VARIOUS MYSTERIES OF THEE PICTORIAL TAROT AND ITS SEVERAL MANIFESTATIONS FOCUSING PRIMARILY ON THE METHODS OF DIVINATION AND CARTOMANCY AS DEVELOPED BY THOSE OCCULTISTS, SOOTHSAYERS, PROGNOSTICATORS, AND OTHER ORB PONDERERS OF ANTIQUITY

1 Welcome

Hello! This is a website dedicated to tarot, my tarot practice, and my tarot collection! AND TO THE DEEPEST MOST SHROUDED MYSTERIOUS OF THE OCCULT! jk they’re just playing cards lol.

2 What It Is

Yall tarot is just some italian playing cards with a fifth suit, and that fifth suit is a bunch of trump cards. That’s all it is. There’s nothing really special about it. You can do tarot with a deck of standard playing cards, except there’s no major arcana, and the cards don’t have all the cool pictures.

Actually playing cards have one trump card, and that is the Joker, which is pretty much the same as The Fool.

3 My Tarot Journey

When I was very young, I used to think tarot — and all divination practices really — were quite silly because I thought people were literally trying to tell the literal future, which is impossible and foolish.

I now consider tarot specifically to be a practice that allows you to do some or all of the following:

• Zone out and shuffle cards and look at pictures. Put the system into a meditative and reflective state.

• Inject some randomness into the system to generate new thoughts and create new connections.

• Get unstuck

• Consider a possible outcome or course of action and see how you feel about it.

So all in all I’d say I’m a big fan of considering the symbolism and imagery of a card or cards and then seeing where my mind drifts while contemplating that within a context.

4 Acquiring Cards

Somehow, somewhere, I heard that you’re not supposed to buy your own tarot cards because I guess the exchange of money sullies the magic of the cards or something, and I chose to believe that for a while. But then somebody, I think it was vilmibm or elly for some reason, was like, “No that is silly. If that were true, I would never have any tarot cards.” And I, having no tarot cards myself at the time, realized this was true, and decided to be a person in control of their own tarot-having destiny, and I bought myself my first deck of cards shortly thereafter.

5 The Wizards Tarot

My first deck of cards was The Wizards Tarot by Wizard of Barge. It is a grotesque, metal, visceral, gaudy, grossout deck.

I love it so much.

It has alternate suits: beasts are staves / clubs / batons, which I like because beasts can definitely bonk you with a stick. Cults are coins, which is okay. I kind of wish cults were cups because if there’s one thing I know about cultists, it’s that cultists are always trying to fill up some kind of chalice or something full of blood. Curses are cups, which should be coins I think because removing a curse is very costly. And swords are just swords.

I love this deck, but I would say it is not a good starter deck because the imagery is so alien and it all seems focused on evoking the same emotion: “sick! and or gross!” Which is to say, there’s not much subtlety here.

https://wizardofbarge.com/products/the-wizard-s-tarot

6 Rider Waite Coleman

From the surreal and experimental Wizards Tarot, I over-corrected and ended up buying the most conventional and traditional deck there is.

There’s nothing too much I can say about it. It’s familiar and non-challenging, and is a good deck.

When you want your tarot to have a theme of “tarot,” then this is the deck you reach for. Every available source book or guide book in the world uses this deck as its base and its subject, so it is beneficial to be familiar with it.

7 Tarot Of The Abyss

This is my most personally highly prized deck because I had to search high and low for it. It was like a quest!

Okay so a couple years ago my friends and I were at this haunted house in Seattle. It was the kind of event where you wander around having cocktails and talking to costumed characters trying to figure out their backstory and solve the mystery.

So that’s what we’re doing, and then one of the characters kind of shanghais us into a backroom and proceeds to give us the best tarot reading of our lives. Highly personal and detailed readings. In each case the reading wouldn’t have made nearly as much sense for any other person in the party.

Then at the end, they gave each of us a little tiny shard of crystal and told each person what was unique about their stone.

It was such a great experience! And they used a very unique deck that I wasn’t able to identify for a long time. I even tried reaching out to the event organizers in hopes of finding the medium. Eventually I found a photo from that night that was clear enough to do a successful reverse image search. And it lead me finally to the Tarot of the Abyss.

There’s a lot of personal touches and interpretations in this deck. Some of the archetypes are renamed. For example, Justice becomes Awakening. All the art is black and white and it’s just really neat.

https://www.usgamesinc.com/Tarot_and_Inspiration/tarot-of-the-abyss.html

8 Tarot For The Great Outdoors

I was on a two month extended stay in the woods, living in a cabin on a lake way up on a mountain. Very remote. The nearest town was very small, and 30 minutes away.

At a small bookstore in said town, I found this deck and it sang to me. I knew it would always make me think of my time in the great outdoors. I really love the artwork and the imagery. It is so vibrant and full of life. The colors are sharp. I love all the mountains and rivers and all the other ways the people who live in the cards are enjoying themselves and their lives and their companions and the outdoors. Hooray for the people who live in my cards!

https://www.mountaineers.org/books/books/tarot-for-the-great-outdoors-78-card-deck-guidebook

9 tarot.rec

tarot.rec is a project that combines the art from ascii tarot and the text from tarot api into a single recfile. The art is low fidelity but really cool. The text is archaic but evocative. I like it for a quick session of CYBERTAROT. This recfile is what powers our/tarot on #tildetown.

https://git.tilde.town/dozens/tarot/

10 Pocket Tarot

“MOTHERFUCKING ACORNS” Edition

A tiny way to draw a random tarot card that requires no cards and no dice

Find any printed text near you and start reading. Stop when you encounter a letter from the word MOTHERFUCKING to get a random letter between 1 and 13: M = 1, O = 2 … N = 12, G = 13, etc. Do the same for ACORNS for a number between 1 - 6.

Use your ACORNS number to choose one of the six tables below. Use your MOTHERFUCKING number to select one of the 13 items from that list.

    i.                  ii.              iii.
1.  Fool                Death            Five of Wands     
2.  Magician            Temperance       Six of Wands      
3.  High Priestess      Devil            Seven of Wands    
4.  Empress             Tower            Eight of Wands    
5.  Emperor             Star             Nine of Wands     
6.  Hierophant          Moon             Ten of Wands      
7.  Lovers              Sun              Page of Wands     
8.  Chariot             Judgment         Knight of Wands   
9.  Strength            World            Queen of Wands    
10. Hermit              Ace of Wands     King of Wands     
11. Wheel of Fortune    Two of Wands     Ace of Pentacles  
12. Justice             Three of Wands   Two of Pentacles  
13. Hanged Man          Four of Wands    Three of Pentacles

    iv.                 v.               vi.
1.  Four of Pentacles   Three of Swords  Two of Cups   
2.  Five of Pentacles   Four of Swords   Three of Cups 
3.  Six of Pentacles    Five of Swords   Four of Cups  
4.  Seven of Pentacles  Six of Swords    Five of Cups  
5.  Eight of Pentacles  Seven of Swords  Six of Cups   
6.  Nine of Pentacles   Eight of Swords  Seven of Cups 
7.  Ten of Pentacles    Nine of Swords   Eight of Cups 
8.  Page of Pentacles   Ten of Swords    Nine of Cups  
9.  Knight of Pentacles Page of Swords   Ten of Cups   
10. Queen of Pentacles  Knight of Swords Page of Cups  
11. King of Pentacles   Queen of Swords  Knight of Cups
12. Ace of Swords       King of Swords   Queen of Cups 
13. Two of Swords       Ace of Cups      King of Cups  

11 Quickref

A short guide to the tarot

SUITS

The suit gives the card its specific flavor. Its focus. Its context.

PIPS

Numbers have different meanings for different people. If and when a number grows to have a different meaning for you, cross out whatever is written here and write down your own meaning. In fact do that for everything and anything written in this book. Or for all books, anywhere and everywhere at all. (Surprise! This website is a book now.)

COURTS

The court cards suggests what a certain archetype might do within the context of its suit’s domain

TRUMPS

These are the “Major Arcana” or “Big Mysteries.” The pips and courts together are the Minor Arcana. They majors are not really any more special than the minors. They’re just trump cards with cool pictures.

Use the meanings here, or just give it your best guess based on the name of the card and your knowledge, context, and intuition.