The Tarot is a road map that serves as a guide along the many intricate roads of life and into our spiritual interior. It is my hope to inspire you to explore the tarot as a tool of personal guidance and to gain insights into the your personal Truth.
What are the inner forces, core beliefs, unconscious habits that mold your outer world? The more you study the tarot the more it will reveal you to you.
Tarot Basics 100
The traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards and has a framework of 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana. Each card is rich with symbolism, numbering and phrases that give indication to the meaning of the card. Some decks incorporate astrological aspects, numerology, and may even bring certain ethnic symbolism into play. Since this is about basics, I am going to stay with the more traditional concepts.
The Major Arcana also called the Trump cards are considered the archetypical aspects of life and relate to our higher purpose and matters of deeper significance. The Major Arcana represent the journey of our personal development from The Fool (0), which is the innocence into which we are born, to the Universe (21) where we complete our journey.
The Minor Arcana relate to the more immediate circumstances of our everyday life. Each of the four suits represents a personal aspect within us and is connected to an element of the outer world.
The Wands represent our spiritual aspects: our hopes, dreams, and the deep inner soul desires that wish to be expressed and actualized in the outer world. Its world aspect is fire.
The Cups are our emotional body: how do we ‘water’ the seeds of our hopes and dreams. What passion do we put into actualizing who we are and how we experience our world? Its world aspect is, of course, water.
The Swords represent the mind: Does the mind rule us or is it a tool that we use to create our hopes and dreams? Its world element is air.
The Disks represent how we have manifested our hopes and dreams in the world: our house, job, relationships, and career. If it is tangible, touchable, it’s the suit of Disks. Its world element is earth.
When used within the framework of a tarot spread or layout, the cards weave the story of how our inner world of hopes and desires is being expressed in the physical world and begins to reveal the truths or fallacies by which we live….
To Be Continued….
