Tarot Card Meanings: The Major Arcana (Tarot Cards Book 1)

Also, in a refreshingly literal twist, the chariot can represent driving. The card is a real grab-bag of mystical symbolism, including stars, moons, alchemical symbols, and two extremely irritated sphinxes, the leftmost of which is actually rolling its eyes in disgust. Everything the Chariot says , you can imagine being shouted through a megaphone: The Hermit looks like a thinner, tanner Gandalf.

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He wears the grey cloak of invisibility. Having reached the snowy summit of his harrowing spiritual quest, he now looks sad and a little sleepy.

The Hermit represents being single and loving it. Strength is personified by a lovely woman wearing a long white dress wreathed in flowers giving a lion a comprehensive dental exam in what is surely a very specific fetish. Sometimes things will go well, other times badly, but in the end, balance will be restored. The Wheel also represents karma, as well as fate and the external forces that control our destinies.

The Wheel of Fortune has absolutely everything you want in a tarot card, including an angel, a lion, a bull, a snake, a Sphinx, esoteric letters and symbols from several major world religions, and an eagle that looks like the artist started out trying to draw one thing and then changed their mind halfway through. The Justice card represents justice, as one might expect, and more sternly, the idea that one gets what they deserve. She looks stern and unbending.

Like the Death card, the Hanged Man sounds much worse than it is. The card represents surrender: The Hanged Man also represents a period of watchful waiting, and he is doing that waiting upside-down. This can be a very positive thing, a time of renewal and new beginnings. Then again, sometimes the card symbolizes death. He is riding a horse with a very small head and red eyes.

The Temperance card signifies calm, balance, tranquility, and avoiding extremes. Temperance is cautious, keeping one foot on dry land. In her hands she holds two cups of water, one hot, and one cold, creating that mystical symbol of cosmic balance, tepid water. Unlike the Death card, which seems bad but is good, the Devil card seems bad and is bad.

The Devil represents materialism, vice, and addiction. He controls our lowest, most animal desires. At his feet, a man and a woman are chained, in servitude to their baser nature. However, the chains are loose and they could slip their heads from them if they tried, indicating that their bondage is voluntary. The Devil is more disappointed than terrifying, and his Satanic hand gesture is a dispirited wave.

Following on Death and The Devil, the Tower is a very bad card. It symbolizes sudden catastrophe. After the destruction of the Tower, the Star is all love and light. On the Star card, a naked woman is serenely pouring water from a clear, still pool onto the grass, where it runs off in five streams said to represent the senses.

The woman is pretty but in an approachable way. One might assume the Moon would be a good card, suggesting femininity, fertility, and other mystically significant things, but in fact, the Moon is a mixed bag at best. The card represents intuition, but also subconscious fears and dark impulses. The Moon is associated with the eerie, mysterious elements of our unconscious minds, including recovered memories and nightmares.

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The moon itself is upstaged by all the weird animals that are roaming around beneath it. A lobster crawls out of the depths of a dark pool, symbolizing the disturbing images that bubble up from our unconscious minds, and joins two dogs baying at the moon some interpret these canines to be one dog and one wolf.

Beyond the animals is a narrow path between two desolate towers. The moon wears the expression of someone who has just said their final word of an argument in bed and is now pretending to be asleep. Following Ettielle, tarot cartomancy was moved forward by Marie-Anne Adelaid Lenormand and others.

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She was so popular, and cartomancy with tarot became so well established in France following her work, that a special deck entitled the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand was released in her name two years after her death. This was followed by many other specially designed cartomantic tarot decks, mostly based on Ettielle's Egyptian symbolism, but some providing other for example biblical or medieval flavors as well.

By the early 18th century Masonic writers and Protestant clerics had established the tarot trumps as authoritative sources of ancient hermetic wisdom and Christian gnosis, and as revelatory tools of divine cartomantic inspiration, but they did not stop there. In that book, Christian identifies the tarot trumps as representing the "principle scenes" [ dubious — discuss ] of ancient Egyptian initiatory "tests".

Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett write:. These twenty-two paintings, he is told, are Arcana or symbolic hieroglyphs; the Science of Will, the principle of all wisdom and source of all power, is contained in them. Each corresponds to a 'letter of the sacred language' and to a number, and each expresses a reality of the divine world, a reality of the intellectual world and a reality of the physical world.

The secret meanings of these twenty-two Arcana are then expounded to him. Christian's attempts to give authority to his analysis by falsely attributing an account of ancient Egyptian initiation rites to Iamblichus , but it is clear that if there is any initiatory relevance to the tarot trumps it is Christian who is the source of that information. The emergence of the tarot as an initiatory masterpiece was coincident with, and fit perfectly into, the flowering of initiatory esoteric orders and secret brotherhoods during the middle of the 19th century.

For example, Marquis Stanislas de Guaita — founded the Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross in along with several key commentators on the initiatory tarot e. Media related to Major Arcana at Wikimedia Commons. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A Wicked Pack of Cards , Bloomsbury , p. A Wicked Pack of Cards. The Origins of the Occult Tarot. The Game of Tarot.

The Symbolism of the Tarot: Philosophy of occultism in pictures and numbers. Re-symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic.

Feminist Theology , Documents from the University Library. Martin's Press, , pp.

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