Tarot is an extension of your intuition. Therefore a tarot reading can be done by anyone with little knowledge and good intuition. As for the origin of tarot cards, there has been a lot said, and yet no one knows for sure. But tarot cards started appearing around the 14th century.
If we look at the statistics then it is believed that tarot cards were discovered in northern Italy around the late 14th century or early 15 century. Visconti-Sforza deck is known to be the oldest surviving set and is said to be inspired by costumed figures who participated in carnival parades.
This carnival is also mentioned in The Cask of Amontillado, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe.These illustrated cards became a popular leisure sport later on in Europe and were called tarocchi. Soon tarocchi became popularly known as tarot.
Table of contents:
What is a tarot card?
Traditionally, tarot cards are a set of 78 cards that are represented in two groups called major and minor arcana. We have 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana cards. Major arcana in a tarot set represents karma and spiritual lessons.
You may need to keep an eye on this card for they carry important urgent messages. Although these messages can be positive or shifting depending upon the tarot reading and your intuition.
While minor arcana represents the daily activities which are your regular trials and tribulations and also ways to get through them easily or gracefully. The minor arcana can be further divided into pentacles, wands, swords, and cups.
Meaning Pentacles, wands , cups and swords in tarot card reading
- Pentacles:
This card more often than not represents money matters, career, and success. But sometimes they can also represent levels of emotional and spiritual prosperity. Pentacles are also known as Disks or coins as they talk about the material and physical world.
- Wands
They represent innovation and creativity. In some sense, this is a card that talks about the energy of movement, growth, and new beginnings. Depending upon the situation and location of the card they can either represent strong love messages or messages about your career or your sense of purpose in the world.
- Cups
This card simply speaks emotion, be it your own or others about you. It talks about your emotional well-being. They are related to matters of the soul and reveal the truth about how we feel about ourselves with no filter.
- Swords
As such swords are associated with conflict or strife. It can be external or internal. Swords simply attack our hearts and cut to reveal what matters the most to us. They can talk about illness, heartbreak, war, loss, and death but they can also talk about instances or circumstances that we are not comfortable talking about.
You can understand lessons, purpose, victories, passion, weaknesses, and losses of your life using tarot reading.
What is an oracle reading?
There is another set of reading called oracle reading. It is vastly different from tarot reading as it is a lawless leader of divination tools and can be anything and everything. It does not have a specification or any law around it.
Animals, chakras, crystals, fairies, gods, goddesses, plants, affirmations, etc all are part of oracle cards. Oracle cards are thought to be more for breaking patterns and inspiring intentional change.
How does a tarot card work
This is time to understand that cards themselves are not magic. The magic is within you, your soul, and your connection to the universe or divinity. Tarots are just a way to connect and converse with yourself and your intuition.
It is a way to make your mind quiet and talk to your soul and hear what your heart says. We receive messages from the divine every day, but with the distractions and our work we sometimes do not listen to the message or we are obvious to the message that our guardians are trying to express.
In such scenarios tarot cards work as a medium and help us in interpreting the message in a more understanding and accepting way. Pulling a card or creating an entire spread is just a medium to understand the path we are on or the destination that path will lead.
How to read a tarot card
- Choose a tarot deck of your liking, calm your mind, and purify the environment using a scented candle or negative energy removal methods which are to your liking.
- Once you are set up, now shuffle the deck and think carefully about the question for which you are seeking the answer.
- You can stop the shuffling when you feel like you have shuffled enough and then spread the card.
- Now there are various ways to pick a card, sometimes the cards jump at you or speak to you, or other times you have to coerce them into answering.
- Now that the card is chosen you can start your reading by understanding the meaning or the description of the tarot card.
- Sometimes you can get a reversed tarot card, it is not a common practice but sometimes tarot readers do not read reversed cards while other times they do. So whatever resonates with you or speaks to you should work for you.
In the end, tarot cards are all about intuition and connecting to the divine. Tarot cards or tarot reading is like looking into the mirror. More often than not, we homosapiens are afraid of the unknown or we do not like what we see.
It is good to remember that with acceptance only we can find our freedom.In case you are wondering what more is tarot reading, then you can read about Priyanka Srivastava, a tarot reader who firmly believes in magic and the will of the universe.