Occult Tarot

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but] The only theory of ultimate interest about the tarot is that it is an admirable symbolic picture of the Universe, based on the data of the Holy Qabalah.

It omits the Two and Three of coins, and numerals one to four in clubs, swords and cups: it thus has 64 cards, but the ace of coins is not used, being the bearer of the former stamp tax. For example, Court de Gébelin claimed an Egyptian, kabbalistic, and divine significance of the tarot trumps; Etteilla created a method of divination using tarot; Éliphas Lévi worked to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory tarot, bringing it back to the tarot de Marseilles, creating a "tortuous" kabbalastic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life. The central document containing the Golden Dawn's Tarot interpretations, "Book T", was first published openly, if not under that title, by Aleister Crowley in his occult periodical The Equinox in 1912. The first documented tarot decks were recorded between 1440 and 1450 in Milan, Ferrara, Florence and Bologna, when additional trump cards with allegorical illustrations were added to the common four-suit pack. Many involved in occult and divinatory practices attempt to trace the tarot to ancient Egypt, divine hermetic wisdom, [15] and the mysteries of Isis.It has been suggested recently that the tarot may have been associated with divination perhaps as early at the 15th century in Bologna, but the evidence is not conclusive. There is a Tarot deck for just about any practitioner, no matter where his or her interests may lie. 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. While the iconography of tarot is something anyone can take meaning from, other visual symbols of the occult are harder to decipher. It's really thrilling to see how people have interpreted and then completely changed it, but there's still that unifying archetype," says Hundley.

After a decade or two of using these, in the mid-1400s, Italian artists began painting additional cards, heavily illustrated, to add into the existing suits. The word "tarot" [24] and German Tarock derive from the Italian Tarocchi, the origin of which is uncertain, although taroch was used as a synonym for foolishness in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.The Swiss 1JJ Tarot is similar, but replaces the Pope with Jupiter, the Popess with Juno, and the Angel with the Judgement. Although methods of reading the Tarot have changed over the years, and many readers adopt their own unique style to the traditional meanings of a layout, in general, the cards themselves haven’t changed much. The earliest French-suited tarot decks were made by the de Poilly family of engravers, beginning with a Minchiate deck by François de Poilly in the late 1650s. Among his 260 publications are two treatises on the use of tarot cards, Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), which attempted to formalize the method of using tarot cards in ceremonial magic first proposed by Lévi in his Clef des grands mysteries (1861), [46] and Le Tarot divinatoire (1909), which focused on simpler divinatory uses of the cards.

On seventy-eight pages, we have the full-size pictures of each card, featuring one more time the demon’s abilities – it is a beautiful waste of precious space.This group spread mainly southward through the Papal States, the Kingdom of Naples, and finally down to the Kingdom of Sicily but was also known in the Savoyard states.

The trend was started by prominent freemason and Protestant cleric Antoine Court de Gébelin who suggested that the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin, and mystic divine and kabbalistic significance. Court de Gébelin published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the tarot in volume VIII of work Le Monde primitif in 1781. The word occult means hidden, and the idea of your magic being very private and very personal is important for two reasons," says Pam Grossman, self-described witch, host of The Witch Wave podcast and co-editor of Taschen's Witchcraft.A lot of the sigils that he incorporates are about queerness, identity and sexuality," says Grossman.