Tarot

78 cards, divided into Major and Minor Arcana. The Minor Arcana is divided into four suits (Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles), each containing 14 cards. The cards’ imagery depicts a journey of growth, combining symbol and allegory.

The reduction in the size of these cards to one that could easily accommodate handling with one’s hands enabled new adaptations to the sortilegic process. The simple act of changing the “spread,” for example, will generate numerous different ways of reading the cards, most often in connection to a querist’s sense of temporality and their inner psychology. Hence, the transformation of tarot decks from illuminated artifacts of aristocratic status to the printed objects of exotified fortune telling required a democratization that was, on many levels, accelerated by the advance of printing technologies from the xylographic to the offset lithographic. — Jesse R. Erickson, ““In the Cards”: The Material Textuality of Tarotological Reading” (2022)

an individual can learn how to “read” tarot by studying printed textual instructions that provide a shared basis for interpretation. Once these instructions are internalized, one can verbally improvise their interpretation of the image through a combination of memory and interpersonal analysis shared between the reader and the querent. — Jesse R. Erickson, ““In the Cards”: The Material Textuality of Tarotological Reading” (2022)

Shuffling and drawing from a deck of cards. An embodied, haptic ritual interface? A context for sorting and processing information? A modular configuration? Purposive inquiry.

Tarot cards originated in 15th century Italy as a card game called tarocchi. In the late 18th century, French occultists started claiming the cards had esoteric Egyptian origins, and could be used for divination.

Different systems, traditions, illustrations. A particular type of cartomancy.

• [⎈] Investigate the role of tarot in popular culture and its portrayal in literature, film, art and music. How has this changed over time?
• [&] Consider the role of the querent?
• [&] See also: combinatorics?

Backlinks

: Querent.py