Unlocking the Minor Arcana

By Warren Adams-Ockrassa

Discover the key to the Minor Arcana of Tarot in this concise guide.

Baffled by the interpretations of Minor Arcana cards such as the Three of Wands or Nine of Swords? This book tells you where the cards' meanings come from, and shows you the key to understanding them.

Add nuance to your grasp of the Minor Arcana, and interpret the cards with greater confidence!

• Exercises throughout the text help you deepen your learning of the Minor Arcana

• Example spreads let you study Tarot in action

• Learn how to make a situational reading, a powerful and subtle Tarot spread developed by the author

• Explore ways to use Tarot cards for casting magick spells

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warren Adams-Ockrassa
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386757696

Book preview

Dedication

Introduction

This book covers the Minor Arcana of the Tarot: The aces through tens and the Court cards, usually represented as suits of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. It does not discuss the Major Arcana.

I’ve chosen to focus on the Minors because they are under-studied in most Tarot books, but they’re an important element to Tarot. The Minors contain a wealth of subtleties that lend nuance to the Majors, and add depth to interpreting them.

This is also a compressed, information-dense book. What that means is there’s a lot of data contained in it, so even a quick read is likely to have lasting effects on how you view Tarot, as that information percolates into your mind.

Whom This Book is For:

If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re interested in Tarot. Maybe it’s the pictures on the cards that draw you to it; or maybe you have a mystical tendency and want to know more about this aspect of the occult; or maybe you’re pretty sure it’s all a load of nonsense, but just curious enough to do some research. What you don’t know yet is whether this book is for you.

So to save us both time, we’ll start out with a few bullet points. If your interest remains piqued after reading them, you’re looking at the right book.

Here are some things Tarot is not:

• Tarot is not evil, is not a gateway to the powers of darkness, and is not satanic.

• Tarot is not thousands of years old, and did not originate in Egypt.

• Tarot is not incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo.

• Tarot is not an unfailing oracle, or a way to either absolutely foretell or predetermine the future.

Here are some things Tarot is:

• Tarot is a means to connect to your own subconscious, and possibly to archetypes in the Jungian sense.

• Tarot is a way to plan and express your own growth as a human being, through the symbols on the cards.

• Tarot might be a way to gain insights into situations that you would otherwise not have.

• Tarot can be useful in magickal workings.

Still with me? Okay, here’s some depth on each of those bullet points.

* * *

Tarot is not evil, is not a gateway to the powers of darkness, and is not satanic.

Some people, on reading this statement, are apt to be relieved; others may feel vaguely disappointed.

The fact is that there is no connection at all between Tarot and what many call evil spirits of any kind. (It’s arguable that there is no connection between Tarot and any form of spirit at all, since the question of whether such entities exist is not empirically provable. That is, if you believe they exist, they do for you ... however, that doesn’t mean they do for anyone else.)

Historically, users of Tarot are of two main varieties: Card-players, or seekers after hidden information. There is no inherent connection between either of those activities and evil, whatever your definition of the term might be.

All right, you may think, but if Tarot is a source of hidden information, can that information be used for evil purposes?

Yes.

That, however, is down to each individual and the way he or she chooses to use the cards. There are many examples of other things we encounter in daily life that can be used for good or ill. For example, a knife may be a way to prepare a meal, or it may be a weapon.

There is nothing in Tarot which acts as a temptation, a beckoning force, or a seductive power toward evil. They’re cards. They’re made of ink and paper. They possess no will or intent of their own.

* * *

* * *

Tarot is not thousands of years old, and did not originate in Egypt.

It’s hard to tell where or when this myth originated, but it is most certainly a myth.

The next chapter briefly goes into the identifiable history of Tarot, which has only been around for a few hundred years, and which didn’t become a formalized method of divination — or integrated with Hermetic magickal systems — until a couple hundred years after it came into existence.

* * *

Tarot is not incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo.

I need to tackle these adjectives separately.

Tarot is not incomprehensible, but it is laden with symbology that seems mysterious at first, particularly if you don’t have all the keys to it.

This can be pretty frustrating if you’re working under the impression that the pictures alone should be sufficient to know what’s going on with a given card (particularly in the context of a spread), or if you’re working with a deck that has been designed by someone without a lot of deep background in Tarot (or with their own vaguely expressed ideas about what the images are intended to mean).

Tarot is also not mumbo-jumbo. That term is generally reserved for nonsense which yields no useful information or results, and it would be a gross miscalculation to consider it applicable to Tarot. You’ll find out why I can be so sure of that as you progress with this book.

* * *

Tarot is not an unfailing oracle, or a way to either absolutely foretell or predetermine the future.

Well, you may wonder, if that’s true, what’s the point of using it at all?

In my experience, what Tarot seems to do extremely well is provide insight into likely outcomes, highlighting possible trouble areas. It does not, in its predictive capacity, represent a kind of graven image of the future; it just lets you get a sense of how things are probably going to end up unless circumstances change.

Conceptually, it’s not too different from weather forecasting: Meteorologists can predict, with high accuracy, what the weather outlook will be for the next couple of days, but the next couple of weeks is much harder to foretell beyond general trends, because the further out they predict, the more variables come onto play.

With Tarot, the biggest source of variables is the querent him- or herself, followed by the circumstances surrounding the querent’s immediate life. There’s simply no way to predict outcomes with unfailing accuracy.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that reading Tarot doesn’t bring Fate into the picture. Seeing the Tower card in someone’s spread does not doom them to chaos or discord; it’s simply an indication of a likely outcome if nothing changes in that person’s current course.

Think of Tarot as a way of being able to see around corners and get an idea of what’s coming up, but remember that no one is required to actually turn those corners if they choose not to.

This is why I say Tarot is not unfailing. There are lots of events that might affect your life from the time you leave the house until the time you return on any given day, not all of them legitimately foreseeable, and many of them reliant on your and others’ behavior and choices. You might have a perfectly fantastic day, or you might get hit on the head by a falling toilet from a de-orbiting space station. Some things really are beyond any capacity to control or predict.

Beyond its possible ability to suggest future outcomes, I’ve found Tarot can provide remarkable insights into a person: What motivates, what drives, what frightens, and what uplifts. These insights, too, are not unfailing, though they do seem to be reasonably reliable.

* * *

Tarot is a means to connect to your own subconscious, and possibly to archetypes in the Jungian sense.

The nature of the cards, once you understand them, is to present various connected symbols and ideas to you. How those ideas link up in your mind is partly based in your conscious or intellectual understanding of the cards, and partly based in intuitive or nonrational connections you might make with those symbols.

In this sense, Tarot is almost a way to tap into a stream-of-consciousness mindset, where different ideas are free and able to connect to one another in new and unexpected ways. (Almost stream-of-consciousness because the imagery on the cards does supply some guidance; it’s not entirely random.)

The Jungian archetypes I refer to here are found in the deep cultural heritage prevalent in the Western world, and many of those archetypes are referenced — obliquely or overtly — in Tarot.

We are so saturated with tropes and assumptions that we barely recognize them. Consider the shape of a stop sign, or the order of colors in traffic lights, or whether people drive on the left or right side of the road in your country.

That latter is a point of concern for travelers: Americans tend to get lazy while walking across the street, and look only toward the left for oncoming traffic before they step off the sidewalk. Someone from New York doing that in London would be looking the wrong direction — and could be in for a nasty surprise.

Stop signs, traffic signals, and vehicle flow are all examples of social artifacts. We understand their meanings, and work within them without being consciously aware of it.

Similarly, Tarot uses many symbols that refer to cultural archetypes, a common symbolic language that is ingrained deeply enough in our culture as to be virtually invisible, but almost universally understandable. There are analogues in other cultures, but a person from, say, Korea or India might be working uphill to understand Tarot’s symbology, because their cultural background won’t be as steeped in the subtleties associated with many cards.

Consider the Devil card, mentioned above. Superficially, it makes sense that the Devil is associated with being bound to material things. But the card takes on subtler and profound shades of meaning when we consider that the Devil is also associated with Satan, who is said to be lord of the Earth, and whose goal is to deceive humans into believing that the material world is all that exists or all we need to be concerned with. (It becomes even more rich when you consider that Lucifer is the other side of Satan, seeking to bind us spiritually, in the process eliminating our free will.)

Provided you’re familiar with Western cultural tropes, then, Tarot is one way to connect to some of them, recognize them consciously, and manipulate them.

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