just what is this 'tarot' thing anyway?

"I've heard card references all over the place but haven't ever really dug into the common themes among them, the basic framework on which each deck is hung."

- tracerj in a comment elsewhere

Tarot is a big pack of lies.

Lies and misinterpretations.

What you probably think of when you think "a deck of Tarot cards" - 78 cards in four suits of 14 cards, plus 22 "major arcana", each with a complicated, symbolically-rich, cryptic picture on them, is the end of about 400 years of semiotic drift.

Up until Pamela Smith drew images on all 78 cards, the custom was for only the "major arcana" and the "court cards" (king/queen/knight/(page|princess)) to be fully illustrated; the 40 number cards would just have the suit symbols on them like what we think of as a pack of "playing cards". (In many other Western countries, Tarot cards have not become the exclusive domain of fortune-tellers and mystics; there are many games designed for them that're still played.)

The themes are a mish-mash.

Deep in the core of the Major Arcana, as best I can tell from my research, is something central to old Christian views of the world: a parade of the States of Man, in ascending power. Or at least that's what it starts as. Then various Moral Virtues are dropped into the order, then Death trumps all the mortals, and we go into the celestial spheres: above Death we find the stars, the moon, the Sun around which all revolves. But even this is trumped, literally, by the trumpets of Judgement Day. And above all is the whole of creation, the World.

The Major Arcana was a fucking mess to start with.

Then people copied the cards and lost the context. That weird pose of the Hanged Man? Well, it seems he used to be the Traitor. In Sicily, in the 1500s (or was it the 1400s?) people deemed traitors to the state would be executed by hanging from one foot. A painful, slow, agonizing death. He's hanging like that because he's trying to shift his weight and find some relief from the pain. Take the card out of Sicily and he's just... hanging. The labels we expect to see on Tarot cards were a late innovation; the nobles who were the first users of these cards were expected to Just Know what they were (and their order of precedence - no numbers, either!) when playing games, so outside of Sicily, he became the Hanged Man.

As printing technology advanced, cards changed from an expensive handmade luxury item to something any asshole with a press could make. Cheaply. Crudely.

Crappy, nasty cards, printed from wood blocks carved by people without the training that the folks painting cards for the idle rich had. One card-maker copied another. What's this crude squiggle? A bird? A tree? A butterfly? Fuck if I know. I think I like it as a bird. I'll make it a bird. What's this thing around the head of this weird dude hanging upside down? A hat? Some kinda neck ruff? It kinda looks like a halo, man. Hell if I know. Eh, it's late, I'm tired, a halo will be the easiest to carve.

So we have a few centuries of artistic Telephone being played on these images. Once they were iconic. But culture changed around them, and they became more and more cryptic.

They never really took hold in England. They were a Continental thing. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s various English mystics discovered them, and said, "woo! these are cryptic! these are fucking fraught with weird meaning! trying to tell stories about the world using them as random input is fucking awesome!". Or something like that. Probably less directly.

These mystics started hacking the cards for their own purposes. They thought they made a dandy tool for divination. They saw connections to other systems of mystical meaning - and they drew their own sets, that had hints to these connections in them. You got into Kabbala the year before you ran into these cards and were struck by the correspondence between the 22 Major Arcana and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet? Assign letters to the Major Arcana and hide them somewhere in the drawings! You think each suit of the deck corresponds to one of the four elements? Put some references to that in the court cards! Got a system of relating the Zodiac to the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana (the number/court cards)? Put it on the cards!

Embrace and extend, embrace and extend. Remix.

And then one artist was crazy enough to draw a symbolic picture for every card. Mix the numerological significance with the elemental significance, the Zodiacal relation, and whatever else - then try to draw something that conveys all of that, as well as showing six cups or whatever.

Now we have people working off of that tradition. Some people try to make it all nice and fluffy when they interpret it. Some go the other way and revel in doom and gore. Do you treat the process of making 78 little pictures as one of just working from what Pamela Smith drew, reinterpreting in your style and theme - or do you go to the keywords Arthur Waite gave her and make your own interpretation? What myths do you feel like mixing in to keep it fun? What themes evolve organically as you work through these 78 images? Maybe you think the elemental associations are wrong. Fix 'em. (I did!) Maybe you have a new scheme for Zodiacal correspondences. Maybe you want to link each card to a verse of the I Ching. Or to a quotation from Mao's Little Red Book. Maybe you just wanna draw a bunch of cat people, that's cool too. I think that one sold pretty well.

That is my view of what a Tarot deck is. A historical trainwreck, pulled by 22 or so images whose context is alien to us. Endlessly "fixed" again and again. It's a big pile of symbols that you deal out randomly and free-associate over to try to connect with the Random Factors; a Western throwing-of-the-yarrow-stalks-and-consulting-the-I-Ching.

Oh yeah, and in the early 1900s the English mysticks said it was from Ancient Egypt, because Ancient Egypt was wicked cool right then what with finding Tut's tomb and all that shit. As far as I can tell there is absolutely zero evidence for this, though hey, it's another layer of symbols to play with - and that's what makes the whole thing potent. Whatever it meant to a stinky Italian peasant doesn't really matter any more; it's a snowball of symbols rolling through history. Throw it against a wall and divine meaning from the shape of the splatters.

(but of course keep in mind that I'm working on drawing one because Kali told me to; my interpretation is just a little bit on the chaotic side.)

(n.b. these dates are all off the top of my head and are likely to be wrong here and there. go ask google. i will before this gets cleaned up into something like an introduction to the Little White Book that's slipped into the box of each Urnash Tarot.)

(ps. the much-cited "Fool's Journey" people find in the Major Arcana is, IMHO, something later ages projected upon the original divinely-ordered parade of social classes. That doesn't mean it's not there, or a valid interpretation, or something to emphasize in one's version of the deck (it's certainly there in mine) - that just means that it's another layer of meaning this snowball picked up as it rolled down history. You can tell yourself a story about a fool coming to know himself and the world if you lay out all the MAs in order; the fact that it stuck probably means that it's a story worth telling yourself and thinking about. A significant percentage of people who do fully-illustrated decks [including Smith/Waite] have stories in mind for each suit, too. Sometimes they run 10-1 instead of 1-10.)

(p.p.s. here in America, as in England, the Tarot deck is pretty much exclusively a tool for fortune-telling and majickq. "I stayed up all night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." (Steven Wright) In continental Europe, I'm given to understand that it varies from being a majickqual tool to being a set of pretty playing cards like the Wild Cats of the World deck I participated in, to even being a set of playing cards with imagery as ritualized as the 52-card deck Americans are familiar with.)