Full text of ' THE ESOTERIC ORIGINS OF TAROT: More than A Wicked Pack of Cards Lewis Keizer, Ph.D. Foreword Modern Tarot is not a card game. It is a form of divination. As such, modern Tarot does not originate in medieval Italian card games, although they eventually became mediums through which cartomantic divination was done. Modern Tarot has a much more ancient derivation in the phenomenology of religions, iconography, and in Western esoteric tradition. Christine Payne-Towler has provided me with most of the motivation and much of the research for this essay. She could have written a much more comprehensive tome, as she is an expert on Tarot iconography and symbol- ogy. But she wanted a scholar to look over her materials and lend credence to the esoteric origins of Tarot. I am honored to comply. The So-Called “Propaganda Campaign” Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett make the following statement in Chapter One of A Wicked Pack of Cards'. “(The Tarot pack). I Tarocchi Di Oswald Wirth Pdf FilesIs the subject of the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched.. Love mahjong ps2 iso. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was con- cocted by the occultists..” A statement such as this is as false as the misguided histories of Tarot presented by Gebelin, Etteilla, and the other founders of Tarot occultism in Western Europe. There was no conspiracy to misrepresent Tarot — only an attempt to understand and explain it. Eigh- teenth-century science was at the mercy of its own limitations, just as twentieth-century scholarship will later be recognized to be. A Wicked Pack of Cards provides us with an excel- lently researched history of medi- eval and modern Tarot schools, but it does not attempt to understand and explain its signifi- cance. Tarot cards deck Nefertari Egyptian New Offered is an exquisite Tarot deck. Rare and out of print, these are new and have never been used. This deck is from 1998. Made in Italy. Each card is embossed and decorated in gold leaf. The instructions are in Italian. This is a sought after and professional deck, perfect fom. It under- stands Tarot as part of the history of European games, but it has no appreciation of the origin of modern Tarot in the history and phenomenol- ogy of the Western esoteric tradition, or as a sophisticated development of effective divina- tion technique. A Wicked Pack of Cards provides a great deal of information, but the authors do not have a thorough enough back- ground in the Western mystery tradition to properly interpret their information. This article is intended to refocus academic discussion of Tarot to its significance and meaning within the context of real historical development in the Western esoteric tradition. I 10 Papa Mantegna deck 2 The Power of Tarot When I was a young academic teaching Religious Studies at the University of Califor- nia in Santa Cruz during the sixties and seven- ties, I was chagrined at the gullibility of students for naive occultist theories about history, scripture, and emerging new-age fads like Tarot. Like the authors of A Wicked Pack of Cards, I knew that modern Tarot decks were merely a development of medieval Italian Tarocchi. Tarot was not the secret Urim and Thumim of the Old Testament or the hieratic Egyptian Books of Hermes described by Clement of Alexandria. Yet not only young, impression- able students, but often even intelligent, educated adults wanted to believe that the Tarot was sanctified with hoary antiquity.
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