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1. What is Tarot?

Tarot is a deck of cards, a number of games played with the deck, and a number of metaphysical beliefs and practices attached to the non-gaming use and contemplation of the deck. Tarot was invented as a card game in the early-mid 15th century, most likely by the nobility of north Italian city states. In 1781 two small essays written by a Swiss-born French philosophe and a French cavalry officer provided the basis for all future development of what has come to be known as occult Tarot. Prior to this time little public discussion had occurred concerning the use of Tarot for divination, although much had been written (both for and against the practice) for almost three centuries prior to 1781 about the use of playing cards in (and as) divination. The extension of this tradition to Tarot was a natural one, and the main question is when precisely it took place. As the occultist myths of Tarot's origin, and meaning, gathered large followings in the midst of several occult revivals over the last 200 years or so, in the 1960s these myths and the deck were seized upon and transformed by counter-culturalists and, fueled by the commercial zeal of a former coal and copper peddler, Tarot was catapulted into pop consciousness. Whereas Tarot began its life as a refined amusement for the elite it has now become one of several psychic salves (or opiates) for the masses and a very different kind of game altogether.

Beyond those bare essentials, the easiest answer to the question "What is Tarot?" is to describe the basic structure of a Tarot deck.

There are 78 total cards in a standard Tarot deck.

These cards are divided in the following way:

4 sets (called suits) of 14 cards each=56 cards (called by occultists the Minor Arcana). It should be noted here that the suits of the Minor Arcana originated in the standard playing-card deck, and that these cards were first imported into Europe (most likely through Venice or Spain) from Mamluk Egypt in the 14th century. Tarot is simply the addition of a fifth suit of 21 Trumps (plus a Fool card) to this deck. The names of these small suits have varied from pack to pack over time but generally suits adhere to some form of the following naming scheme—

Batons/Wands—Originally Mamluk Egyptian Polo Sticks, these heraldic devices were translated by non-polo-playing Europeans into Bastoni or Bâtons (staffs, sticks, or clubs), and eventually into the standard suit of Clubs. The suit name Wands is simply the occultist version of Bâton, which itself can refer to the baguette (wand) of magicians. Always symbols of physical power and political authority, the occultist view of Wands is as a sort of first, creating principle, projecting its power as a tubular conveyor of divine joyjuice. Really, that's what they think.

Cups—This suit was taken directly from the Mamluk suit of Cups, again a Mamluk heraldic device, without much embellishment, except a tendency developed over time for Europeans to Christianize the display and meaning of the symbol. Obviously, the cup form has yielded well to comparisons with the Holy Grail, and to the cup of the Eucharist. It is the correspondent receptacle to the Wand conveyor, accepting and forming the joyjuice into particular (frozen) delights and deliquescences.

Swords—The Mamluk Scimitar, curved sword, was again gradually straightened and Europeanized into the long, double-edged kind now found in most Tarot decks. The divisive aspect of the symbolism has always been obvious, the blade cuts things open, either militarily, or, as a symbol for mind's tendency to divide unity with analytical jabs and slices, mentally. The occultists saw here a sign of punishment and salvation, for this suit has usually been associated with pain and suffering, even in the old fortune-telling traditions. The idea is that the reward for putting distance between ourselves and God by being created as a distinct and independent being (the result of the joyjuice finding its form in the Cup) is the pain of mental reflection and analysis, which breaks everything down to elemental pieces. The saving power implicit in this affliction is of course that through mind and analysis, perhaps aided by a little divine (Promethean or Jesuine) sacrifice, we can come to know and to apply the pieces towards an apprehension of Truth.

Coins/Pentacles/Disks—The road to Pentacles and Disks is the weirdest evolution of a suit. Initially, nothing more than a Mamluk heraldic device designating the office of treasurer, thus the coins, it became occultized into a magickal object by Eliphas Lévi in the 19th century, with A. E. Waite, who saw the suits as grail hallows, adding the now well-known star or pentagram symbol in his famous 1909 deck. Aleister Crowley iconized this further with the simplification to Disks, a sort of super-frisbee. Following the original impulse, here the joyjuice descent finds a home in the matrix of Earth, takes the knowledge of the broken pieces and the solutions of synthesis, and builds living material things. But, the catch (you knew there had to be one), these living things are so far removed from the original creative impulse, they may be blind to their divine origin or content.

Each suit has ten numbered cards, Ace through Ten, plus four court cards [note: the term court card possibly comes from a corruption of coat card, coat having once been used to refer to something, such as one's apparel, which would distinguish one's class or profession].

The court cards also go by various naming conventions but—

—is a fairly standard description.

One notices that this sequence is identical to that encountered in the 52-card pack of standard playing cards (the Page being the Jack), with the addition of the Knight in Tarot. Originally, the Mamluk Egyptian deck used four male court-cards, and none of them displayed human figures but rather the suit-signs (or heraldic symbols) representing them. When the Mamluk decks were first introduced into Europe they initially retained the four-kings arrangement, although the Europeans immediately began illustrating the cards with human figures, and shortly variations began to occur, including the introduction of female court figures into the mix. Eventually the standard Tarot sequence (noted above) was established, but variations continued for some time and court-card deconstructions are of course a major part of the postmodern attempt to redefine the deck in less sexist and less class-oriented terms. While that may seem an admirable goal, one should consider whether other cultural artifacts, such as Shakespearean literature, really need to be sanitized of all PC-less content. Often people, whose knowledge of Tarot is minimal to say the least, feel they should be empowered by the winnowing of what they view as offensive and disturbing elements of the old book. This is nothing new—Tarot has always been easily if not very intelligently demonized by censors.

The Fifth Suit

In addition to these 56 small cards there is a fifth suit of special cards called trumps, an anglicization of triumphs, or in Italian, trionfi, a reference we'll explain directly. From this we get the idea of trumping lower-valued cards in games, and by extension in other contexts. These 22 cards are called by occultists The Major Arcana, or Majors, to distinguish their presumed greater significance as symbolic indicators from their 56 mundane companions.

These trump cards depict various ideas and persons, the names of the cards are mostly rooted in Medieval or Renaissance religion and culture (particularly that of northern Italy). The cards are numbered from 0-Fool to 21-World as follows—

0. Fool—[NOTE: the Fool will sometimes be found stuck between 20 & 21, this is yet another occultist innovation or conceit, depending on one's view of things]. Technically, the Fool is a special card in the game of Tarot, and is in fact in addition to the actual 21 trump cards, but it is combined with these by occultists as the lead card in the greater mysteries. In the game of Tarot the Fool has a kind redemptive function, being able to stand for other cards and save them from being taken in play, so it is not surprising that this function, combined with the tendency to see in destitute or eccentric characters an expression of spirituality, has been transformed by occultists into a symbol for Jesus Christ SuperFool, the most redeeming savior since sliced Dionysus. The Fool has, in the post-Christian downsizing of Tarot, become lately the jester of the whole deck, and a symbol for a kind of spiritual journey one is said to take on his path through or about the rest of the trumps. I will interject here, as playing-card historians are always quick to do about this matter, that while the postmodern Fool is definitely playing a jest, the traditional card IS NOT a precursor of the Joker card of standard decks.

I. Magician (or Magus)—This card is often paired with the Fool, as the completion of a kind of Dionysian-Hermetic dyad. In this view the Magician is the calculating achiever (the one who has mastered all the other cards), and the Fool is the innocent beginner—both are supposedly symbolic of high spiritual residence (so, close to the creative Light) but going in different directions. In its older form the Magician was a Bateleur, which could apply to a street magician or a cups-and-ball performer or to any person who did tricks, such as a juggler or a tightrope walker. As the deck has taken on an Hermetic veneer, Hermes has found a home particularly in this card, and it is well to recall that Hermes began his career as a thief, and as Thoth-Hermes represented the charming aspect of words—that is their ability to do tricks and especially to manipulate and deceive. One of the interesting developments of this card over the centuries has been the transformation of the presentation and meaning of the tools of the Magician's trade. As these signs became associated with the lower or minor suit indicators (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles), the tools were displayed usually upon a flat plane, typically a table, to show they had been lifted up from mundane matrices to serve the microcosmic employment of the Magus. Finally, Aleister Crowley carried this through to a logical conclusion, making the Magus himself the wand, and showing the tools floating about him, spatially free to mix and match magical solutions.

II. High Priestess—The girl every man wants to defile, but of course can't unless he's got the secret word, which she often partially displays in the book or scroll in her lap. It's that last letter that's the trick, and most never get it. While she's not deflating inquisitive egos, she's supposedly reflecting a whole bunch of true things from some hidden light bulb that hangs out "up there, somewhere". In the first Tarots, this lady was portrayed as the Popess (La Papessa), the Pope's wife, and is generally thought to have been included as a "Ghibelline gibe at the corruption of the papacy", as Gertrude Moakley put it, although the true political and social nuances of the early Tarot trump illustrations are not always to this day well understood. For example, Moakley, in her groundbreaking book on the Visconti-Sforza deck, offered a compelling argument that the Popess was REALLY an illustration of a member of the Catholic Umiliata order of nuns, Sister Manfreda (Maifreda da Pirovano), who was in fact elected Pope by her sect (the Guglielmites) in 1300. The Inquisition wasted little time in burning her at the stake. The Viscontis, nobles and eventual rulers of Milan, were relatives of this first female pope, and suffered a temporary threat from the Inquisition as a consequence of her trial and execution. Supposedly, the later Viscontis (and their Sforza successors) celebrated her martyrdom by placing her image in the deck. It has been suggested she replaced a Virtue, Prudence, and the presence of her book is evidence this may have been a symbolic remnant of that earlier card. However, there are also images of Popes carrying a book as well, so this is not convincing evidence. Eventually the very specific correspondence to Maifreda could not reasonably be maintained as the deck came to be produced outside of northern Italy, and the card was absorbed into the more general Pope Joan mythology. Finally, in the late 18th century, when Antoine Court de Gébelin got his Egytomaniacal hands on the lady, and her husband, she became High Priestess to his Hierophant.

III. Empress—The girl every man wants to defile, AND she'll let you, but you better be ready to ante up for child support. She gets pregnant in a heartbeat. Otherwise she's got a green thumb for just about every living thing you could possibly imagine. The Empress and Emperor cards (note, the worldly couple who separate the High Priestess from the Hierophant]) were presumably representations of their 15th-century human counterparts, the Hapsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, which it has been pointed out was neither holy, Roman, nor much of an empire. It is not known precisely which Empress and Emperor were first indicated in early Trionfi, although if the creation date of the V-Sforza decks is correct (c. 1450), then these figures could be, as Gertrude Moakley has suggested, Eleanora of Aragon and Frederick III. However, as noted below, there are some problems in this identification, and at any rate, the people depicted became symbolic of the offices, and eventually the occult ideas of secular worldly power, as projected via the two genders. Since the Empress was a representation of worldly feminine power, she was naturally merged with occultist dogma concerning the role of the feminine in procreative dynamics and, blending ideas of Persephone with Mary, she becomes the physical matrix by which the Holy Spirit (contained within High Priestess), transmits divine essence into matter. Consequently she becomes as well the Kabbalistic Daleth, the doorway through which life enters from the Abyss into material existence.

IV. Emperor—The man every pomo girl wants to—castrate!! Gertrude Moakley believed this card represented the figure of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor from 1440-1493. The problem with that view, if the date of the early Visconti-Sforza decks is as believed, c. 1450, the figure shown as the Emperor is an old man, with wispy white hair, whereas Frederick would have been 35 in 1450, a mature but not elderly man. As noted above, he's a vestige of a once important political dynasty, the male counterpart of the Empress, and as with most men these days he's suffering greatly from femi-revisioning. On the one hand he used to be a great conquering hero (John Wayne playing Jenghis Khan for example), on the other his unrepentant penetrative tendencies, when deconstructed, reduce to pokey-man, and so he sits around now contemplating the burden of his unruly conquests (the Arnold playing old Conan), and wondering why his harem is not more attentively appreciative. Aleister Crowley, in The Book of Thoth, complained that "...nothing is left [of the "wild and courageous" ram] but the docile, cowardly, gregarious, and succulent beast." While he's partly bemoaning what he viewed as the terminal effect of Christianity on good European barbarism (something his Aeon of Horus was meant to correct), he notes this is the "theory of government" which is to say the natural outcome of the impulse to conquer being tamed by the impulse to rule.

V. Hierophant—This is every dogmatist you've ever encountered in your life, backed up by the power to excommunicate you if you don't like it. In fact, he's really just a conveyor of truth for those who lack the secret word and know they'll never get it. If you can't handle the truth, you get dogma. Most people can't handle the truth, so they get this guy. As noted above, in 1781 this card and the High Priestess were given these new, Egyptian, titles, whereas originally they were called Pope and Popess respectively. The effect of this has been to remove these cards, and so the whole sequence of trumps or Major Arcana cards, from a particularly Christian context. The Egyptianizing of the deck opened the door to more non-Christian cultural modifications in the 20th century, but this pomo effect, again largely a countercultural (meaning counter-dominant-cultural) movement, misses an important point: the return to ancient roots which occultists loved to do, or to pretend to do, was always done within a Christian context. The Egyptians in other words affirm the later Christian doctrine, and do so by being closer, as the Fool, to the beginning than the middle or the end. Their pure doctrine, unadulterated, and uncorrupted by pagan superstitions, initially didn't require a savior figure to set matters right. But at some point the world lost its way, the Christian Church was set up to both replace and to incorporate the best aspects of the ancient one and to promise a salvation to return us to the Golden Age. Court de Gébelin believed that he had rediscovered the teachings and principles of the ancient church, that in this way, while not intending to reject the Christian doctrine, he would be able to demonstrate what a more natural, purer, relationship of humans to God looked like. And so it was appropriate for him to reveal the ancient symbols hidden behind their Christian (or, because of the ignorance of the people conveying the symbols, pseudo-Christian) masks. Whereas the Pope would have told you how to behave if you want to get into heaven, the High Priest can tell you how to live as if heaven were not a place but a time once and future—a legacy forgotten but also a memory stored for a new post-Apocalyptic era.

VI. Lovers—This card has always been about the idea of providing a union of opposites, even in the oldest forms it symbolized literally a political marriage (between the noble houses of Visconti and Sforza), sealed by the figure of Cupid providing a fixing shaft of conjunction between the beautiful Venus (Bianca Visconti) and her Martial condottiere (Francesco Sforza, newly chosen Duke of Milan). Over time, following the pattern of generalizing Tarotic symbolism (as we see with the High Priestess evolution) as the decks moved away from Italy, the card evolved into another kind of union or synthesis, that which the mind or reason provides between the pull of spiritual Love versus the worldly kind—that is the choice between the twin Venuses, Geminae Veneres (for this idea see Panofsky's Studies in Iconology, page 152). Again, Cupid provides his sanction, although his arrow here, in these later versions of the card, suggest a marking of the lower sexual impulse, or an identification of Cupid with the worldly Venus, also personified as Eve. From this comes another form of the card as the literal Garden of Eden, with again the notion of a synthesis being represented here not by Cupid, but by way of the divisive effect of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Later interpretations, by Crowley particularly, add layers of alchemical dogma returning the twins to their parents in a sense, the Greek Geminians being compared to the very bloody Biblical brothers, Cain and Abel.

VII. Chariot—You can get a very good idea of what you're really up against in this study (if you're fond of imagining yourself engaged in a study of Tarot) by reading the following essay:

VIII. *)(&)*&&^%$^$#%$%

And right there our peaceful little perusal of the trumps rolls right off the tracks—

We should get used to this, it's going to happen a lot.

The problem with "VIII" is that no one can decide, with ultimate authority, what it's supposed to be. Some people say "VIII" should be entitled "Strength" while others say it should be "Justice" (and thus these two cards are locked in a struggle over the number attributions "VIII" and "XI"). At the same time, and to muddy things more, there is the whole problem introduced by Aleister Crowley, in his influential "Thoth" deck, who exchanged the attributions (the correspondences between Tarot trumps and paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life) of IV-Emperor (yes, we skipped that problem) and XVII-Star. Most people, who are not strict adherents to Crowley's Thelemic system, have not followed nor much concerned themselves with the latter change, but many still fight over the VIII-XI controversy. Based on purely astrological considerations the better choice seems to be Strength in "VIII" and Justice in "XI". But there's more to it than that—there almost always is in Tarot.

So, let's continue—

VIII. Strength (or Justice)—[note: also, in Thoth-influenced decks these cards will be titled "Lust" or "Adjustment" respectively.] Both the motifs deal in some way with acquiring a "virtuous" load of balance, knowing how to shut the Lion's trap without losing your arm, or how to indulge Justice without getting nailed for bribery. In the old days you just killed the Lion, symbolized by Hercules whacking the Nemean Lion with his club. But that was seen as not particularly transcendent since one was behaving like the beast to tame it. In other words, you weren't learning anything other than how to kill, and the Lion's already pretty good at that. Then someone decided to make it a circus act, with a lady lion-tamer who coaxes the beast to cloak his fangs—this achieved with good Christian Love, and a t-bone steak (this not usually shown on the card). The problem is the Lion still sometimes gets loose, and gets Lustful, in which case trying to close his mouth becomes more contraceptive than anything, and if this happens the Empress can't get rightly Lionized. Yes, the Empress, way up there running the Holy Roman Empire. It's all connected you know. Anyway, "balance" is a funny thing, no matter how you measure it, it doesn't work (lively) unless it's off a bit, allowing for a creative disturbance in the Force, or Tiamat's belly.

IX. Hermit—Another veiled gadget, so you know it's REALLY about sex (what isn't?). But on the surface (and never be afraid to start there), it's really about conveying and nurturing a seed. Whether this is a seed of faith, which is nurtured by guiding it along a path to a certain revelation of its true home and true destiny, or a seed of life, which implies the same by a kind of mirroring of divine creation, is subject to sometimes secret interpretation. On a purely pop-cultural note, if you are paying any attention whatsoever, you will have noticed that this is in fact the fellow who graced the inside cover of Led-Zep IV (that image based on Pamela Smith's version of the Hermit for A. E. Waite's deck)—NOW you're impressed with Tarot, aren't you? More seriously, one of the interesting debates about the true meaning of this figure is whether he shines a light on a path (or two) you may go by, or instead represents an allegory of what kind of life—i.e., hermetic—is required to obtain the heights of spiritual understanding. In other words, is he illuminating a method or a madness? Again, this is a card that began its life as something else—a depiction of Time, with the lamp being originally an hourglass to mark off the lost moments (or chances—see next card).

X. Wheel of Fortune—No, there is no Vanna White turning letters. But there is an acknowledgement of an ancient awareness in people that "shit happens", and it happens because it changes, in cycles. What we see we once saw and shall see again. Who is up will be down, who is down will be up. The catch is that it may not happen soon enough to do you any individual good or harm. So, spin the Wheel and hope for some good luck, for a change, for another chance. Now, Fortuna, the goddess of fortune, has been identified with a wheel for thousands of years, but the form we see in most versions of this card, depicting the stages of foolishness in lives cast and canoned upon the Wheel, came into expression and being in the Middle Ages, and has seldom varied from a seemingly simple and clear message—as Philosophy here explains to Boethius (in one of her Consolations)—"You have given yourself over to Fortune's rule, and you must bow yourself to your mistress's ways. Are you trying to stay the force of her turning wheel? Ah! dull-witted mortal, if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune." The Kabbalistic layer the card enjoyed (or suffered) added some dogma concerning the palm of a hand, one that might turn the Wheel, or one that might shuffle the deck, for here as well is supposedly the basis of divination, Fortuna in fact having hosted a temple where card-like tiles were shuffled and read thousands of years ago. While the card Fortune slowly was recast with Egyptian figures on its rim instead of the more traditional ascending ass, culminating ape, and descending man, the meaning and in a way the terror of this card has remained intact and constant. Finally, Fortune is one of the blind cards, the others being Lovers (or Love), Death and the Moon (Justice is blind in a good way), and so speaks to the sense we all have that the darkness (of love, luck, death and night) is our natural and inevitable home, no matter how we may strive, for our brief human time, to reach for the light. In the end all these are mainly about Fortune, which is merely about change, and not the moral judgments humans make concerning its value.

XI. Justice (or Strength)—[again, in Thoth 'Justice' is called 'Adjustment'.] A lot of these trumps are about the nature and process of change, particularly Fortune and Justice. Sometimes change appears to be chaotic and random, sometimes it appears to be intelligently guided. In Justice, the scale is very sensitive, the slightest disequilibrium will be detected and will have its effect. It is disturbing to realize you can do all the right things and still come up a milligram short in the weighing, and that this tiny difference is ALL the difference that matters. Justice, as a Virtue, is about determining what it is we all deserve. Christians claim, along with William Munny, that "deserve's got nothing to do with it", in other words that a just and righteous God is no big deal, since all Gods are essentially just because they're the ones determining the good and the violations of it in the first and last place. Something else must be added to the concept of Justice, and to the balance of the scales, and this is Mercy, which is the act of delivering an outcome to someone that is much better than he deserves. As noted above there is a kind of natural connection between Fortune and Justice, so much of merit being an accident of being able (not merely willing) to do the right thing at the right time. Aleister Crowley, who was as self-justified a soul as the occult has ever produced, finally saw in this card, and this Virtue, "the phantom show of Space and Time" where all possibilities were allowed and required so that in the end all hands would be played, all money won from and lost back to the cosmic bank, the Adjustment being "scrupulously just".

XII. Hanged Man—This card is one of the most distinctive in the deck, one which ties the original decks to a particular place and time, since it illustrates a form of punishment used in southern Europe, and which had significance in political artwork of the Italian Renaissance. It generally indicated that the person so punished (or so depicted in a piece of artwork) was a traitor. Subsequently, the card came to be seen as Judas Iscariot, complete with his 30 pieces of silver held in two bags. As Tarot moved further away from home, to be played and the decks produced in places not familiar with the punishment or the motif, the interpretation of the symbolism became more and more aberrant, reflecting a general tendency for the cards to be adapted to regional uses and interpretations. The occultists decided that whatever was happening to the Hanged Man, it had to be allegorical, not literal, and so typically this card is seen as symbolic of sacrifice or suspension of some sort, but usually not a sign of literal hanging or death.

XIII. Death—The one Tarot card almost everyone has seen, and the one which, along with the almost equally threatening Devil (see XV below), is one reason why Tarot has a kind of spooky reputation amongst non-initiates (it also has a spooky reputation amongst initiates, but that's another story). Now, you will likely soon discover that the fear naturally generated by the surface features of this card is so disagreeable to those who make a living peddling advice with Tarot cards, that it's been thought well and wise by some of them to change the name of this card altogether. And so in some pomo decks, you'll find XIII-Death changed to Transition, and the image altered to some fluffy bunny growing to Peter Rabbit or some such idiocy. Death is death, it's not supposed to be necessarily cheery OR frightening. And while Tarot dogma teaches a respect for the process of change, and its inevitable terminations, the process is seen as ongoing, not discretely horrifying (or liberating), but ever-readily so. See FAQ question 20 for a discussion of how to read this card in a fortune.

XIV. Temperance—Given the bad name this word has gotten in some places, you'd not be surprised to know that it also has been pomoized of late, being turned into the insipid "JUST Right" (well, OK, not yet, but no doubt soon). People, even those whose grasp of history barely extends to the memory of last week's Survivor melodrama, are vaguely aware that Temperance has something to do with restricting their right to destructively self-indulge, and so are pretty much convinced it's a bad idea. What Temperance, the Virtue and the Tarot Card, is really about is one of those innumerable nasty things in Tarot requiring that you put down the remote control to Buffy the Teenage YAMpire Purveyor or gods know what other drivel you're wasting your life on in television land and pick up and READ A BOOK (or several). Tarot is densely textual. One must temper his visual experience of it with much ideological indoctrination. And therein buds a clue about the real meaning of Temperance, which is REALLY about proper mixtures, not repressive prohibitions.

XV. Devil—Yes, he's big, he's bad, he'll kick your ass and take you to Hell in a heartbeat. Since the Devil personifies virtually every redeeming feature of modern life: greed, lust, power, obsessive self-interest and self-promotion (after all, how do you figure he got to be a fallen angel in the first place?), it's difficult for most people, having read the unfine print, to figure out what the problem is. Well, there isn't one, if you're happy with greed, lust, power and obsessive self-interest and self-promotion. And of course we live in a paradise as a result, shorn free of corruption, pollution, prejudice, poverty, disease, hunger or injustice—right? Hmmm... As with many things in Tarot, the correct answer to this question depends on prior training and political leans. But, while recalling that the Devil is really himself just a Christian spin on the role and value of Great Pan (the terrifying but liberating goat-man of ancient Greece), it's well to recall also that traversing thresholds of any sort bears a high price and usually comes with a lovely set of chains (no, not KMart).

XVI. Tower—Kaboom!! You're dead. Well, maybe. On September 11th, 2001 the entire world learned, again, all about the surface meaning of the Tower symbolism. Interestingly, the Koran itself warns us of the hopelessness of seeking refuge in towers when death comes calling. This is again a card so integral to our experience of modern millennial existence, which is primed to explode so often and so entertainingly that if we can't get life to cooperate and provide us with our own daily fix of catastrophe (preferably that of a neighbor or co-worker) we depend on entertainment providers to supply us with reality television or news, a kind of Toweresque casino, where unexpected ruin is guaranteed for someone at every gaming table. And again the downside of this card (as with that of the Devil and Fortune and really ALL cards), that physical structures all eventually shatter against the inevitable and irresistible force of Nature's changing ways, is something most people readily acknowledge as a possibility. But graveyards aside, they really suspect the illness is just more reality television, and the suggested remedy, that they look beyond the supposed security of physical comfort and stability to a deeper cure for what ails us, is obviously only of pre-industrial relevance—or at least it was before September 11th, 2001.

XVII. Star—No, not the kind on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, nor the kind up in the sky (exactly). In the older decks this was a woman holding aloft a star in her left hand, and was paired with a similar figure of a woman holding up a crescent moon in Trump XVIII. As the Bible commands:

XX. Judgment—In the last two cards we see a definite link to Apocalyptic motifs presented in Revelation. Indeed, the links here are striking because the narrative of a final resurrection of the dead and a calling to judgment occurs in chapter 20 of the final book of the New Testament, the creation of the new world or Universe occurs in chapter 21, exactly matching the numbers of the cards depicting these events in Tarot. It is worth noting that there are 22 chapters in Revelation, as there as 22 trumps in Tarot. It is also worth noting that the depiction of religious themes and motifs in Renaissance artwork, even on playing cards, is hardly anything mysterious or occult. However, occultists have been particularly drawn to the notion of hidden meanings—which obviously empowers the initiated to act as teachers to paying clientele of all sorts through the centuries—and so the mere fact that Tarot depends for its illustrations at least in part on a mining of Apocalyptic images has fueled the subsequent Tarot industry in mystery.

XXI. World/or Universe—As noted for the previous card, this image completes the Apocalyptic narrative, in the early cards this showed the descent of New Jerusalem, the reborn World, and the elements of that simple motif, puttos holding up the city in a circle or bubble, were to be recast by cardmakers over the centuries until the final product we have today, while bearing a symbolic resemblance to the original, certainly looks superficially to be a completely different card and idea. And the evolution of this card is one of the best ways of illustrating the problem faced by the largely ignorant public when they first encounter Tarot. For, not only do they have to try and decipher a pictorial code, which is by the nature of the business of card-making, a random and often corrupted production (that is, cardmakers often made copying errors when trying to transcribe unfamiliar images from an old deck to a new one), but people's profound ignorance of the Bible, of philosophy, of—pretty much everything that makes up Tarot symbolism—makes the process of learning the subject (or even understanding what that means) a challenging proposition. The new World (much like the old worlds) of Tarot is therefore populated by every manner of questionable character and motive, from people who write idiots' guides, whether honestly called that or not, to those who use Tarot, and people's convenient ignorance about it, to peddle their personal philosophy or religion. Tarot is ascendant today in a way it has never been before, it is also less known and understood than ever before. Given Tarot's history, that is not an unexpected or unintentional result, and we will discover that, in our attempt to confidently and conclusively answer the question "What is Tarot?", the answer does not entirely reduce to "anything you want it to be" but it often gets very close to that.