The source did not provide any Minor Arcana. Are we then to conclude that these 22 books are for instruction only, and not for readings? Some may conclude that, however, in The Word of One, we find these words:

"Follow the depths of the Tarot; enter its mystery, yet do not be frivolous with it. When certain times impress you with rightness, you will shuffle and read for choice persons for reasons beyond the apparent. In such a manner new motions will be activated. Forgotten will be politics and nicities. Truth in its blunt beauty will issue to enrich the receivers."

The absence of any revealed Minors tells me that different teachers may create their own minor arcana, or use the minor arcana from the old tarot. If you already know at least one form of tarot, the simplest thing is just to use the deck you already know. Find the table of correspondences later on in this chapter, which numbers the major arcana, and shows their corresponding card in the old tarot. The new tarot is just the evolved form of the old tarot. So it is quite easy to add your understanding of the new tarot majors to your understanding of the old major. Thus, you can do New Tarot readings with an Old Tarot deck.

"Divination" has the same root as "divine" and "divinity." It is invoked by a deliberately random act, results of which cannot be foreseen or controlled. In the case of tarot, that refers to a thorough shuffle of the cards, followed by cutting them several times. How many times depends on how good you are at shuffling. As I say, one deliberately makes the sequence of cards purely random. If they turn out to be deeply significant to the querent (you are the reader), then how can we explain this? We cannot. It is a miracle. Of course skeptics have a different explanation and no really fair and objective study of tarot has ever been done. So we must rely on our own experience, either by having readings done for us, or by doing readings for our friends and acquaintances. It is OK to be skeptical if we are also capable of learning from our own experience something contrary to our previous opinion.

Making a New Tarot Deck

Tarot cards and playing cards have the same origin. They both have 4 suits, using the same 4 archetypes of earth, air, fire and water. They both have royal cards. They both have 10 numbered pips in each suit. And they both have a major arcana, although in the playing card deck, this has been reduced to only the first card in the sequence of major arcana, called "The Fool" or "The Joker." A tarot deck has 26 more cards than a playing card deck, so it will take all of one deck (which we will call deck 1) and about half of the second deck, deck 2. Begin with the Jokers from both decks. Mark one of them with the number zero and the name "Nameless One - Fool." Mark the other with the number "21" and the name "Knower - Judgment." Then go through and get all the jacks from deck 2, and from deck 1. You now have 2 jacks for each suit. Mark one of them "Page" and the other one "Knight."

We now have 2 of our major arcana. Where will we get the other 20? Why, from the Spades and Clubs of deck two. As you have gone through the previous chapters, you may have noticed that the major arcana are all numbered. This numbering is pretty arbitrary, but it will allow us to associate major arcana with the numbered Spades and Clubs. If you happen to buy rider packs of playing cards (recommended), take a look at the Ace of Spades. There you will find the Mother divinity, surrounded by her spark-stars of creativity, in an onion shaped dome, which can be thought of as a temple, resembling Moslem and Orthodox Christian temples in Russia or India. The Taj Mahal, the most beautiful building in the world, has just such a dome. So we will refer to that suit as Temples. They will do for Major Arcana number 1 - 10. Write the name of each major arcanum book on the corresponding number of Temples. We could just as easily reverse this order and use Shamrocks (Clubs) for 1 - 10 and Temples for 11 - 20.

Consider the suit of clubs. They are really Shamrocks, traditional Celtic Christian symbols of the Holy Trinity. Divinities usually come in threes, even in monotheistic religions like Christianity or Hinduism. Hinduism monotheistic? Yes, because all the gods are just manifestations of Atman. And the highest manifestations come in threes, such as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, creation, preservation and destruction. In Christianity, it is the Father, Son and Holy Ghost (which may descend and give one the power of healing, prophecy, or speaking in tongues). Or it is the Holy Family, Father, Mother Mary of the Immaculate Conception, and Jesus, incarnate god and conceived by a virgin. Go through the Shamrocks from deck 2 and add ten to each of the numbers, so you now have 11 - 20. Go through and write the corresponding numbered major arcana name on each card.

The New Forms of Earth, Air, Fire, Water

Hearts are serpents, since both involve sex and initiation, rather than our intellectual side. They correspond to wands in the old deck, element fire. Shamrocks are pears, since both stand for divine wisdom (Hagia Sophia). They correspond to cups in the old tarot, element water. Temples are curved blades, since the Mother is about inspiration, creativity and decision. A curved blade can propel one on a ship or plane. Or it could be a chef's knife, tools of creativity and practicality, or even the traditional scimitar, tool of war and authority. They correspond to swords in the old tarot, element air, representing motion and decision. Remember the upraised sword held by Lady Justice on many old courthouses? It can represent punishment, especially execution, but its more common meaning is decision.

This may sound very confusing, but it is all based on ancient unconscious associations, the result of many lifetimes. The language of symbols is the language of divinity, and specifically of mankind's Collective Unconscious. It is not something that can be invented. The meaning of the basic elements of symbolism has not changed in 40,000 years. That is why a symbolist can read the ancient cave paintings, and can understand the meaning of burials from the last Ice Age. See Symbolism. The symbolic meaning of something is rooted in whatever is unusual or distinctive about that thing. For instance, in an orchard, most species are short-lived and quick to produce. Most produce their fruit in spring or summer. Pear trees can live a hundred years or more, and only begin to produce fruit about the time the rest of the orchard is dying out after a dozen years. Not only that, pears are picked just before frost, and even then they are not ripe. Lay them away in some cool, dark place and they will ripen to perfection between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once they are fully ripe, they are too soft for shipping, so the pears you buy in a supermarket are likely to be hard and not ripe. Now what does all this suggest in human actions? Wisdom, spirituality and civilization, because these things take a long time to come to fruition. How does the element water come into this? From the ancient practice of scrying, of looking into a still bowl of water with unfocused eyes until images swim into the mind's eye. That is how Nostradamus worked. The things he wrote were the things he saw, not literally as in a vision, but intuitively.

Serpents have always suggested sex. Freud wasn't the first to notice this. But what he did not know is that sex itself is a symbol for initiation. The first act of sex is what changes a person from a child to an adult. When an older woman suggests to a teenage boy that she will make him a man, it is literally true. Ditto for a mature man making a girl into a woman. Sex is thus a symbol for any transforming experience, such as the illumination of fire, or any sort of epiphany or trial by fire. Men or women who go into combat experience a trial by fire, and are never the same afterwards, for better or for worse. It is an initiation.

Stones as jewels represent money, and as building stones, the concrete reality of building something physical and lasting. Blades of all sorts are mainly used to cut things in two, but this itself is a symbol. It means a critical decision which divides time into a before and after. Just as one cannot go back to childhood after being initiated into the rites of adulthood, so one can never go back to the past after some critical decision has been reached. Thus, blades can refer to a critical branchpoint in life, while the Royal blades can refer to people who make such decisions, such as businessmen, politicians, military commanders, judges or anyone who is decisive.

If you have studied the Alphabet of symbolism, you should know the basic meaning of most of the numbers. However, in that chapter I say little about "one" or "ten." I shall do so now. "One" always represents the beginnings of something, but only in potential. "Two" are polar opposites, like the north pole of a magnet and the south pole. Either implies the other. Together they make one magnet. That is why opposites attract. "Love is completion," a favorite saying of Thales. "Three" is the wHoly Trinity, god's favor, a prayer answered. "Four" is the wHoly quaternity, ecological perfection. "Five" is a person at their best on this physical plane. Luck with money. "Six" is the wHoly Trinity split apart by polarity, leading to religious wars, pogroms, fanaticism, burning witches and heretics. "Seven" is the seven ways, and the sum of divine and earthly perfection. "Eight" is earthly perfection split apart by polar opposites. Greed. "Nine" is the Trinity of Trinities. Spirituality. "Ten" stands for the ten forms of Samadhi (mystical union) and the ten sephiroth on the Kabbala. But it can also stand for Human Perfection (5) rent apart by polar opposites (2). Poor health.

In our new deck we have converted half the jacks to pages, half to knights. Think of the role of pages in a medieval court. They were servants and students and carried messages. Knights in the new tarot may be either male or female. They are adults, on the go, changing, not yet fixed in their ways. Kings and Queens are equal, one male, the other female. They are set in their ways and in a position of authority. So in a reading, the Royal Cards usually refer to people. It is up to the querent to recognize who. Tarot readers are not usually psychic, and do not need to be. That may come as a surprise to some people.

Royal cards do not always refer to people. A page card could represent a message, or a check in the mail, or a promotion. A knight card could represent strife, by the querent, or directed toward the querent. A king or queen card could represent success and a position of authority.

When I first began to intensively study the New Tarot in the form of the T deck, I was dissatisfied with their minor arcana. So, I began doing mandalas. First I received the Aces, then the Deuces, and so on to the Tens. I am no artist, so I only give a description, and an interpretation based on that in Interpretations. When I put the New Tarot on a web site, I decided to try to find images on the web which fit the basic meaning of a number and a suit. So this gave me a second version of minor arcana, also found in the "Interpretations" chapter. You should feel free to take either of these approaches yourself, once you feel yourself to be a master of symbolism. Make your own version of the minor arcana, if you like.

You can see all the new major and minor arcana here, and print them out. These make very small cards, not large enough to shuffle. Printing cards which are easy to shuffle is a pretty specialized job. Better either to use an existing tarot deck, or make your own with two identical playing card decks.

Now, how to do a reading? A good place to begin is with the three card reading, especially when you are just fooling around with your friends. The querent asks a question. The deck is thoroughly shuffled, cut by the querent, shuffled, cut by the querent, and once more. Now peel off the top 3 cards and lay them in a row, left to right. This represents past, present, and future. Believe it or not, you can learn a lot about the meanings of the cards by doing readings, if the querent will cooperate. Master the 3 card reading before you go on to more complex spreads. It is quite all right to look up the meanings of the cards. You don't have to memorize them. Also remember that a card can carry many different messages. Try to pick out one coherent theme in the cards laid down in the reading.

Once you have mastered the 3 card layout, and that may take a year or more, doing as many readings as you can for yourself and others, then you are ready for the classic Celtic Cross. It doesn't seem to me that any two tarot readers do this exactly the same way. Some never let anyone else touch their cards. Others have the querent cut the cards. I find as the reader it is best to see what the querent expects, and then go along with that.

Every tarot reader has their own way of laying the cards down. Here's the sequence I use: covers, crosses, above, below, behind, before, you, home, hopes/fears, final outcome. I always start by picking a Royal Card to represent the querent. This doesn't have to be too exact. Young people will be pages, youth of both sexes knights, and mature people kings or queens, depending on sex. If they are passionate, choose serpents. Intuitive and wise, choose pears. Decisive in business or war, choose curved blades. Craftsmen, handy with their hands as gardeners or carpenters or mechanics, choose stones. Because I am not good at the standard riffle shuffle, I use a domino shuffle, where all the cards are spread out face down on a table and swirled around, then picked up at random. I usually let the querent cut the cards. If they are good at shuffling, I will let them do the whole thing. 3 riffle shuffles, 3 cuts.

Lay the querent card on the table, right side up to you, the reader. "Covers" goes on top and means immediate influence or concern. "Crosses" is laid across these cards and usually means an obstacle. "Above" is laid away from you, above the center cards, and just think of every possible connotation of "above." Indeed, that is good advice for each of the positions. "Below" is laid toward you, below the central pile. "Below" can be "beneath" as in the foundation of the querent's personality. It can also be many other things. "Behind" is laid to the left of the central pile, and usually means the immediate past, or things or people the querent is putting behind them. "Before" is laid to the right of the pile, and is the immediate future. You then start a vertical line to the right of what is now a Celtic Cross. Start at the bottom with "You," the querent, above that "Home" which may not mean family, above that "hopes/fears," which can be one or the other or both (ambivalence), and above that "final outcome."

If the gods are with you and a true divination has resulted, the separate cards will be like the words of a sentence, or the sentences of a paragraph. They will make up one message, with possible sub-themes. That is your only guide, really, in interpreting the reading. It must make one coherent message. Good luck!

28. Knower | Contents | 30. Magick