CARD TALK is written, edited, and produced by Meg Jones Wall of 3am.tarot. Theme music created by PaulYudin.
Meg:
My name is Meg Jones Wall and you're listening to Card Talk, a mini-podcast for Tarot Basics and Evergreen Insights I'm glad you're here and evergreen insights I'm glad you're here. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about the basics of tarot just quick and dirty basics. What is it, where did it come from, why is it so popular and why is it particularly relevant right now? Let's get into it. First, what the hell is tarot? Tarot is a card system that can be used for divination, reflection, creativity, spirituality, inspiration, meditation and so many other things that I'm not even listing here.
Meg:
Tarot is one of those tools that can be used for any number of things, and every person you meet who's been using tarot for a while can probably introduce you to some new technique or way of using the cards that you never would have thought of before. I think it's one of the coolest things about tarot as a system and modality. Fifth suit a distinct suit of trump cards that generally are described as broader archetypes, and these trumps can be used alongside the four minor arcana suits that closely resemble a standard 52-card poker-style playing card deck. So, essentially, when we're talking about a tarot deck, we're talking about a five-suit deck that includes the major arcana, which is made up of 22 distinct archetypes, which are numbered 0 to 21, as well as the minor arcana, which are broken into four suits and each suit includes 14 cards. Now these 14 cards are separated as pips and court cards. How I talk about them? Pips you can think of as the numbered cards, numbered 1 through 10. And court cards are often figures. Even if you're working with a deck that doesn't have a lot of people in it, if people are going to show up in the tarot, it's likely in the court cards, which broken up into page knight, queen and king, although those are often renamed in a lot of modern decks.
Meg:
Next is where did tarot come from? And that, my friends, is a fantastic question. I have to be real with you. I am not a tarot historian or scholar, though I have been learning a lot more about tarot history over the last few years. This is in no way going to be exhaustive, but I am just going to give you a couple of quick hits, just so you have the absolute basics of tarot history. I have a much lengthier lecture on my website, but I'm also including a lot of great resources in the show notes if you want to dig more into tarot history, which I highly recommend because it's wild. In short, card decks have been used for centuries all over the world, and while the inspiration for tarot cards specifically likely comes from a very wide variety of sources and people groups, the decks that we consider tarot cards specifically likely comes from a very wide variety of sources and people groups.
Meg:
The decks that we consider tarot decks today have their origins largely in Western Europe in the mid-1400s. A lot of resources that you find, especially older ones, are going to tell you that tarot's history is murky and mysterious, that we don't know anything, but in truth, we know a lot actually about tarot's development and history. We just don't know anything, but in truth, we know a lot actually about tarot's development in history. We just don't know everything. What we do know is that artists created a lot of different kinds of decks and that a lot of different kinds of people used the decks, and that cards were used for many different purposes at this time, including divination, as the Romani people were already in Europe practicing the art of card divination at the time that tarot cards began to become popular. The earliest decks were wildly different from one another. They really were distinguished by having that trump suit. But the earliest archetypes were really inspired by stories and myths, ideas that would have been really well known to the people using the decks at that time, which means that even among different regions, different classes and different kinds of artists, the archetypes were different and there were different numbers of archetypes. The archetypes were arranged in different orders, the suits in the minors looked different, the court cards were always changing and expanding, etc. The first hundred years really few hundred years of tarot history have a lot of different kinds of decks, which is one of the coolest things about looking at really old tarot cards.
Meg:
Tarot was used in a lot of different ways. I like to think about it as a community art project where different artists could share their ideas on relevant archetypes and stories for the people at that time. But it was really commonly used primarily for card games at that time. But it was really commonly used primarily for card games If you've ever played Bridge or another game where you have to take a trick like Spades or Hearts or Lost Air for my Canadian friends but it was really a card game that was used by different classes of people at different times. However, there's also evidence that the cards were used during parties as kind of a divination, getting to know you sort of game. If you've ever done the thing where you watched a TV show and decided which character represent different people that you know, that's basically how people would use the tarot deck at different times. They would assign different cards to different people based on their own criteria, and then people would take turns defending their choices based on the characteristics and impressions that they had from the card itself, as well as on the person that they're talking about.
Meg:
Again, I'm not a scholar of tarot history I will do another episode soon talking about the different decks and traditions but what you really just should know is that tarot has always been a game of the people and, while it has undergone some different facets of gatekeeping throughout the centuries, it really originated as a community kind of art project and really was something that people used in their daily lives all the time, for fun and for pleasure, as well as for divination and inspiration, which means that if you want to do that now, you do not have to study a lot of different things in order to be a tarot reader. You really can follow the earliest traditions of tarot, which is using it for your own purposes and making it your own. Next, let's talk about why tarot is so popular. If you do research into tarot history, you will see that at various times in history, tarot has enjoyed different resurgences over the centuries. This most recent wave in some ways feels like an extension of a big wave that happened in the 1970s, but I think it's also really relevant to the times that we are living in.
Meg:
Tarot's popularity, along with astrology and other spiritual modalities outside of organized religion, always increases when there is a rising lack of faith in institutional religion and other general institutions like education and government and politics and politics. There is an increasing desire of younger generations to have more agency in making decisions and understand the self in new ways, as well as connecting with community. Modalities like tarot always seem to increase in popularity during times of unrest, and so it makes sense that, as we watch a genocide in our phones, as we watch our politicians not listen to us, even as we demand certain changes, as we struggle against institutions that are more interested in feeding capitalism and making sure billionaires are happy than taking care of the people, that more and more of us would be drawn to systems like tarot and astrology and numerology and other modalities and types of spirituality to find support and encouragement. It's a hard time to be alive, and I say this as a white person with a lot of privilege living in the United States. There are so many people suffering in so many horrifying ways around the world. It makes sense that a lot of us would be leaving the church or losing our faith in those kinds of institutions and really looking beyond that for something more that we can grasp onto and connect to one another through.
Meg:
That kind of leads us right into this next and final question, which is why is tarot relevant right now? I've been talking about this some on Instagram as well this idea that you know, in times of upheaval, of unrest, of change and challenge and revolution, that systems like tarot aren't particularly useful. But I would argue that the opposite is true. The thing is tarot is a system that can be used by anyone for a really wide variety of functions, which means it's kind of always relevant. But also we are witnessing impossibly hard things. I know I already kind of talked about this, but genocide, war over natural resources, climate crisis, inflation, politicians who value property and power over human life.
Meg:
There are so many demands on our attention and for many of us, just making ends meet and getting our basic needs met can take everything that we have. There's not always room for much else, but the thing is, every single one of us, no matter our job, no matter our social standing, no matter our level of privilege, needs ways to breathe and rest and to take a beat and to remember who we are and what matters and what we're fighting for. And I have seen in my own life and seen in the lives of others the ways that tarot can be a valuable, consistent ritual, that it can be a place to return to, that it can serve as a companion when things are hard, because tarot isn't just about love and light. It can help us find the words and the archetypes for the hard things that we're going through. Tarot can really show up in a way that reflects our feelings back to us and holds space for them, in a way that can be so soothing and healing and encouraging right now.
Meg:
No matter how you use tarot whether you use it primarily as a source of inspiration for creativity, whether you use it as a spirituality tool, whether you use it as a grounding tool, whether you use it to build community, tarot can help us find ways back to ourselves and can also serve as a really powerful ritual for taking a few moments out of our day or our week to remember our purpose and find the support that we need in that moment. Tarot is also really functional for helping us make decisions and reflect on challenges. It can offer us insight into difficult situations and can also be a really cool way to connect with people in our lives that we care about. If you've never tried to read collaboratively or do a tarot reading with other people, I'm going to do a whole episode on it because I think it is such a cool practice and can be such a valuable way to build community and deepen relationships. The process of just learning about tarot can also teach us about ourselves and our world and the people that we love and the ways that we show up for the causes that we care about. And in developing a tarot practice, a tarot ritual, a tarot habit, we also bring that kind of reflection and meditation into our regular life. We normalize taking time for ourselves and we also normalize asking ourselves hard questions, challenging our own biases and assumptions and digging into things that feel sticky or hard. That feel sticky or hard.
Meg:
Anyone can use tarot cards. I will say that all the time. I'm going to keep saying it. I feel like I've been saying it for years. Anyone can use tarot. But since it's an existing system, since it's been around for a long time and since there are so many resources on it, it can be really overwhelming to dig in and start your own practice. It can be hard to know where to start. My purpose here in general in my work, but especially for this podcast, is to give you the tools that you need to build or expand a tarot practice of your very own. Again, I'll say this over and over I'm not here to try to convince you to read. Exactly like me, you might find that you disagree with some of my interpretations or inclusions or the ways that I talk about these cards, and that's not only fine. It's actually great. It's okay if, in using tarot as a tool of rebellion or revolution or self-discovery or transformation, you end up disagreeing with me, like that's part of what it's for. It's helping you understand what resonates with you and learn to listen to your own intuition and instincts and really experience and perspective. So I hope that that kind of helps provide some general basics and introduction to the practice of tarot and what tarot is episode is.
Meg:
Don't ignore tarot history just because people talk about it in the most boring way possible. Tarot history is really rich and fascinating and strange. There is everything from occultists like publishing information that came to them in a fever dream, and claiming it's true to like digging into all of these different techniques and rituals and rich histories from different people, groups, the ways that tarot has evolved in different ways, the ways that each tarot deck originated and was standardized and distributed. There's so much to dig into and, again, I'm not a history scholar. It's just not my area of expertise. But there are some incredible scholars out there who have done some amazing work gathering and synthesizing and breaking down tarot history and I highly recommend checking it out.
Meg:
When I first started reading tarot, I really didn't want to get into tarot history because everyone just talked about it in this really vague way and it didn't seem helpful. But now that I've learned more and I can point you towards some really cool resources, I think it's absolutely worth digging into, if anything, just to see how wild people can get about the cards and also to really remind you of how many different ways people have used the cards throughout history. In every generation, in every tarot resurgence, there have been people who claimed that they could use tarot in a completely new way and who left their own mark on the ways that we understand certain cards. And what that really means is that by reading the cards yourself, by putting your own stamp on your interpretations, by bringing your own unique perspectives and experience to the cards, you are immediately contributing to tarot history. You are part of the long lineage of people making the cards their own. And isn't that fucking rad? Because I think it's rad, all right.
Meg:
Thank you so much for being here, for listening and for supporting my work, and I will be back with more Card Talk soon. We'll be back with more Card Talk soon. Card Talk is committed to staying ad-free for everyone, which is only possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. To pledge your monthly support or to make a one-time donation, click the link in the show notes. You can also find episode transcripts, more about me and additional tarot resources through my website, 3amtarotcom. See you next time.