Tarot is a life-improvement divination tool.  If you use it properly a Tarot deck gives good advice for all kinds of situations.  We humans have used divination tools to help improve our lives all across the world through all our history and we constantly develop and adapt them to suit our place and time.  Tarot is a great classic of Western culture, developed by many counselors through many generations.  This version of it is adapted to fit the ways in which we see the world today.

Divination tools make use of mental abilities we all have, and yet there are profound theoretical questions about how they work.  For example, the great psychologist Carl Jung studied Tarot and other systems deeply but only managed to offer well-informed conjectures about the basic questions.  We can hope that science will come closer to the answers as it continues to investigate the nature of mind.  But be that as it may, we know that if they are used properly, and for the purpose of understanding life, divination tools do work.  And this may well inform our curiosity with deep respect.

There is a scholarly opinion, which I subscribe to, that Tarot arose from a system of symbolic mental images that were a common property of mystical thinkers in ancient Europe and nearby countries for a long time.

Certainly R. J. Stewart convincingly shows the twenty-two images of the central Major Arcana group in British bardic sources of an early date.  The Major Arcana was a zodiac.  You can find this in Stewart's modern translation of an extract of the Viti Merlini, a life of Merlin, an old scribe-made book compiled out of an older verbal fabric, in which the stories culminate with a grand astrologic prophecy of a turning of the cosmic ages.

In that grand old British prophecy the images that lie behind the Major Arcana cards are described clearly, in approximately the same numerical order for them that we have today, described in terms that differ only in recognizable ways from the thoughts we currently hold about those cards.  Stewart thereby forces me to say that either the entire core of Tarot arose within some Celtic or pre-Celtic tradition or else that this set of images was common property for mystics across Europe and beyond in some ancient time.  I much prefer the latter conclusion, that it was widespread rather than distinctly Celtic, on general humane principles.

But the ultimate origin of Tarot is certainly a far too vexing subject for us to cover here in much detail.  Suffice it to say that the oldest actual graphic renderings we have of the Tarot today are a large group of hand-painted paper cards made in the Renaissance in northern Italy.  But that region is a largely Celtic cultural crossroads area known in Roman times as "Gaul This Side Of The Alps".  So the argument has followed us.  Perhaps we are really forced to shrug and smile and say Tarot has arisen from the misty depths of time.  Oh well.

In any case, in that grand old British prophecy ascribed to Merlin the images of the Major Arcana are used to describe a cosmic turning of the ages.  The images are put into a series of events that take place around the zodiac and thus of course on Earth, a turn of the cosmic wheel in which it dips into the sea of chaos.  This is like the understanding of them that is usual for us today, that if we see these central cards all together in a proper order they tell a tale of profound individual psychological transformation.  And as in Nostradamos, the news is ultimately good.  The tale of crisis and transformation culminates in a wiser newborn state of peace.  And yet those hand-painted Renaissance Italian cards were made as toys.

They were made in fact in some sense as erotic toys, gifts from bridegrooms to their brides over several generations of a certain wealthy family.  They were a game of cards.  Well, then, what can we recreate about the play?  Actually a version of it which may be authentic survives today.  It is a whist-like game of tricks and trumps and yet it is designed to represent, in a sporting way, the exciting complexities of real life.

For one thing, in those Renaissance decks the Minor Arcana has been added to the Major, more than tripling the number of cards.  The Minor Arcana, this new set, may seem at first glance virtually identical to modern playing cards but it was actually far more concrete in the players' understanding of the suits.  The four suits related clearly to the four classic elements which were understood by everyone to make the physical world.

So we may well imagine the whist-like play of suits spoken of across the boudoir table, in a sporting way, as the weavings of the ordinary world: My coin, my dear, against your chalice; and so on.  And then, thereon, you also have the zodiacal mystic panoply of hidden forces, which supposedly animate the world and give it soul, plunked down onto the play as trumps.  This does add interest.  Your king, sweetheart, is thrown from his castle tower by my lightening bolt.  And so on.

And still we have another feature: Those Renaissance cards were graphically designed to be confusing.  I am pretty well convinced that this was deliberate for the effect it had upon the game.  Just look at them.  (They have been published and are in print and are widely available as the Visconti - Sforza deck.)  Just look at them.  Can you tell apart the kings and knights without the hints in the modern booklet?  Can you tell the Empress from a queen?  Can you even quite reliably distinguish the entire suits of swords and rods?  No you cannot.  Why not?  This must surely be a feature of design.

Imagine, if you will, let's say, two married couples at the table, informal private quarters of a mansion, likely playing partners spouse with spouse or maybe men v. women for a game, and ask: Who owns the deck?  Who must therefore be looked to as the sovereign arbiter of all confusions?  One of the women.  She had it from her husband as a wedding gift and was likely taught it by her mother-in-law.  This in a culture where she also held the household keys, a big iron ring of them, and was expected properly to know the content of every chest and barrel in her stores and yet a culture ostensibly male-dominated.  I will bet real life was often manifested vividly in the game.

In any case, those early decks were made as grown-up toys.  Can't we say the same for this deck which you have in hand today?  Is not your conversation with these cards a sort of play?

In any case, from our viewpoint in the present it was a fortunate coincidence to have an old well-polished diadem of deep philosophical worth manifested on a set of picture cards and even amplified and grounded by a surrounding of a sort of Pythagorean geometric diagram of ordinary life.  Just consider what a fortune telling tool must do and you will see how apt that toy was for the task.

A proper fortune telling tool must contain some useful answer to any possible question concerning human life and also offer some ritualized means of picking from its contents, enough of ritual to help in clarifying and elevating thought.  For a minimum example simply bring your question clearly into mind then flip a coin with one side meaning "yes", the other "no".  For a little extra benefit, have some special coin you only use for this which you must fetch from a hiding place where you keep it wrapped in silk.  All that may help you get into a proper state of mind.  But, as you can plainly see, the thing you mainly want is a box of subtler answers.  So enter then upon the scene, Tarot.

Enter then the "Gypsies" on the scene of Renaissance western Europe.  Having fled some horrible event in India or thereabouts, held in slavery in eastern Europe for generations, the Roma people set off west again upon the newly opening roads of a newly burgeoning culture.

Come from somewhere in the mystic East -- from the magic Bible realm of Egypt according to legends that grew around them -- the Roma were perfectly positioned to play the role of outcast shaman.  In all lands and times, people who do not practice magic (however that is defined) feel powerful mixed emotions toward those who do.  Even in cultures where bits of magical practice are part and parcel of daily existence, those who specialize in that sort of thing may be forced away out to the margin where they may do less harm and yet remain available for consultation.  And now, in the Renaissance, old native magics of Europe were in general decline, heavily suppressed in many places by new rising social forces.  It was under these conditions that the Roma took up fortune telling with Tarot.

In no society ever has there been a satisfactory understanding of reality.  The fabric of reality stands before our very eyes, quivers at our fingertips and manifests constantly in our experience yet never fully matches our intellectual expectation, regardless of what myth and metaphysics we and our social group may claim is real.  When these gaps are powerful and significant enough to be undeniable we say "There is magic." And we are right to feel some awe.  From our viewpoint, whatever viewpoint that may be, such dark holes point directly at the wider world as it really is.

In particular: I have practiced divination with Tarot intensively for twenty-five years and I have seen that practice yield many fine results in helping people, but I still have no decent theory as to why appropriate cards constantly turn up.  The lack of decent theory still leaves me a bit disquieted even though by now I know very clearly the feeling of how that happens and I have learned reliable techniques to make it happen.  The right cards constantly turn up and there, for me, is magic.  So it was, no doubt, for many folk of western Europe who patronized the Romany fortune telling women.  They were almost always women.

Maybe this is a good place for a brief discussion of that phrase "fortune telling".  Many serious readers of Tarot loathe that phrase because it seems so crass and cheap.  Are we advising clients how to get rich?  Only in the metaphoric sense that wisdom can be called a treasure.  Perhaps the word "divination" is much better, for its morally superior implication that a reader makes contact with divine sources of information.

But in reply I shall point to the Wheel Of Fortune card and say that every reading is a journey into the profound mysteries of that image.  Especially in the choosing of the cards we hitch our little wagon to the central axle of that ever-turning wheel.  And I will most certainly ask if our sources of information are so clarified and so abstracted from familiar realms as to be called, in any proper sense, divine.  I think not.  And I'm even prepared to haul in old Socrates on this point.  Oh well.

In any case, we owe an enormous debt to "Gypsy" "fortune tellers".  It was they, in their generations, who found and honed the practical explications of the cards that have become a tapestry of customary meanings.  With printing press technology, new in Europe, there came countless inexpensive editions of Tarot and they put these toys to excellent use.

Indeed, to watch an expert Romany diviner work a deck is to be struck with awe.  Mix the cards in a certain quick simple ceremonial way then deal a load of them straight off the top into a large rectangle.  Now here is the situation on a sort of map.  Elastic overlapping regions of the map correspond to various facets of our lives: the home in all its physical, emotional and spiritual connotations is more or less over there; health in every sense appears in that direction; and so forth.  Cards even point across the map toward one another in a third dimension.  All of this so far is much too quick and fluent to be learned outside the ethnic tradition of which it is a part; it surely must be taught to children from an early age.

But what comes next is more explicable and can be learned by many with a modicum of help, such as a good version of the deck.  I mean the customary meanings that are seen on individual cards.  Each card inspires the reader's mind to entertain a rich but vivid cloud of thoughts.  Then these thoughts are finally selected and stitched together in a story that is hopefully seamless, wise and helpful.  And this final portion of the task is amenable to anyone who has experienced life thoughtfully.

But still another feature of design was needed to make Tarot widely accessible.  Only the Major Arcana plus the face cards of the Minors had intelligible pictures.  Forty cards, more than half, consisted merely of a decorative design of seven swords or three cups or ten wands or four coins or such.  Forty more pictures, drawn out of the clouds of customary meanings, must be added to make the tool widely accessible.  And that would wait until 1909 in London.

In the meantime, in the intervening centuries, you may be sure Tarot caught the interest of thinkers in the mainstream European occult philosophy tradition.  This is a grand and honorable tradition of inquiry into the nature of existence.  Its roll of members stretches from Pythagoras to Newton and to Jung and to the present day.  Among the currents that it has absorbed and molded to the needs of rational thought, besides Tarot, there must be listed astrology, geometry, alchemy, Kabala and more.

The mainstream European occult philosophy tradition does tend to be a little dry.  Nonetheless, some of these thinkers made very interesting contributions to our understanding of Tarot.  They rediscovered the astrological basis of the Major Arcana and used it like zodiacs are always used when taken seriously: for philosophical discussion and spiritual contemplation.  Nor did the Minor Arcana escape their notice; its grid of numbers and Greek elements served as a useful vehicle for carrying on Pythagorean thought.  These scholars synthesized an intricately patterned foundation layer of theoretical speculation as to how the symbols in the deck all interact to weave our lives.  And one of them was a certain Dr. Waite who will appear momentarily.

But we must also mention that here and there occasionally in this period between Renaissance and modern times some individuals achieved a bit of fame by reading cards.  Some caught the ear of wealthy patrons.  Some made the rounds of royal courts.  Some were an absolute sensation.  Now and then among the fashionable elite there was a fashion for that sort of thing.

And so we wend our way at last to London in 1909.  Now there burst onto the scene the revolutionary current classic: The Waite - Smith version of Tarot, the "Rider Pack" as it is often called after the Rider company that published it in 1910.

Doctor Arthur Edward Waite, a reclusive British scholar of the occult, was theoretical designer.  To him we owe the esoteric fact that in their deck a certain number of symbolic salamanders are shown embroidered on the tunic of the Fool and that in certain cards the sky is green and that the Emperor sits on a cubic throne.

The one who set the pens to paper, though, was Pamela Coleman Smith, an interesting individual by all accounts, a literary woman who published avant-garde tiny magazines, a costume and set designer for the London stage.  To her we owe the fact that in this deck the characters are posed in lifelike ways displaying clear emotion, the scenery and props are artfully arranged, and in the Nine Of Swords the usual nine swords are thrust into the back of a prostrate victim in a dungeon.

Presto and voila! The forty missing pictures had been added and well done indeed.  Smith's designs give eloquently nuanced voice to the traditional meanings.  Much has changed in the century since but the Waite - Smith deck still stands at the threshold of the modern age as our current revolutionary classic.

Yes, much has changed in the century since then.  When I began working with Tarot in 1979, my search of retail stores in the city where I lived revealed six versions of Tarot on offer.  This was a city of about a million people, no cosmopolitan center certainly but not entirely devoid of either art or practicing magicians.  A similar search in a similar place today could surely find closer to a hundred different decks easily available to an interested shopper.

Personally, I am both heartened and disappointed with this recent plethora.  On one hand, a wide choice is helpful because it lets a wide variety of people seek pictures that speak to them intimately.  And I actually see many people using this variety of decks like Tarot should be used, as a spiritual, philosophical and practical tool.  But on the other hand, of course the artistic quality ranges from excellent to distressingly poor.

There are now a few publishing companies of respectable size who specialize in Tarot decks.  People at these companies constantly decide that time has come for yet another Arthurian or Victorian or Goth (or etc. or etc. or etc.) deck so they have an illustrator crank one out.  The quality of illustration work is always competent and sometimes good but of course the thing is crap and everybody knows it except uneducated shoppers.  These are called "theme" decks.  This is the ghastly horrid end of our current artistic quality spectrum.

But on the other end of it there are quite a few decks, usually self-published with very small distribution, where a serious approach was made and carried through, usually by a small group collaboration.  Here the illustration work is often idiosyncratic or even crude but solutions to the problems of design are sometimes refreshingly original.  And above all else, a flowering of liberated thought in the attributions often shines through all superficial considerations.  These "free" decks, as I like to call them, are full of rewarding surprises.

And it must be said that even the established publishers are not entirely devoid of aesthetic merit.  They make a class of product called a "fine art" deck for a specialist collector market.  These generally lie at the upper boundary of the illustrator's craft but seldom past it, and therefore usually suffer from the need to make so large a set of pictures.  And yet, some are done so very well as to genuinely excite the admiration of a connoisseur.

And finally, there is a commercial product that might be called a "philosophical" deck.  Now and then a serious thinker who has written profitable books will conceive a Tarot project and their publisher will take it up and hire an illustrator.  A few of these turn out well.  A very few are truly valuable records.

And where does Spirit Hill lie on this map?