by Marcus Katz
© www.derwentphotography.co.uk
Marcus Katz
Marcus Katz is an author and teacher of the Western Esoteric Initiatory System (WEIS). As the Co-Director of the Tarosophy Tarot Association, the world’s largest Tarot organisation, he has studied and taught tarot for thirty-five years and has delivered more than ten thousand face-to-face readings. His first book, Tarosophy, has been called a “major contribution” to tarot tradition by leading teachers. Marcus is also co-creator of ARKARTIA, an interactive online world for tarot studies and experience.
Tali Goodwin
© www.derwentphotography.co.uk
Tali Goodwin is an author, researcher and Co-Director of the Tarosophy Tarot Association. She has created innovative teaching books such as Tarot Flip and Tarot Life. Her research and ‘Cards of Antiquity’ campaign brought Lenormand decks to a new popularity, whilst also uncovering A. E. Waite’s second tarot images, held secret for over a century. Her work on the life of Pamela Colman Smith, published as Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot, revealed new insights into the Waite-Smith Tarot and previously unpublished photographs of Pamela Colman Smith.
Llewellyn Publications
Woodbury, Minnesota
Copyright Information
Tarot Time Traveller: Enhance Your Modern Readings with the Wisdom of the Past © 2017 by Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin.
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First e-book edition ©2017
E-book ISBN: 9780738753393
Book design by Bob Gaul
Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover illustration by Autumns Goddess Design/Jena DellaGrottaglia
Editing by Laura Graves
Interior art: For illustration and photo credits, see Art Credit List. (page 361)
Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Katz, Marcus, author.
Title: Tarot time traveller: enhance your modern readings with the wisdom of
the past / by Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin.
Description: First Edition. | Woodbury: Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039063 (print) | LCCN 2017033314 (ebook) | ISBN
9780738753393 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738751344 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Tarot.
Classification: LCC BF1879.T2 (print) | LCC BF1879.T2 K3853 2017 (ebook) |
DDC 133.3/2424—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039063
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Contents
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Dedications
Introduction
Preface
1. Cartomantic Orientation
2. Cartomancy Card Meanings
3. Cartomancy Methods
4. The Square of Sevens
5. Tarot de Marseille
6. Lenormand
7. The Pioneer Years
8. The Magical Years
9. The Illustrated Years
10. The New Aeon
11. Spiritual Tarot
12. Tarosophy
13. Time Travel Guide
Afterword
Answers to the Exam Questions
Appendix 1: Card Meanings
Appendix 2: Tarot Time Convertor
Bibliography
Art Credit List
Acknowledgments and Permissions
We would like to thank our team of social media moderators: Cath, Charlotte, Derek, Jason B., Jason C., Jenna, Lonnie, Shay, and Steph, who manned the walls of our Facebook group, Tarot Professionals, an heroic task that allowed us the time to create this book.
Where practical, we have made all best efforts to trace copyright ownership. If there is any copyright claim not within our knowledge on images used, we welcome contact through our publishers.
[contents]
Dedications
To Charlotte Louise
To C., C.C., B.C. & Mr. B.E. (Who Guard the Quarters)
To H.B. & H.M. (Constant Companions)
To S.H. (Our new Branch Manager)
To All Those Who Stand Outside Their Time.
In Memory of Rufus Oakapple, brave and curious enough to return.
And as ever, and above all, this book is spiritually dedicated to
Antistita Astri Argentei
The Priestess of the Silver Star
She whose light leads the way to the Arcanum Arcanorum, the Secret of Secrets
Vos Vos Vos Vos Vos
V.V.V.V.V.
[contents]
Introduction
But he planned to make as it were a moving likeness of eternity; and, at the same time that he set in order the Heaven, he made, of eternity that abides in unity, an ever-flowing likeness moving according to number—that to which we have given the name Time.
—Plato, Timaeus
You are about to take a journey through time with nothing more than a playing-card deck, a tarot deck, and perhaps a Lenormand deck in your hands with the tarot time traveller to guide you.
On this journey, you will learn how to read the future as you pick up pieces of the puzzle from the greatest tarot teachers throughout history. The tarot time traveller will escort you in a series of ventures to discover many of the eras of tarot and their mysteries.
You will set off to the very beginnings of cartomantic (card-reading) development and learn different ways to read a normal deck of playing cards. You can also time-hop if you wish and choose your own journey of discovery by exploring the time zones that call to you. You might like to start in the present day and work backwards, or go straight away to the swinging sixties and learn how to read from the rebels of the time, or head to the late Victorian establishment figures who influenced modern tarot.
We hope you will enjoy the experience of learning the whole history of the cards in your hands as much as you learn all the special methods included in this book.
If you are an absolute beginner, you’ll have a complete course in tarot rooted in elements of a very real tarot tradition. As an existing expert, you can use this book to fill in the gaps of eras
you may not have already explored in depth.
Much historical research has gone into this book and there are many unique exercises, so you will also find some fantastic reading lists and decks to explore at the end of each era. 1 You will find each era brought to life with a vignette that opens each chapter and several sections.
We will begin our adventure by surveying the time map of tarot and packing our temporal travel bag with suitable card meanings and emergency methods in case we run into any trouble on our voyage.
Ironically, we do not have enough time to visit absolutely every temporal nexus of playing-card-reading, Lenormand, and tarot development in this book about and for tarot time travellers. In the journey ahead, we will take you to points of interest for the casual reader, tarot scholar, new tarot reader, and the enthusiastic professional. We can only briefly point the way to other avenues such as Kipper cards or the fascinating history and use of the Minchiate, Grand Etteilla, Marseille Tarot, and other decks of antiquity.
Consider our time machine is following cartomancy (fortune-telling by playing cards), Lenormand, and tarot like a skipping-stone across the lake of time, where we will look at the biggest splashes and what makes the most ripples. As an example, let us look at the publishing history of the Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley’s guide to his beautiful and enigmatic tarot deck. This gives us a rough idea of when there was enough general interest in tarot as a subject for such a book to be published; the big splashes are 1944, 1969, and 1974, and then editions until the eleventh printing in 1985.
We will only be making time-stops at a selection of points in the tarot timeline. Buckle yourselves in, keep your hands away from the edges, and enjoy the ride.
And who knows, perhaps this may not be the only tarot time travel manual to be provided in the coming years; when you work across time, the possibilities are endless and the decks of antiquity call for our further consideration.
We will start from the moment when cards first took their fortune-telling meanings, but really our story starts at the dawn of time. In the beginning of time there was a dream—a dream that became real. In the early dawn and from that darkness of time, we awoke. The world around us took on shape and semblance. In time, one thing began to correspond to another. On cave walls, we first learnt the language of symbols. The symbols then began to dwell in our dreams. As the eons passed, we learnt to create the symbols on stone, bark, papyrus, and upon paper, and the symbols continued to correspond to both our dreams and our reality.
There came a time of a great renaissance and seventy-eight sets of symbols were placed together as an infinitely mutable book of dream and reality. A book with loose pages, free to tell any story in any language for all time. It would forever be able to tell dream and reality of past, present, and future. It is the book called tarot.
As we completed this book and reviewed it again from this beginning, we realised that this is a book about meaning—the intention or significance of the images of tarot. Whilst we may read them as a language with our own vocabulary and experience, the cards are pieces of art created as a tool of symbols, and those symbols are signposts. Every card points to something different from another card: the Tower points to a more disruptive future than the harmonious 10 of Cups; the Knight of Wands refers to a totally different person than the Queen of Cups.
So, what does a card mean? Over time, a system—a tradition, almost—of meanings has been associated with the cards, and variations of it are used every minute in readings online and in person, by people and computers. If you open a fortune-teller app on your iPhone and get your card of the day as the 2 of Wands, you will also get a piece of text that says something like “A card of personal power; be bold and show originality today.”
But how did those words and that meaning, get associated with that card? Furthermore, why could it not just as easily say the opposite, “A card of caution; take cover and avoid risks today”?
In this book, we are going to take you through time and incidentally discover how the cards in your deck became placeholders for hundreds of layers of meaning sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory. We hope that it will first confuse you as to what a card may mean, and then clarify a singular thought—the cards do mean something, and what that thing is will vary in its delivery from time to time, place to place, and person to person.
We will return to answer the question of the meaning of the cards when we reach the end of our travels in this book.
In the meantime, you will learn tarot as it was developed, starting with an A-B-C of cartomancy with playing cards, then developing your language with Lenormand, using the right-left way of reading from vintage cartomancy. We will then practice with the Square of Seven, an extended method of cartomancy that will remind you of the Grand Tableaux of Lenormand.
You will then develop a more elaborate use of the language of correspondence through tarot and learn how to enter the cards as if they were landscapes of another world. As you experience the tarot as living ideas, you will then add esoteric and spiritual associations before applying them in a range of cutting-edge modern techniques we call Tarosophy. In doing so, you will re-create the journey of tarot through time and learn a little more about how it became applied to so many different purposes; from fortune-telling to spiritual development.
An Important Note on Lost Time Tracks
It would be impossible to collate and show the development of every deck and every author, teacher, and occultist who has developed the tarot story, so as we have mentioned, we will select only certain nexus points: big splashes and ripples. When an author or teacher has made a big impact on the card meanings (judged later vis-à-vis history), we have included them in our time travelling visits. We may have missed out big players such as Etteilla primarily because we have limited space to tell a connected story—our selections in this book were compiled to link together in a practical sense, and it might prove confusing to follow certain avenues that really deserve their own unique exploration.
Similarly, we have not attempted to collate card meanings across time, although we offer a Tarot Time Convertor in Appendix Two which provides several correspondences between playing cards, tarot and Lenormand. The reader can then determine if the 9 of Pentacles in their chosen tarot meanings matches to their chosen meaning of the 9 of Diamonds in playing-
card cartomancy or the Lenormand’s Coffin card. It would be overly confusing to present every parallel strand of history for card meanings across different types of playing-card decks, authors, tarot decks, Lenormand decks, et cetera, so we have presented them separately in their specific zones and chapters and then collated a selection in Appendix Two. If we were to add the 36 Kipper cards or try and align the 97 Minchiate cards to the 78 tarot cards, we would likely blow a gasket on our real-time travel device—our own mind.
We hope it will become obvious how other ripples have been created throughout time, and you may like to place whomever we have missed visiting in the timeline for your own studies and time travels. In that way, Tarot Time Traveller can serve as a framework for a full history and discovery of the mysteries of tarot.
To produce this book, we have taken a real-life journey through time over several years, accessing antique Chapbooks and collections of women’s magazines; secret order documents and hand-written journals; visiting museums and archives around the world. We hope in your own tracing of this journey, you will agree with us that there is nothing new under the sun and that the tarot contains powerful echoes of the lives of real people across time.
Over time as well, your own readings will consolidate your specific “meanings” for your cards, which will also change in time—you too will become a tarot time traveller. That said, there is a mystery in this, which we will reveal at the conclusion of this present book.
Is it important to know the history of the cards? Well, we think so—our own reading of the cards, particularly the Waite-Smith Taro
t, after thirty years, shifted massively after our writing of Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot (Llewellyn, 2015). When we get the 2 of Pentacles in a reading, that card is now (for us) far more about miscommunication—often deliberate—than the usual “juggling of resources” that many contemporary sources copy and paste between each other.
We trust this book will provide you an interesting range of layers to deepen your understanding of the cards as a divinatory tool. Let us begin at two personal points of time before stepping through the portals that contain all time and all possibilities: your tarot deck.
[contents]
1. See www.tarottimetraveller.com for a regularly updated list of addendum and convenient reading list.
Preface
Marcus
Dawn, Friday, 17 June, 1983: Ambergate, Derbyshire, England
An eighteen-year-old boy sits out on the balcony of his bedroom in a little village nestled in the heart of England. He has just received a mail-order copy of the book Practice of Ritual Magic by Gareth Knight and is sat in a yoga position, meditating to the rising sun. His notebook records the appropriate correspondences for meditation; the god-name IHVH, the Angel Raphael and Paralda, Lady of the Sylphs, who he imagines he can see in the bright morning sky.
A few days earlier he had asked his homemade tarot cards a question: “How should I go about my studies in magick?”
The cards, twenty-two small pieces of cardboard on which he had pasted a photocopy of the major arcana taken from a Stuart Kaplan book in the local library some four years ago, were laid out in the Celtic Cross:
Devil (reversed), Temperance, Death, Hanged Man, Justice,
Wheel of Fortune, Hermit, Strength, Chariot, Hierophant. 2
He wrote dutifully in his journal his interpretation of these cards, that the reversed Devil signified ignorance but perhaps the dawn of spiritual seeking; that Temperance would be crossing him always, calling him to temper his life and responsibilities; that Death in the near future was a new beginning and an initiatory transformation; the Hanged Man below was “spiritual advancement” and so on to the final outcome card of the Hierophant; against which he wrote “social and material success.” 3