http://www.learntarot.com

Ever wondered if you could read your fortune using the so-called tarot cards?

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No.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

The interesting thing about tarot cards is how recently they have come about. People usually think that Tarot cards are ancient in origin, but in fact they sprung up in Europe in the 15th century. At that time they were just normal playing cards, used for games. It wasn't until the 18th century that they began to be used for divination.

Probably (as a child), along with astrology, fairy tales, magic,
and other pseudosciences, until I heard of this little piece of knowledge.

Of course, there's always cargo cult science .

Once, in one of my former lives, a “political friend” of mine (one could say, a “comrade”) visited me, and when he saw the Rider Waite Tarot on my desk he began to rant about how disappointed he was that I’d “believe in cards”, to which I took the cards and threw them against the wall, telling him how foolish I thought such quick assumptions are … and that I didn’t “believe in cards” but that I know a bit about our psyche and the so-called “subconscious”, and that almost any tool that helps one to bring things to the surface of consciousness is, in my opinion, legitimate.

I don’t believe in “fortune telling”, but I believe that there is “the ignored” which we usually call “the subconscious”, and most of us have been told fairytales in their childhood … and the Rider-Waite Tarot uses imagery that resembles that in many fairytale books … I like to use this Tarot deck sometimes to meditate about what I experienced, where I stand now, and where I want to go next … the so-called “subconscious” never fails to make connections which I find to be helpful.

So, I’d say it depends on how one uses tools. They are nothing to “believe in”, and any prescriptive use (like looking up every meaning in a Taro book) would, IMO, rather impede one’s progress than advance it, but a creative and open-minded approach to using external images for projecting inner imagery is (again IMO) a good use of this tool.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Two things .....

15th Century is ancient for anything in Europe made of paper/pasteboard, for anything printed. Hand painted on parchment would make a deck of cards rather too expensive game pieces except for the very wealthiest.

Lest anybody poo-poo what Bonobo just said, there is a "scientific" image rich deck of photographs that a particular school of psychology uses in much the manner he described. I would say that the Waite Tarot deck represents a much richer set of images (many more elements per card) than this "more scientific" deck.

Reading tea leaves is similar. You look for images in the leaves, then look up the symbolic meaning of the images you saw. Seems a lot like Rohrschach tests.

Yeah, though the sheer amount of different symbolism, the huge spectrum and contrasts between motion and stasis, between agression and peace, between wealth and poverty, etc., plus the possible combinations of cards, each on its distinct “place for the card that is about [xy]” makes it extremely rich even for those who “see” little with geomantical methods like reading order in(to) the chaos of tea leaves or Rorschach’s axially symmetrical inkblots.

BTW when I was in my teens I played around with the I Ching for a while, but the many differences between different translations and the difficulty to “get” the “real meaning” without being able to read it in the original language frustrated me. I had even collected my own yarrow stalks


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After re-thinking, and after remembering how I used to see complete movies in the movements of clouds in the sky, I see that it may as well also be the other way ’round, that some will be able to project their inner imagery more easily onto something as superficially “chaotic” as tea leaves in the cup, and who would possibly feel restricted by the images on cards <shrug> there are many ways to reach somewhere …

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

At least one thing learnable from it is the binary system.

Yes, and that I also found out by myself, when I stumbled over an image of the 64 hexagrams arranged in a circle, allegedly by some ancient emperor, IIRC. I played around with his composition and (sort of) compressed it, using black for the solid bar and white for the broken one (again IIRC) (attached image), which, I later learnt, looks quite like a stroboscope disk, with the exception that it changes direction after half, i.e. it goes back to “zero” and counts up in the other direction.


This also was my first—and earth-shattering!—encounter with the concept of “fractals” and “self-similarity”, with many new connections when some time later I learnt about Benoit Mandelbrot and his discoveries. I don't understand all those mathematics, though.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

(pls forgive me for following up on myself)


This image, dated 1701, was owned by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher and polymath (1646–1716), who “refined” the binary number system (but apparently before he got that image):
(quoting above-linked Wikipedia entry)

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?