#esoteric sciences

Strength and Justice…

…or is that Justice and Strength? About 15-20 minutes after you start to study Tarot, you’ll learn that these two cards share a strange sort of linkage.  Much of that is due to sequencing concerns.  In the original Marseilles decks, Justice was card VIII in the order, while Strength was card XI.  Then Arthur Edward Waite came along, and because it made the cards run in perfect order in terms of…

Tarot Tip:Lack of Humanity

Yesterday, I posted about how the RWS deck was noteworthy in part because it added scenes to the Minor cards.  Instead of a few Suit emblems bobbing in a sea of featureless white background, we finally had people and other beings actually doing things in these cards.  Granted, the Aces each feature only a celestial hand appearing in the frame, but all of the other Minors offer fully-developed…

Along with questions about the timing of events, Tarot practitioners often consider binary yes/no questions to be some of the inquiries that Tarot is most ill-equipped to handle.  After all, using Tarot to answer questions isn’t really the same thing as flipping a coin.  Or at the very least, it’s like flipping a 78-sided coin — no easy task!  But there are still ways of getting these binary…

"The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

~ Oscar Wilde; De Profundis [1897]