The Light Blue Tarot

By Lune Inkpen

For hundreds of years, ordinary playing cards (minor or lesser arcana) and Tarots (major arcana or trumps) have been used to portray the world: they narrate and explore it. The major arcana contain 22 mysterious images (no suits), while the 56 ordinary playing cards (fourteen for each of its four suits) form the minor arcana. All 78 cards or blades are seen as archetypes of the human cycle; they express, symbolically, the meaning of the felicitous or ominous experiences of individual journeys through life on earth.

This book aims at providing readers with a basic knowledge of the Tarots (historical background, means, symbolism), as well as with an easy method for reading them availing of the divinatory principles in practice. With a little exercise, anyone can learn the art of divination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lune Inkpen
• Release date: Dec 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9788822881243

Book preview

References

Introduction

For hundreds of years, ordinary playing cards (minor or lesser arcana) and Tarots (major arcana or trumps) have been used to portray the world: they narrate and explore it. The major arcana contain 22 mysterious images (no suits), while the 56 ordinary playing cards (fourteen for each of its four suits) form the minor arcana. All 78 cards or blades are seen as archetypes of the human cycle; they express, symbolically, the meaning of the felicitous or ominous experiences of individual journeys through life on earth. Their iconography portrays western culture and the historical structure of Italian humanism quite clearly. The divine blades were a game, a book of memories and a scheme for foretelling the future in Mediaeval and Renaissance Italy. Later they spread all over Europe and, in France, in particular, from the eighteenth century on, they gave rise to investigation of the occult world of divination. They soon conquered the English-speaking world as well as many other cultural milieus that were able to see themselves reflected in those images and symbols. The cards tell stories that comprise a myth, or a system of mind-sets and occurrences, physical and emotional experiences of a universal nature, common to all human beings.

This book aims at providing readers with a basic knowledge of the Tarots (historical background, means, symbolism), as well as with an easy method for reading them availing of the divinatory principles in practice. With a little exercise, anyone can learn the art of divination. The meanings presented here are the traditional ones, updated to comply with present-day language use and the modern worldview, but all should feel free to style them according to their own intuition and human experience. The cards are simply a tool, a bridge by which to reach the Other and the Self. By entering into syntony with archetypical images, throwing open the doors of intuition and the imagination (not fancy but veritable magic), one may find answers within oneself to the issues the enquirer’s questions elicit, and propose ways of interpreting the situation presented to the Tarots as a problem to be solved, because the divine blades, however they may be viewed symbolically, are above all a unique means of gaining knowledge.

0 The Fool

I am the Fool, I am chaos, all teems within me. Everything begins from and ends in me. I am the creativity of your heart and mind, I am error leading to knowledge, I am art and rebellion, I am the tireless voyager. I am the wayfarer who knows no road, hounded by a dog that strips me bare. I rest on my staff in my folly. The burden I bear is a karma I do not know. I am the innocence and faith, the spontaneity and enthusiasm, which you have lost, perhaps, and seek to recover. I fight, I flee, I find the treasure, I vanish and then, suddenly, I reappear. I am the unforeseeable, the irrational. I am bewilderment. I sing, I act, I am the jester and I laugh at your pain. I bear a weightless burden. I carry the chattels of previous lives, the memory of what I shall be. The dog who bites me is Hecate, she who knows. I am free and can invent new things. I eliminate the canon, scoff the law and mock you. I am uncertainty, crisis and instability. Is it really me