loses all use. Such a consensus, by definition, also needs to develop a following, which in turn suggests that we at least try to be traditional wherever that makes sense. The nature of the cards themselves suggests that definition is not what is called for. Their meanings cannot be circumscribed or delimited as the word definition implies. While each card covers a sort of territory within the greater realm of the experience of being human or alive, there is often considerable overlap, and often a card will have an implication that is right in the middle of another card’s home territory. For example, the Empress and the Queen of Pentacles have much in common. But you don’t want to start out interpreting the Queen as a goddess or the Anima Mundi without first looking at her simply as a set of human personality traits perhaps made manifest in a flesh-and-blood, squeezable Earth Mama with potting soil under her fingernails. The narrowing that we do in no way means that we cannot go back out to the edges and margins of the meaning again. It merely starts us out on our quest somewhat closer to the center instead of in a foreign land. The core is an anchor in the midst of a general vicinity instead of the other side of the world. It also provide a more secure and reliable center for more personal accretions and extrapolations. And, of course, the cards also need to retain some ambiguity, stretchiness, even self-contradiction and paradox. A degree of vagueness is necessary for pareidolia to function properly.

A large number of decks present a single key word as a title, printed on the face of the card. While this practice might be attractive to a beginner, or otherwise one who thinks that understanding the cards is a matter of memorization, it is more of a hindrance than a help. While some of these names actually capture quite a bit of the range of a card's meaning (Dominion for the 2 of Wands, Enterprise for the Three of Wands, and Valor for the Seven of Wands), most titles don't even come close, and Crowley's Thoth deck is one of the worst offenders, especially in the higher-numbered Pips.

Old ideas of meaning and meaningful communication have fallen into disfavor of late, especially among the philosophers, academicians, deconstructionists and post-modernists. Sophists all. Of course this shows in the sense they fail to make, in the ugliness of their art and architecture, and in the nakedness of their emperors. We will just have to make bold to suggest that these fads won’t last, and will never be regarded as classical ways of thinking. We will continue the discussion of key words as sources of core meanings when we get to the Language chapter and the section on Vocabulary.

3) A third source for core meanings will be referred to as the dimension of Component Ideas. They are the more elemental or ‘atomic’ ideas that combine into the ‘molecules’ of the 78 cards. These are more pronounced and obvious in the 56 Minor Arcana, the Court cards and the Pips, where each card is a product of either a Court Dignitary or a Number, together with a Suit. There are eighteen of these component dimensions in the Minors. Even in the more straightforward Trumps there will be components that have been put together to produce compound meanings. We will refer to this process here as ‘portmanteau’ analysis and the this will be discussed at some length in the Language chapter in the Morphology section. This source is the least used and least understood of the four discussed here. Very few authors discuss these components in more than passing detail. It seems obvious to me that this dimension was well-used by Pamela Colman-Smith as she designed her Minors, yet this seems to be seldom taken into account by those describing her cards, or their clones. Most authors simply riff off her pictures. Crowley, in his Book of Thoth, probably used this tool more than anyone else, and showed its effectiveness in producing understanding.

4) A fourth source for core meanings is Correspondence, an expression of correlative thought. Degraded versions are sometimes referred to as magical thinking or argument from analogy. In this process, one system or extended analogy is overlaid onto another in such a way that there is asserted a resonant connection between corresponding elements. To stay on the more rational side of the spectrum, where correspondence is more creative than troublesome, requires an understanding that correspondence means to resonate with, and not is equal or equivalent to. The subject of Correspondences has its own chapter, following Historical Notes and Timeline.

There are core meanings to each card, with a range of perspectives and implications broader than the sum of their images, keywords, component ideas, and correspondences. Many will assert the cards just mean whatever you want them to mean. This is just relativistic bullshit, in line with the missteps of modern philosophy. But wide deviations from the norms still appear. The Tarot is an evolving language and an evolving consensus, but it does also takes some “wrong” turns and it’s up to new authors to convince others that those turns were wrong. I might be working on trying to correct some of Waite’s wrong turns, or common misinterpretations of Pixie’s pictures, and a couple errors in Crowley’s correspondences, but those corrections have to propagate. That requires an ability to reason to others in a field where reason isn't a top priority. We do what we can, I guess.



Symbols and Archetypes

It might surprise many Tarot aficionados to hear that the cards are NOT archetypes in any sense, and certainly not in the sense that Carl Jung used the term. In both the Tarot and the Yijing, the ideas of Jung are tossed around very casually, and with little to no comprehension. The main point, it seems, is in dropping a respected and famous name to try to secure some credibility. It has also led to some well-selling books being published. The collective unconscious might get the worst abuse, where new age writers might start with these two honest words and have them transformed into ‘universal consciousness’ within a sentence or two. You can even encounter the phrase ‘the collective unconscious of Western culture’ in the new age canon. “The unconscious is not a second personality with organized and centralized functions, but in all probability a decentralized congeries of psychic processes” (CW 9.1, p.278). Synchronicity gets its fair share of abuse as well, having been made into some kind of universal metaphysical law instead of a special class of coincidences. Here we are concerned with archetypes. Jung picked up an old word and redefined it. We can find the original idea and similar versions in Plato, Philo Judaeus, Irenaeus, the Corpus Hermetica, Dionysius the Areopagite and others. Earlier on, these rarified notions belonged to a purer world and transcended the world of flesh. They were thoughts in the mind of Deus or Zeus. Jung's definition of archetype found its original roots in Platonic ideals, but he redeveloped the idea to mean something considerably different. Those who run with the idea in Tarot seem to be stuck back at Plato. Jung’s archetypes are cognitive processes, and not ideal precursors to things. They have a primitive role in re-cognition.

Jung tried to clarify what he meant: “The term ‘archetype’ is often misunderstood as meaning a certain definite mythological image or motif ... . on the contrary, [it is] an inherited tendency [i.e., ability, potential] of the human mind to form representations of mythological motifs - representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic pattern... . This inherited tendency is instinctive, like the specific impulse of nest- building, migration, etc. in birds. One finds these representation collectives practically everywhere, characterized by the same or similar motifs. They cannot be assigned to any particular time or region or race. They are without known origin, and they can reproduce themselves even where transmission through migration must be ruled out.” (CW 18: 523). In all of Jung’s collected works, we only find one sentence that he wrote about Tarot: “It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli.” (CW, 9.1, p.38). Distantly descended. In a 1933 lecture, which isn’t found in his collected works, he also noted that the images are “symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” and they are “sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.” They are not in themselves archetypes. We do not inherit the idea of a blasted tower, especially when we are born into an indigenous nomadic tribe. The images may merely be common cultural elements, although many do derive from deeper inherited universals.

Jung did pretty well here, considering how many years it would be before neuroscience began to build some decent structure to support his ideas. A key word in Jung’s definition is inherited. This means genetic, and this in turn means neural structure and function, wetware cognitive processes, likely in combination with specific cocktails of endocrine secretions and neurotransmitters. Neither are archetypes a purely human phenomenon. They are also well-pronounced in primates and other social animals of high intelligence. We are probably looking at distinct processing modules in the brain giving us inherited neural predispositions to organize our memories of perceptions and behaviors around specific needs that we have as biological entities belonging to families and social groups.

It is perfectly logical that evolution would select and preserve our ability to recognize and catalog such characters as mothers, fathers, children, infants, siblings, alphas, allies, cowards, explorers, caregivers, elders, sages, rebels, thieves, spouses, lovers, bullies, heroes, sycophants, tricksters, challengers, fools, adoptees, cuckolds, and suckers; and such behavioral categories as praise, dominance, treachery, alliance, apology, seduction, flattery, deception, betrayal, obligation, gratitude, xenophobia, surrender, sacrifice, submission, commiseration, grooming, reconciliation, etc. Together these make up the apperceptive mass of our collective unconscious. As our lives progress, we will flesh out these predilections with our cumulative experience into coherent role models and behavioral protocols. Such archetyping is simple enough to encode genetically and also avoid confusing the great apes, elephants and dolphins who also seem to be born with them. Jung was pretty specific about these being universal across the species, and we might guess that this is due to their roots in earlier versions of hominidae. Cultural memes do not qualify. The Tower and the Devil cannot be archetypes if the San Bushmen of the Kalahari don’t have them. They also don’t have tens or swords. Jungian archetypes prepare or predispose us to perceive certain things, but ‘nihil est in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu,’ there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. Leibnitz later added “ nisi intellectus ipse ,” except the intellect itself. Both archetyping and the pareidolia heuristic would be parts of this original intellect. Ideas and ideals themselves are not inherited and the archetypes are not determined with respect to their final content. Their development is as idiosyncratic as their origin is universal.

The cards, accordingly, are symbols and symbolic clusters. They point their users to a reality that is not known in full. Helpfully, Cirlot claims that the essence of a true symbol “is its ability to express simultaneously the various aspects of the idea it represents.” They are multidimensional by this definition. Unlike a sign, a symbol never fully surrounds or defines the thing that it points to. Consequently, we are not going to be describing exactly what the symbols mean. We are simply taking numerous verbal snapshots from a number of different angles. The core meanings that we will be looking for are narrower than the full scope of implied meanings, but also much broader than linguistic definitions. And although the word may be difficult for the intuitive folk to use, they are conceptual as well. Languages like the Tarot and Yijing attempt to organize the dimensions of human experience into simple, diagrammable systems, such that these will fit onto one page. Since new words cannot be added, the meanings must expand until every experience can be pointed to by at least one card. But they don’t want to expand so much that they do not locate specific territories or types of experience. Each card is a lesser infinity, but it still has a locatable core.



The Cutting Room Floor

This section takes a quick look at some of the traditional dimensions of Tarot study that will be left behind here, and why. Wildly idiosyncratic decks, more expressions of artistic creativity than the fundamentals of Tarot, will not be considered here, even though some new ideas for specific cards may be proposed in descriptions of card images. The 52-card deck won't be discussed, as this is a separate system. Various gimmick decks won’t be discussed. Neither will oracle cards. We are only looking at decks that hover around a common core language with a 78-word vocabulary. This will still range over a wide territory, from the Marseilles deck, through the RWS, to the Thoth, and we will try to see these as essentially the same system with some challenging variations in dialect.



Apophenia and Pareidolia

One important key to understanding the Tarot is in remembering that the cards, and therefore their sequences, were meant to be shuffled, not kept in any fixed order, and that they were meant to be readable as a coherent story no matter which order they happened to fall into. We can make a story out of any sequence of images by filling in the blank spaces between them. This property exploits two ancient processes of human cognition, or heuristics, ways of interpreting, or distilling meaning from experience. Apophenia is the experience or process of seeing patterns and connections in random or meaningless data. Common examples include hearing voices in white noise or seeing our own images projected onto dimensionless fields (ganzveld). Pareidolia is the experience or process whereby a vague, essentially random, but potentially suggestive stimulus is perceived as significant. This is often an image or sound. It is a subset of apophenia wherein there is at least a hint of form or structure in the initial stimulus. Common examples include seeing images in clouds, and the Man in the Moon. Aberrations of both processes are common in such mental disorders as schizophrenia and religion. But they are also evolved cognitive heuristics. They helped us to jump quickly to conclusions and actions long before we had reason and language, and they are still very much with us. Sometimes they still help us even better than reason and language. We might get the tiniest bit of an edge when the movement we see in the grass is really the tiger we imagine and not just the wind. Some skeptics have been known to harumph at this, and claim that these two phenomena are what most undermines the Tarot's credibility. But there is no reason to take this scornful a point of view, or apologize for it. The Tarot might instead be celebrated as a way to make use of these ancient mental functions, which act much more closely to the surface of the sub-conscious than reason and language can ever go.

The images that we connect with pareidolia might be snapshots in a dream sequence, dates on a calendar, letters of the alphabet, or numbers on a list. We can always find a way to make meaning where none really existed beforehand. We also have the ability to make our little strings of freshly connected images sound plausible to others. If we have the social magnetism, we can get our fellows to take our connections quite seriously, so that these become adopted and built into the thinking processes of our followers. Still, we need something that is better anchored, in something perhaps that science can see, if we are going to call our fabricated stories fundamentally meaningful. There is also such a thing as making too much meaning, seeing too much as being meaningfully connected. One of the best known manifestations of this is in clinical paranoia, which is distinct from the suspiciousness you feel when you aren’t good friends with pot. Here, the universe gets all connected up in humanly meaningful ways, and there you are at the center of it, receiving special blessings from the Creator of the Universe, or some kind of persecution. All of those galaxies were placed up there in the sky just to light your way badly at night. We shouldn’t connect or make assumptions like this any more than we really need to. The astrologer might make a note here that there are no lines between the stars.

As with the Rorschach ink blots, we are able to begin and go quite a distance with just a hint of form. What we perceive are the projections that we make on this. Without any meanings, core or otherwise, the cards can at least serve us in this capacity. But we really want to start with less vagueness and ambiguity than this. We want the ink blots to better suggest your parents fighting, or trying to make you a new sister. The cards will stimulate our unconscious projections, but if the cards each have their own, somewhat narrower spectrum of meaning, they can then meet our projections halfway. Without some sort of inherent form, we have no information, only imagination, when we are supposed to be asking questions and getting at least a suggestion of answers. We therefore have reason to abandon the idea that the point of the cards is simply to start us off an any direction our hearts desire, unless of course we really are playing the Fool card.

Setting us up to work with pareidolia forces us to use our imagination and activate our intuition. It force us to look at questions from new perspectives or points of view. And in a way, this is like hitting a “page refresh” button.



Number Symbolism versus Numerology

It seems than many Tarot authors can see no difference between number symbolism and numerology. But number symbolism is an observable fact. All around the world, human cultures and sub-cultures have associations of meanings with certain numbers taken as symbols. Further, there are separate symbols for cardinal numbers, which show quantity, and ordinal numbers which order things in a set, showing their rank or position. Both cardinal and ordinal numbers lend themselves to geometrical arrangements as well, offering ways to view what they symbolize or signify in patterns. They can also divide spectra of experience into set numbers of segments, as with scales in music. Many such patterns and scales are also cross-correlated with other symbolic systems. The nominal numbers, which merely name things, or arrange things temporarily in an ad hoc fashion, do not show quantity or rank, or quality, nor do they carry any inherent meaning. The number that you take from the machine to number your place in line is not meaningful in itself unless you are excessively superstitious. When you lined up with your classmates in alphabetical order, this did not tell anybody anything at all about your characteristics as a student or your character as a person.

Numerology concerns nominal numbers. At the base of nearly every numerological observation is a random number sequence, or an accident of arrival or assignment. Many people suspect divine and profound meaning in the sequence of the letters of the alphabet. This idea has been pronounced and influential in the WMT (Western Mystery Tradition) with the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, and in Islam with the Arabic. The idea that the sequence is meaningful has some of its beginnings in the belief that religious texts were authored by none other than the Creator, who would have used the letters as tools in pronouncing His Word, and who would never have kept a sloppy workbench. Along with this, we can consider that some cultures, like the Jews, had no independent method of writing numbers. Instead, like the Romans with their numerals, they used the letters of their alphabet to cipher with until the Arabs brought us the ‘Arabic Numerals’ from India. They gave the value of One to the letter Aleph, Two to Beth, and so on in alphabetical order. Then Yod through Tzaddi were given numbers 10 through 90, Qoph through Tau, 100 through 400, and the Final forms 500 through 900. But if we assume instead that the alphabet came down to us in random order, haphazardly through history, via the Proto-Sinaitic and Phonecian alphabets, then it is not likely that the alphabet and these numbers somehow became mystically fused in their divine essence by this rather arbitrary later assignment. Meaning is an insertion after the fact into a random sequence.

A similar kind of original randomness also occurs in the basis of calendar dates. From a geocentric point of view, there are a few real and measurable points in time, that do not require any conceptual artifice or man-made geometry. These are the globe-encircling dawn and sunset shadow lines, the phases of Luna, the solstices and equinoxes and their midpoints in the annual solar cycle, and the great 25,868-year clock that is the precession of the equinoxes. There are also time measurements based on frequencies of vibration in matter and other physical laws. Beyond these we have the man-made calendars, which are wholly unrelated to any of these phenomena. Starting points of clocks and calendars are pinned instead to arbitrary moments in time. A date is just a day until a number is assigned to it, but the day assigned to day one is an arbitrary selection. This is just some human calendar maker's decision and it's almost certainly not of cosmic importance. We add to the confusion by having months of random length. And these months are measured in decimal days, which rely on the accident that humans evolved with ten fingers. So now we have people telling us that we can add up the numbers of the letters of our names and the numbers on our calendars, and then add these numbers together, and reduce this to a single digit, and the result is supposed to be meaningful. We may have Papus to scold for bringing this into the Tarot. But somebody else would have let it in by the time the new age dawned.

The sequence of letters in an alphabet is merely the product or the bricolage of millennia of people just making stuff up. There is no observable structural or phonetic basis to the arrangement that bears a direct relationship to something meaningful. The assignment of a day and month and year number to a particular day in history is an arbitrary act unless there is some secure, original tie to a meaningful phenomenon related to time itself, such as a solstice or equinox. Any numerology which uses alphabet sequences or calendar dates constructs its entire edifice on top of arbitrary numbers and random sequences. And it only compounds the silliness to then add these numbers together and reduce them to single digits. It is not likely that any honestly gathered empirical findings are going to discover a meaningful order in such a system. It is far more likely that we will find a combination of pareidolia and cognitive bias pervading the investigative process. The only place that we will find the numerology of the Hebrew alphabet (called Gematria) to be truly meaningful is in deciphering Hebrew tracts expounding on the properties of Hebrew words based on Gematria. The real meaning ends there. The rest is imagination and the tricks that this can play. Western Mystery Tradition's (WMT’s) Qabalah and its elaboration of the Kabbalah’s Sephiroth. This will be retained, while large portions of the remaining WMT material is numerological and will be dropped from this study. Using the numbers of the received Trump sequence to help derive their meanings is numerology rather than number symbolism. So is using the structurally meaningless sequence of the Hebrew alphabet to label or identify the 22 paths on the Tree of Life.



Number symbolism is a different matter entirely. The study of the Ten Sephiroth of the Kabbalah is number symbolism, not numerology. See the links here in Sections N and especially O for more on number symbolism (with other sections you might find useful). Gail Fairfield's Choice Centered Tarot has a good sense of the ten numbers, and Paul Case's The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages has a useful section. But most Tarot authors are either confused in these matters or don't address them at all. I also get into the numbers in some depth below, and include Crowley’s elegant approach verbatim. No system of number symbolism can be called universal, and several distinct systems exist: the meaning-set of numerology, for example, or that of the Pythagoreans, or of Jewish Hebrew Kabbalah. The Tarot has been developing its own for some centuries, in close connection with the(WMT’s) Qabalah and its elaboration of the Kabbalah’s Sephiroth. This will be retained, while large portions of the remaining WMT material is numerological and will be dropped from this study. Using the numbers of the received Trump sequence to help derive their meanings is numerology rather than number symbolism. So is using the structurally meaningless sequence of the Hebrew alphabet to label or identify the 22 paths on the Tree of Life. The Fool’s Journey

The numbered sequence of the 22 Trumps, which has generally stabilized now as Zero through Twenty-One, with Strength preceding (and so switched with) Justice, is often narrated as the journey of the Fool as a Hero on a quest for individuation and fulfillment, a journey from ignorance to enlightenment. This story assumes that the sequence has an overall, deep structural meaning. Others have seen meanings in a 0+7+7+7 arrangement, where each set of seven trumps, in their given or received sequence, enters into a higher order of development. Still others have been able to tell a plausible story from an 11+11 configuration. One of the great virtues of the Tarot, however, is that the cards can be shuffled, and fall into any sequence, and still be made to tell an apparently meaningful story by making use of basic human cognitive heuristics that date to our early evolution as hominins. Our brains are structured to construct meaningful sequences out of even the most disconnected events, on the chance that what we hit upon might have survival value. This is also how we string together fairly random semi-conscious sequences of REM states into meaningful dreams sequences without any conscious effort. We will need to consider here that the development of the Trump sequence may simply have been based on the way the cards first fell, or the order of floats in a Renaissance parade.

There is one element to the structural Trump sequence that has developed meaning over the years, even though it may have started out as a half-arbitrary assignment. This is the part-sequential, part-geometrical division of the 22 Trumps into sets of 3, 7 and 12, based on the Kabbalistic ideas first set forth in the Sepher Yetzirah, circa 600 CE . This parsing is not fundamental to there being 22 Trumps in all, but it has provided some very useful contributions to the symbolism over the years by permitting the 22 Trumps to be closely associated with various Scales of Three, the Seven Planets of early Astrology, and the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac with their Twelve associated Houses. This is the only analysis of the sequence of Trumps that will be explored here in any detail. The historical influence that this has had in the ongoing development of Trump meanings is the only real reason to pursue this inquiry. There is not an original connection that ties these ideas together at their roots, except as we can find human universals in the scales of three, seven and twelve. It should be noted before leaving the subject that the division of the Hebrew alphabet into Mothers, Doubles and Simples, bears no relation or similarity at all to the more global disciplines of phonetics and phonosymbolism.

The numbers One or Ace through Ten are clearly an expression of number symbolism, and aren’t really used in this tradition in a numerological way. These will be explored at some length in the Components section. Outside of this and the 3+7+12 set of scales, numbers will not be used. A couple of items of accidental meaning have been stumbled upon in the course of applying numerological sequences to the Trumps. Some have taken root in the historical development of Trump meanings, or at least have significant insights to offer, even if they are accidental. Most of these are taken from symbols associated with the characters of the Hebrew alphabet (and its forerunners), as they appear when this sequence is aligned with that of the Trumps. For example, Ayin, or Eye, as correlated with the Devil card, has things to suggest about the limitations of our vision and the things that we may be blind to. This also resonates with the theme of nearsightedness in the resonant Yijing Gua. These will be explored as they appear for each card, but there is no point in doing this systematically, since the system itself has no underlying meaning. Pareidolia is sufficient to account for any insights discovered therein.



Over-Elaboration, Tautologies, and Mistaking Maps for Terrain

The human mind is a kind of terrain that as yet comes with no map that bears any geographical likeness to the terrain itself. The map is symbolic, so in ways it must be taken on its own terms, and because of this it can be a little too easy to get lost in the map without continually referring back to the reality it is supposed to represent. This will be repeated later: If a map of the psyche or symbolic language is to be useful in a real world, the orienting and interpretive grids that it superimposes onto reality will continue to hover pretty closely over that reality, instead of moving further away into multiple levels of abstraction on abstraction. As simple as these systems are, the permutations within the organizing system, which are separate from the individual symbols and ideas, can get extremely complex. These are the maps that our sojourners get lost in, believing there is more information there than in the contact with the world that the symbols are supposed to point to. The abstraction itself becomes a distraction, often a mindless one. Zhuangzi wrote: ‘To know when to stop is the highest attainment.’

Over-elaboration is a real problem in all of these symbolic languages. Newcomers and old-timers alike will get fascinated by all of the permutations and extrapolations of the structural system and wander away into ever-higher levels of remove, each thinking they might be onto something big, but almost always moving ever further from the point of having such a system in the first place. In logic, a tautology is a proposition that declares itself true by definition, in a format that isn’t refutable. It is independent of verification or refutation because it exists only in its own world. This is not a world you want to get lost in, since it’s only a hall of mirrors. The adventure becomes a maze rather than a journey. And where the map is in error, or is just an arbitrary depiction, all we really get is lost. The Kabbalah in particular has been made vastly more complicated and fussy than it needs to be. This is in part because adherents must keep going until they find all the meaning in the Tanakh and the Torah, which in fact contains mostly borrowed stories and myths, moralizings, vengeance fantasies and attempts to assert control over a froward and stiff-necked people who would rather worship Baal. They might have to keep wandering in that desert forever.

It's especially easy to get lost in over-elaborated systems in Yijing studies because the superstructure is binary enumeration. People take off following the properties of binary systems themselves, thinking that this must in fact be an exploration of the Yijing. This is the source of the DNA nonsense. Actually, the Yijng was written at a time before there was anything like yin-yang theory, and binary mathematics simply became an interpretive overlay that Chinese culture would have no real grasp of for another two thousand years. There were in fact structural elements and dimensions that were on the minds of the first authors, but these were few in number and simple to understand. They can be understood a little better with a binary overlay, but this does not make the mathematics fundamental to the creation of the book or its interpretation. Nevertheless, since the Han Dynasty, many centuries after the Yi was written, tens of thousands of volumes and lifetimes have been dedicated to snipe hunts in the world of Xiangshu, or Image-and-Number, usually leaving Yili, Meaning-and-Principle, the study of the meaning of the text, far behind.

The compulsion to go too far in extrapolating deductively from a simple cognitive system has been as active in Astrology as anywhere else. The permutations of inventable ideas exceed the scope of the human mind, as the great mounds of books on the subject will attest. This mass of available conjecture presents an ominous challenge to the novice and threatens to preclude an understanding of the simplicity of the basic system. While the core of the system is rich enough in its symbolism to fill a long lifetime of study in depth, and only one level or two abstracted from the human psyche, impatience still rules, and students go wandering off into abstraction after abstraction, thinking there must be more to it. The answer must be in the decans, or in the asteroids, or in progressions. This approach may be called ‘a mile wide and an inch deep.’ Study time is far better spent in staying put and digging deeper into the mother lode. This requires patience, and humility.

All this is not to deny that we can't milk these expansions and digressions for ideas, but out in the farther fields of abstraction, this does rely more on pareidolia than any kind of fundamental or structural relevance. It becomes a question of a triage of sorts, of where best to spend our time. Someone who can give up the peripheral goose chases and snipe hunts can still follow the occasional lead that someone else has brought back in their otherwise empty sack.



Religion & Metaphysics

The ‘Devil’s Picture Book,’ as the Tarot was sometimes known, developed in an era where the church was starting to lose its icy grip on culture. The Trumps arose shortly before Martin Luther made his move. For a long time there was some give-and-take in the Trump names and depictions, if not entirely to appease the Church, then at least to escape its wrath. The Devil card and the lightning-struck House of God or Tower were the last to join the deck. Gradually, most of the Christian iconography wandered away. Today, in most decks, only one vestigial instance of pure Christian iconography survives, in the Last Judgment card, depicting the angel Gabriel sounding his trumpet, and the dead with their families arising from their coffins to greet their just rewards. It is time for this image to go away too, because, to be blunt, the whole idea is childish and embarrassing. Others have proposed worthwhile alternatives, Crowley with his Aeon card, depicting a new era of will and decisiveness, and Robin Wood, depicting a Phoenix, in flames, and a skyclad woman. Both are several steps more evolved, and are also in better resonance with the Qabalistic attribution to Shin, the Hebrew Mother letter of Fire, and to Uranus, stolen here from the Fool, a corrected Astrological attribution made later here. The title Judgment, dropping the word Last, remains appropriate enough. It is also time to let go of any residual idea that the Ace of Cups is the Holy Grail. Even vagina is a better fit than that.

Many structural elements that organize the vocabularies of Kabbalah and Qabalah are repeatedly likened to diagrams of the mind or body or garments of JHVH and Adam Kadmon, who was made in this holy image. In the Yijing, the runaway Xiangshu or numerological systems became anatomies in their own way, or metaphysical models of the world and the patterns of circulation of its Qi and Jing. But the metaphysical structures that we project onto the universe can often tell us a lot more about ourselves than they tell us about the universe. Xenophanes suggested, “If oxen or horses or lions had hands to draw with … they would make their gods’ bodies in the same shape as their own.” We take up our own psychic contents and project them onto some imagined cosmic mirror. As above, so below. In Qabalah’s Tree of Life, this is the face of the Abyss, where Daath or Knowledge resides. Unknown to most, this is a reflective surface, and often all we see is our own egos, and its insecurities, turned upside down or inside out. But we still take these contents and set them on thrones in their assigned domains in the heavens and see them as Archons and Aeons, hypostases, deities and divine forces. With the right attitude, however, we can step back and take an anthropological approach and study these images as we would any myth for what they can tell us about their psyche of origin. Sometimes we may have to re-invert the images, so that first causes become final causes, or ideas become derivatives of sense, or essences derived from existences. But while they may be nothing but reflections of human character, they still have things to tell us about this character.

Some elements of Kabbalah, those which have contributed to the development of card meanings in the Occult Tarot's formative years, will be kept, while others which added primarily to the complexity and confusion will be set aside. Notions of deity, even those outlying the Judeo-Christian tradition, are unnecessary here, even though states of mind that might otherwise be called religious, such as sacredness, reverence, forgiveness and gratitude, are best kept as part of the core repertoire of human cognition and attitudes. These do not require a deity. Rather than construct this on a platform of atheism, let's merely assert that the Tarot can be understood in its core without reference or resort to metaphysical or theological speculation. Here we are going to leave out the metaphysical belief and conjecture as unnecessary, and not even imbued with all that much wisdom in the first place. It can probably be asserted by now that the original point of religious and metaphysical belief was always ethics, and that it has always failed pretty badly at this. But the Tarot, too, can be seen as an ethic, and one that can survive being stripped of metaphysics and religion. This leaves it free to advise, without dogma, on the finer points of living a more optimized and self-directed life.







Tarot as a Language



The Language as System

Calling the Tarot a language is not using an analogy or metaphor. But Tarot does differ from languages like English in several respects. Together with its close cousins, notably Astrology, Qabalah, and Yijing, the vocabularies are tightly constrained and finite. They are typically limited to a hundred essential words or less, distributed within just a handful of categories or parts of speech. New words are rarely added, except when several are admitted at once as part of a new dimension expressed within a pattern. The meanings of words grow and expand by accretion of connotations, glosses, or key words. Unlike the English language, which proceeds from having a word for each thing, whose phonemics and morphology make little sense, whose logic is only dimly perceived through nearly subliminal grammar and syntax, these systematic mini-languages exhibit a crystalline patterning. All have superstructures that can be clearly diagrammed, with a clarity and economy such that both the superstructure and the elements of vocabulary will all fit nicely together on a single page or poster. Science develops the same sort of languages, like the ever-evolving standard model of subatomic entities, or the much better known periodic table of the elements. It is important that the whole system can be seen at a glance and held in the mind as a single image. This feature helps get us past linearity and permits a simultaneous access to all of the ideas involved, and this in turn is important wherever a contrast or choice between elements is wanted. The overall structure is a map to all of the parts at once.

These systems are abstract diagrams of the psychic or experiential world, attempts to map the mind’s terra incognita in the distribution of its faculties and in its many layers. They are attempts to increase the regions of the internal world that are available to both perception and discussion. The discipline of psychology attempts the same. For all of its pride about being the study of cognitive behavior, it has always seemed to forget that it was itself a form of cognitive behavior, and ultimately a languaging behavior, a parsing and a taxonomy of the human experience. Its results were inescapably entangled with how it parsed the world into ideas and organized those ideas into systems and sub-systems. It also built most of its database on disappointing human behavior, but that's another subject. Despite its larger-scale incoherence, out of this we get useful little language subsystems, such as lists of defense mechanisms and cognitive biases. We also get classifications of psychological disorders that allow therapists to put the right pills into the right mouths, and fill out insurance forms consistently, although this contributes very little to long-term mental health solutions.

ars memoria or ars memorativa. This process also uses finite numbers of elements parsed into manageable sets, and spatially arranged to show interrelationships between sets and elements. The individual items are imagines agentes, or instrumental images. The overall structure of the Tarot is a just such a map to all of its parts, giving simultaneous access to multiple concepts for purposes of comparison or choice. The Trumps were also a sort of memory training in cultural literacy: they were some of the first literal flash cards.

From the beginning, one of the primary functions of these languages was mnemonic. When a user looked at an idea, the language did not permit him to overlook the other members of its set. When a user forgot an idea, the other members of the set reminded him what it was. When a user’s experience was too limited with one member of a set, the rules that were implicit in the overall set allowed him to fill in some blanks and holes by a process of interpolation. This was explicitly a real part of Tarot’s early history, as it was associated with a mnemonic technique known as the art of memory or. This process also uses finite numbers of elements parsed into manageable sets, and spatially arranged to show interrelationships between sets and elements. The individual items are, or instrumental images. The overall structure of the Tarot is a just such a map to all of its parts, giving simultaneous access to multiple concepts for purposes of comparison or choice. The Trumps were also a sort of memory training in cultural literacy: they were some of the first literal flash cards.

A Catalogue of Attitudes

In a systematic way, the Tarot has evolved as an attempt to enumerate the dimensions of experience with a finite vocabulary of symbols, in much the same way as chemistry seeks to configure the world with its periodic table. Its elements function as gravitational centers for orbiting meanings, or as organizational loci for sorting and filing experience and retrieving it with better ease. The Tarot is a sort of filing cabinet for the memory and open for the use of our imagination. And in therapy it can be used as a sort of ‘catalog of attitudes,’ an assortment of cognitive tools arrayed before us as optional accessories. In this context, freedom may be thought of as a function of the options that we are aware of, and this array makes it easier for us to make an informed selection.

These languages will be treated here in large part as working cognitive frameworks or models of the human psyche, attempts to lift this psyche out of its half-submerged state and hold it up for examination, to help us to point to this and that, or help us to choose between this and that optional state of mind. They both refer to and objectify subjective human experiences and feelings. Like the subsystems of psychology, they will be useful insofar as their insights can be applied to solving problems. This is frequently dependent on the aptitude and real-world savvy of the user. The deck can be thought of as 78 general types of experience, both states that we can feel ourselves occupying and states that we can occupy on purpose when faced with different kinds of situations. They might be objective lessons, some perhaps to be learned the hard way the first time around. If a person has a difficult time learning, then the next occurrence may be difficult as well, but if they are capable of learning, the experience or state can become a cognitive skill instead. An approach to Tarot that sees the cards as cognitive skills, or a technology of cognition, will make more sense for people who are able to learn from their experiences.

The Five of Cups suggests things that might be learned from experiences with loss and ingratitude, the Five of Swords, things that can be learned from overconfidence and betrayals of trust. Instead of thinking of the cards as predictions, we can try thinking of them as skill sets to keep close at hand. We have all opened big boxes of parts that say ‘assembly required.’ To assemble this product you will need a tube of glue, a hammer, a Phillips screwdriver, a medium-sized bandaid, and two glasses of wine. Our readings can be taken like this. These are the perceptual and cognitive tools that you will want to have close by. They are tools like psychological processes, attitudes, talents and cognitive skills. In the inner world they are learned stratagems, in the outer world they are experiences that are instructive of these stratagems. They are offered in a tidy array, like tools laid out on a good work bench. For those who can get past having their fortune told or future predicted, choices are offered that imply choices of outcome, and only failure to learn predicts bad luck. The idea of positive and negative meanings and reactions to the cards needs to be outgrown if the cards are to be useful aids to agency.

The 22 Trumps of the Occult Tarot are what the subcultures of the Western Mystery Tradition came up with when pressed to identify the 22 most important things to know on such a path. They are clusters of cultural ideas rather than archetypes, and flash-card reminders of important elements of this subculture’s notion of literacy. They shifted around quite a bit in the earlier years. Virtues came and went, or (like Prudence) simply got assimilated into other images (in this case, the Hermit). Where we find that something important is missing, it is up to us authors to find the best place to insert it, because it is now against the system’s internal rules to keep adding new cards.



Vocabulary, Definition and Connotation

Some system vocabularies start out with a preset or fixed number of items. Scales are the common example: divide the human experience into eight parts and see when you get. Then check out what that other culture over there did with the same assignment, see if the two solutions have anything in common, and then determine if that is instructive or not, whether it speaks of cultural differences or human universals. Other vocabularies evolve with no initial goal or end in sight. They may grow spontaneously until cultural pressures to add a missing item, or delete a superfluous item, and this results in at least a temporary stability. Then at some point they become fixed in number and even canonized there. Our calendars were developed like this. So were the different alphabets from our various cultures. The Trumps of the Tarot were yet another example, at least until the card games of Tarot found a fixed and established use for exactly 22 cards. It appears to have been a coincidence that this equaled the number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Once the overall number found some stability, the meanings of the 22 individual Trumps, and some of their sequences, got shifted, tweaked and juggled around until they too found some stability. It is important to understand that the final ‘plan’ was not yet there at the beginning of the process. The Trumps found their way to their current order and number gradually, and even now things cannot be thought set in stone and proof against some new paradigm yet to be discovered or invented.

The term vocabulary will be used here to refer to the complete deck of 78 cards. The eighteen elements which constitute the component parts of the 56 Minor Arcana can be referred to as morphemes, discussed below. As stated, the vocabulary of this language is tightly constrained and finite. If there is to be any growth, barring the addition of a whole new subsystem to the language, this will need to occur by addition to the meanings of the individual words. Some of this accretion comes by way of associating, correlating or nesting other finite symbolic systems. Because these systems are used in divination, the universe of discourse for the languages we are discussing will be the full range of human experience, since this must embrace all sorts of questions ranging from matters of the heart to matters of leaky plumbing. While any gods out there might well disagree, from a human perspective this is practically infinite. As such, the individual items of vocabulary each have to do a whole lot of work or cover a very large territory of possible meanings, vastly more than any English words. These are like biomes in ecology rather than nations in political geography, in theory getting their organizing principles from characteristics that preexist in the human mind. Even jumping between more conventional languages like modern English and ancient Chinese produces interesting contrasts. The former has dozens of times the number of words, the latter has many times the number of possible meanings for each word. The former is more definitive and articulated, the latter more connotative and poetic. This is even more pronounced when the vocabulary drops to less than a hundred words. When a word or term carries many possible meanings it is called polysemous, and the phenomenon, polysemy.

Polysemy is much more apparent in these limited languages, and potential meanings for each of the cards can get pretty complicated. As with old Chinese, a word’s meanings must be narrowed by the context in which it appears. In the Tarot, this narrowing is not done until after we have a sense of the broader range of meanings of each card, and then it happens in three ways: 1) we narrow the meaning by the question we ask, eliminating associations that have no bearing on the problem at hand; 2) we narrow it further by the named position in which a card falls in a spread, a process discussed under grammar, below; and 3) we get tighter still within the context of the surrounding cards, which is also a part of the grammar discussed below. And we may add a 4) when we watch the reactions of a client for whom the cards are being read, reactions which guide the reader to a still more personalized meaning. Of course we are also looking at our own emotions in response or reaction to a card, sensing our own undercurrents. This is the intuitive part. While there are reasons to have core meanings for each of the cards to get us started somewhere close to the center of the mental or psychic territory that is the cards primary domain, we don’t want to start out with too narrow an idea. We don’t want a definition. But we also don’t want to begin our search three domains over or half a world away.

Word meanings develop over time a little like a tree, branching out and self-pruning. Systematizers often take up this job of pruning. As with trees, vitality and longevity may be strengthened, not weakened, by this process. The cards began with very general ideas. In the Minor Arcana, they began with somebody’s wild ass guess as to what it meant when component ideas like a number and a suit were put together. And many began only with notes from divination records. In the Trumps, they began with a nexus of cultural associations with the images and situations that were being represented. Whenever some contributor thought of a new key word which was remotely close to the area defined by a card's rough idea, the word attached itself to a growing body of associations. At some point there get to be sufficient accretions to sort them for some common themes, common denominators or clumping, and also to toss the more inane, extraneous or irrelevant assignments, the non sequiturs. This process is rather like studying the holes in a target made by a young archer to learn where he has been aiming; or like studying a bell curve to find a mean. Along another line of analogy, it is like pruning a fruit tree back to its most productive or fruitful branches. In this metaphor, note that it is fruitless to prune the tree down to one branch, much less down to the root. We want to maintain some of the learned diversity. Neither do we want to think we are defining a particular term. It has too much work to do to be limited like that. The words we attach are not meant to define a process any more than a person's name is meant to define the person. These names are meant to summon the character to help out with the chores. In this case the characters are psychological processes, attitudes, talents, and cognitive skills.

A Tarot card may be likened to a meaning magnet, or a neural net of associations, or a heading in a thesaurus. They can function as mnemonic devices, or nets for fishing the subliminal seas. When functioning at their best, a reader has only to look at a card in a context to begin the flow of a steady stream of ideas, with a spontaneity and ease akin to that of ordinary conversation. In fact, once core meanings or their gestalts or gists have been grasped, most of the work with the cards is preconscious or subconscious, down where a reader’s personal associations are interconnected. The development of associations with each card is of course a personalized process. Some writers will assert that it is perfectly appropriate for this to be entirely personal or idiosyncratic, and that the cards should mean whatever a reader needs or wants them to mean. Of course this means that a reader can no longer communicate with other readers in a common language and that all their subsequent conversations with them become little more than dueling monologues, and any ideas we have about meanings and meaningful communication get deconstructed. These people can think what they want, but unless they are extremely influential, they will eventually wind up speaking to themselves in a special language that nobody else understands. They do not become part of the Tarot tradition or history. There are uses and reasons for classical approaches, consensus, and traditions beyond simple pressures to conformity, and these should be respected.

We get our card meanings first from written sources and contemporaries, and then from our working notes and journals. Initially, we collect more ideas that we keep. Much of the initial collection will be in the form of key words, hopefully gathered from a number of sources instead of just one favorite book. We build on these, which makes it important for a beginner who aspires to ever be more than a beginner to look for higher quality sources. Typically when a reader looks at a page of key words for a card, their meanings will be all over the place, and will often contradict each other. The intent in the present work was to narrow this range of meanings into a smaller, tighter and relatively coherent whole, and then fill in some of the remaining blanks, interpolating between these narrower meanings. We wind up using both extrapolation and interpolation. In extrapolation we estimate what things are like beyond the original range of cases, based upon what we think the original range has taught us. We have to guess at what the rules are that lie beyond the known. Interpolation produces estimates between two known observations, as in finding word meanings between two known values. Two-point-six is an interpolation between two and three. Extrapolation is subject to much more uncertainty and a higher risk of producing meaningless results. Some key words will be repeated in collections for a number of different cards. Sometimes it is wise to eliminate the ideas that are just too general, but often these repeated words will have narrower applications that are very specific to the core meaning of a card, meaning they should be left in place with a note-to-self to look at a narrower gloss in a narrower context. In these languages, when used in counseling, you might find frequent use of ideas like deferred gratification, acceptance, adaptability, noble obligation, etc, all implied by several different cards.

An effort was made here to find some consensus on the things that have long been said about each particular card. Collecting the key words for use here, and this from a very large number of sources, was a little like looking for an archery bullseye in a wall from which the target had been removed, leaving only the holes to go by. There were clusters of hits to be found, and within those clusters were holes never made but ones that might have made sense. I tried to guess at what might have been the two innermost rings of the targets and use these to locate core meanings. But I also confess to having cherry-picked many of these hits according to some preconceived notions based on the constituent elements of the cards like number and suit, or preferred correspondence attributions. This was necessarily a creative process and not simply a statistical survey.

The Key Words sections here, a feature used throughout this work, will be a grab bag of these collected ideas. The only order is alphabetical. It is not recommended that these be memorized. Rather, the intent is to give the reader first a feel for the general meaning of the larger idea, and then a gestalt that ties the cluster together and also implies further meanings that infill the cluster or expand it only to round things out. The scope or breadth of these ideas is considerably narrower than those found elsewhere, in order to develop the gestalt more tightly around the core meaning. But within this narrower range there is a denser collection of information than found elsewhere. If you are taking a day to study each card (a highly recommended program) it might be a useful exercise to go through this section slowly, out loud, and try to stretch your mind to make a connection between each key word and the card or symbol in question. It is recommended to use more than one source for this exercise, and hopefully three or more, and all of these should come well-recommended by educated readers. It is critical for someone who wants to go anywhere useful with Tarot to start with best sources available and not build on a foundation that will soon need rebuilding. There is a lot of nonsense out there in print because there is money to be made by writing for credulous and gullible people. It is advised to avoid books with beginner in the title. Also, the word ‘master’ is not used by real masters.



Morphology



Grammar is organized in two main dimensions: morphology and syntax. Morphology , the first half, is the study of the inflected forms of words. The Fifty-Six Minor Arcana are each a product of two factors, akin to molecular combinations of two atomic conceptions. Depending on how they are grouped, they fall into two or four general classes. The two classes are the Court cards and the Pip cards. The four are the Four Suits, each of which is represented by the four members of the Court and the ten Numbers. Few authors have truly analyzed the Minor Arcana from this perspective and many have simply abandoned their study to focus on the more straightforward Trumps. The bulk of ideas on the subject is the parroting of earlier writers' guesswork, or else making wild guesses at why Pamela Colman-Smith drew the pictures that she did. To really understand the Minors, some assembly is required. A grasp of the four Court, ten Numbers and four Suits is a must, but so is a grasp of their role in combination. Marc Edmond Jones, an astrologer, made use of the term portmanteau analysis, after Lewis Carroll’s use of the term and its subsequent adoption in linguistics: “You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” In general, the Court and Numbers refer to the subjective aspects of experience, and the Suits to the means or the approaches by which the subjects interact with the objective world. In other words, the Court and Number portion of the cards tend to act as subject and the suits as predicate. However, the entire event depicted by a card can occur in either the inner or the outer world. Invocations and personal insights may stand as examples of the inner world events, evocations and predicted situations of the outer world events. In other words, and for example, on drawing the Seven of Swords, a reader may find himself feeling like a seven wielding swords, or feeling like a seven encountering a stimulating intellectual challenge, or faced with a Seven of Swords situation in a purely objective encounter. It should be clear that a familiarity with the first of these will help the reader with the second and third. Ultimately, each card is learned in its inner, interactive and outer world meanings. Those who simply use the cards to predict their futures tend to see these cards as solely objective encounters. This misses the opportunity to examine the card as a subjective dynamic in order to get a better understanding of the energies at play, to get a sense or feel of a situation as a first step in mastering it. At its core, the Five of Wands suggests an assertive force with some of the characteristics of Mars and Geburah acting through the element of Fire. Crowley explains, “The Five of Wands is therefore a personality; the nature of this is summed up in the Tarot by calling it Strife. This means that, if used passively in divination, one says, when it turns up, ‘There is going to be a fight.’ If used actively, it means that the proper course of conduct is to contend” (BOT 43). When viewing a card’s vignette, then, one might ask, ‘do you identify with the character shown or see this objectively as a lesson?’ The therapeutic approach to a card will often require taking command of the subjective view first. Looking at the Eight of Swords, for example, may require taking the point of view of the men who tied that poor seductress up and left her alone to meditate while they went about their more pressing tasks. If that’s what the picture is showing to you.

The Court cards are personae. At bottom, they delineate sixteen general personality types that are compounds of the four elements each with four aspects representing both stages of maturity and characteristics akin to further elemental expression. The Pip cards delineate forty classes of more objective situations and suggest personal strategies for greeting them effectively. These will be explained in more detail in the Component Ideas chapter below.

Even the relatively simpler or more elemental Trumps have portmanteau elements in their construction. The 12 Trumps that are specifically associated with the signs of the Zodiac and their associated Houses are also compounds of the tenses and genders of quality and element. The Trumps associated with the Planets also carry implications of the signs of the Zodiac where those planets have their dignities and their weaknesses. Furthermore, the contributions of those correspondences from other systems that have contributed significantly to the evolution of core meanings of each card may now be considered as meanings embedded in the card in a portmanteau fashion. For example, the Magician card now carries portmanteau implications from both the astrological planet Mercury and the Qabalistic Sephira of Hod.



Syntax



Syntax is the other half of grammar and concerns the way words are put together into sentences, paragraphs and other larger structures that generate compound meanings. In general, the sentence in the Tarot begins with an individual card and the largest array of meanings that it carries from all of the symbolic implications of