Welcome to tarotica.com
What this site is about...mainly Tarot cards and cultures.
Once upon a time, back in the very dark-agey day of 1996, I wrote the first version of the Tarot FAQ you will find here. And I published my first website about Tarot. A couple of sites later, I haven't published nearly the amount of content I had originally planned, but I have tried to publish items I thought would be useful to those interested in understanding what Tarot is really about, and how it got into its present condition.
Now, I should qualify that statement to point out that a lot of people interested in Tarot have little interest in what I write about it, because they are Tarot game players, and I write mainly about Tarot as a symbolic and especially an occult phenomenon. The game is certainly important to those concerns, especially historically, and I do focus on that side of Tarot games, as for example in my book, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre. But as you will see in reading the articles on this site and my various blogs, the Tarot world is sharply divided into interest groups, or domains, whose agendas are often divorced from and sometimes vigorously opposed to one another.
The various advocates for these groups sometimes take a puritanical attitude towards heretics. For example, a class of Tarot gamers is absolutely livid that Tarot gaming has been far overshadowed by its lurid occult cousins. You will hear these gamers sometimes complain about how Tarot has been "stolen" by occultists, as if 15th-century gamblers had patented Tarot or something. In fact, the gamblers and witches were working with Tarot cards, no doubt for different ends, from quite early on. The alternative or occult use of Tarot is nothing new. On the other hand, the occult dogma concerning Tarot and its elevation to the cosmic playbook or encyclopedia, The Book of Thoth, is relatively recent, although even that began at least over two centuries ago.
The Tarot that a lot of us first encounter today is really the product of a marriage of politics and marketing, which I have described here. Because this particular brand, and way of thinking about Tarot, dominates most entry-level experiences with the deck, for those interested in understanding occult Tarot, meaning the Tarot symbolism and dogma mainly created by the French and English occultists of the late-18th through the mid-20th centuries, the modern brand can be pretty confusing. For example, in an effort to maximize the popularity of Tarot, the bowdlerized modern decks minimize "negative" or "dark" elements. Also, since the majority of new users of Tarot are women, a new, allegedly feminist dogma, was created in the last few decades which in some cases argued for eliminating the Tarotic ideas and contributions of men entirely. In one case for example, a Jungian and Campbellite, Angeles Arrien, decided to throw out everything Aleister Crowley had written about his complex occult Tarot, the Thoth deck, and to instead substitute her Jungianesque notions. She added insult to injury by claiming that she was doing this to "honor" the Thoth deck artist, Frieda Harris, despite the fact Harris had plainly said she needed Crowley to explain his symbolism to viewers.
Another problem we see in modern Tarot is the tendency for its bourgeois experts and promoters to look disparagingly at poorer, less educated, practioners, many of whom have only a dim understanding of any kind of dogma or political stance concerning the cards, and are mainly looking to Tarot as a steady source of income through fortunetelling. I have seen comments made by some Tarot practitioners that seem pretty racist, talking about running people like gypsies out of Tarot (through fortunetelling licensing and the like), because they give it a bad name. One might say in contradiction to this, that gypsies have helped to give Tarot a good portion of its colorful cachet. But that is a cachet much loathed by people who hope to replace it with the idea of Tarot being a psychological or therapeutic tool. While some of the methods employed by these "clinicians" seem like witch-doctoring, they nevertheless insist there is a real distinction between themselves and more colorful Tarotic tribes.
As you now no doubt can tell, yes the world of Tarot can often seem quite absurd or even mad to an outsider or a novice. In fact it is often referred to as Tarotmania.
However, there are also quite interesting things about Tarot cultures, the people who do Tarot, and of course the cards and their symbolism.
I hope this site helps you come to a better understanding of these absurd and interesting things.
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
A new artcle, The First Named Cartomancer In History looks at a 1734 poem, which is not only one of the earliest mentions of cartomancy, but also gives a partial name of the cartomancer.
Monday, January 11th, 2010
A new artcle, What is Tarot Art? explores a number of questions about the art(s) of Tarot, and focuses close attention on the works of two much-acclaimed Tarot personalities, Robert M. Place, and Ciro Marchetti.
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
•The Tarotmania Map is back up, with a few notes concerning what it was and is.
•Relevant to that, I will mention two updates at the Tarotica blog:
- First, my explanation of the various definitions of the word Tarotmania. While I have my own ideas and usages for this word, there have been others.
- Second, a report about a Tarot reading done the The View, which Mary K. Greer recently discussed. Some observations about the reading, and about Greer's comments.
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
•Finally wrote an introduction to the site, which you see above.
•Please note the availability of both the site feed, and the Twitter feed under Links and Things.
