What Is The Tarot?

Tarot cards are actually a centuries-old picture-book. It made sense in earlier times to communicate with pictures, since most people couldn't read or write. Each of the five suits in the deck of Tarot cards is a chapter of the book.

The continuing relevance of the Tarot is due to its subject matter: the unchanging core issues of life. The four minor suits of the Tarot teach us about money, love, power and fame. The major suit reveals the seven ways we can get stuck in life and how to free ourselves.

These teachings about self-empowerment, found in the Tarot's major suit, proved so threatening to medieval tyrants that the entire suit was censored and removed from the Tarot deck. The remaining four suits in the Tarot deck have come down to us as the four familiar suits of modern-day playing cards. Modern playing cards are a Tarot deck that has had the self-empowerment teachings removed by the medieval ruling class. The study of a complete Tarot deck can help you identify and free yourself from people, institutions and ideas that limit your growth and happiness.

Tarot cards are also used for divination. The information they transmit is accompanied by the age-old wisdom of how to handle every situation depicted in each card. The new perspective and complete overview provided by a Tarot reading, coupled with its wealth of insightful wisdom, offers the client a clearer picture of what's going on and what the consequences of each option will be. Armed with this information the client can make a better-informed choice in this present moment, the point of power, and create the future that is desired.

An added benefit for the reader or anyone who uses Tarot cards is the way such use promotes the integration of the two sides of the human brain. The verbal mind receives a great deal of attention and training in our culture, including the learning of a conscious verbal language. The pictorial mind, however, the one that thinks in pictures when we dream, has not had the benefit of such acceptance, attention, training, and acquisition of a conscious language. Hence, it is a subconscious mind.

Many ancient traditions recognize our human nature as a bi-modal consciousness that was split in two long ago by the increasing dominance of the verbal, linear-thinking hemisphere. These same traditions teach that human happiness and planetary salvation depend upon our success at re-integrating the two halves of our minds. This process has been called the "alchemical marriage." Its means of accomplishment is the central teaching in the book of Tarot and a primary benefit from the study and use of the cards.

As a repository of wisdom about life, a tool for divination and a method of re-integrating human consciousness, the book of Tarot is an invaluable resource that generously rewards every effort we make to understand it.