Your Luck And Fate Are In The Cards
“An imprisoned person with no other book than the tarot, if they knew how to use it, could in a few years gain universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence.” - Eliphas Levi.
Eliphas Levi was a mystic, occultist, and the greatest influencer of The Golden Dawn, a secret society focused on the teachings of hermetic wisdom. This order brought forth the most common tarot decks we know today. These card decks, decorated with the principle archetypal stories of humanity, date back to antiquity.
An Origin Of Mystery
Tarot has gone by many names, from tarocco to tarok, all depending on the region. Some historical records reference the paper tile games of China, dating back to 50AD. Others detail it extending from ancient Egypt, later branching throughout Europe. Played as early as the 1400s, it reached the height of its popularity throughout the Victorian era. We rarely play tarot games today, as now they’re primarily used for divination and spiritual guidance. Yet the knowledge of its origins are likely lost to time.
Divination Or Game Of Chance
If we trust in the vision of Eliphas Levi and Antoine Court de Gébelin before him, we can also trust the tarot is a mystical archive of ageless esoteric wisdom.
A standard deck of playing cards can also perform tarot readings without the major arcana. Just as common as 4-suit 52-card decks, there are stripped down decks where several cards from the ace to the six are removed to perform different readings, or to play different games.
Which arrived first, the divination, or the game? As soon as playing cards were introduced to Europe, so were references of cartomancers, or rather, card readers. In any competitive card game, the players opposite each other will look for tells. Studying each other’s body language & tone for any hint of the “luck” they bore. The last hand played may in fact predict the fate of the next round.
If you could go back in time and place a winning bet on a sporting event, would you?
“Games of chance” were born of both playing cards and tarot.
The Symbology Of Destiny
They created these decks, in image and number, as a form of meta-symbology in line with the hermetic wisdoms of ancient Greece and ancient Egypt. Meta-symbology is a combination of numerology and astrology using standard playing cards to perform destiny readings. The four suits represent the four seasons. The 13 cards in each suit represent the thirteen lunar cycles. The 52 cards are interpretations of the 52 weeks. Add the values of all the cards together they come to 365, representing all the days in a year.
No matter the application, for luck, or for fate, these decks and their uses are intertwined with the human condition. When looking at the hermetic tradition, the symbology of the major arcana represents a map of the fool’s, or hero’s journey. Similar to the 3 metamorphoses of Nietzsche, it details the odyssey of our personal development, the road to wisdom, and the transcendence beyond.
You may read the cards for the enlightenment of understanding where you are, where you’ve come from, and where you are going. Or you may be more prone to play a game of chance. So next time you play a game of poker, you might just have a different perspective of the outcome of the game, depending on how you interpret your’s or your opponent’s hand. Either way, this all gives deeper insight into the origin of the expression whether the outcome you are hoping for “is in the cards”.