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Is there any book that gives correct descriptions of the tarot?
I don't mean that touchy feely, intuition new age stuff.
But a description that actually follows the system Arthur Waite is describing in his book?
He hints to a system over and over again, but never explains it. He is also too preoccupied with bashing other writers, telling us what the cards are not, to be telling us what the cards actually are.


What is the best book that explains:
Why are the backgrounds color the way they are? why are the numbers numbered the way they are? what does the flowers mean? what's up with the red towers? And so on.

Supposedly he purposely withheld info and keys pertaining to Golden Dawn secrets and had no intention of revealing anymore.

manofsands wrote:Supposedly he purposely withheld info and keys pertaining to Golden Dawn secrets and had no intention of revealing anymore.

I had a similar suspicion. Did anybody of his students pick up where he left off?
Or did anybody crack the code since then?

The trouble with this one - if its precisely Waite's deck you're looking at I don't know that there's anything out there.

The thing that AE Waite was going on about, if you're talking about the companion book to the deck and his at-length description of the cards, was the esoteric use of tarot which is the mystery school use of it for symbolic meditation, secret teachings within the cards, etc. etc..

If you don't mind swapping to a different deck and doing the same thing you can get 13 or 14 years of that with BOTA. Short of joining BOTA you can look at some of Paul Foster Case's books like 'The Tarot' and some of the others that are out there which will at least point you in the right direction.

In my experience so far in BOTA and looking at other analogous decks like the Rider-Waite, Golden Dawn decks, Thoth, and any of the others that put the fool on the Hebrew letter Aleph is that they're incredibly similar in framework because they're, for the most part, using the letter assignments in the Sepher Yetzirah to pick out which tarot keys go with which letter of the alphabet (meaning element, planet, zodiac sign, etc.), running right down the Athanasius Kircher ToL with the 22 keys, and generally these also conform with the Golden Dawn color-scale. That specific framework started with GD and progressed from there (needless to say PFC, AC, AEW, all these people spent time in the GD as well).


I don't know how interested in the esoteric side of tarot you are but, as far as I'm hearing from people, you can spend the rest of your life lock-picking your subconscious with it and still not max out its utility.

I refer back to this website http://www.biddytarot.com/tarot-card-meanings/

It may not be exactly what you're looking for but there's a lot of good info.

Cybernetic_Jazz wrote: In my experience so far in BOTA and looking at other analogous decks like the Rider-Waite, Golden Dawn decks, Thoth, and any of the others that put the fool on the Hebrew letter Aleph is that they're incredibly similar in framework because they're, for the most part, using the letter assignments in the Sepher Yetzirah to pick out which tarot keys go with which letter of the alphabet (meaning element, planet, zodiac sign, etc.), running right down the Athanasius Kircher ToL with the 22 keys, and generally these also conform with the Golden Dawn color-scale. That specific framework started with GD and progressed from there (needless to say PFC, AC, AEW, all these people spent time in the GD as well).
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This is my understanding too. I first heard about this from levi. The fun part is that Waite denies it in his book and even calls out levi on it as being incorrect.
Then again Waite also goes on in length why the tarot is not Egyptian, and then adds Egyptian symbols to his deck.,

RoseRed wrote:I refer back to this website http://www.biddytarot.com/tarot-card-meanings/

It may not be exactly what you're looking for but there's a lot of good info.

The problem with sites like that is that they concentrate on the individual cards. Most of my books does the same.
But it's hard to find information on the system behind the individual cards. And also, how the cards change in correlation with each other.

I don't necessarily know that the Egyptian motif means that the cards need to have originated in Egypt. Hermeticism is Greco-Egyptian, Pythagoras is cited as having received much of his number theology and sacred geometry ideas from the Egyptians, many seem to suggest that Mosaic belief and the Levitical priesthood came as a product of Akhenaten (Imhotep IV), and of course it was the Corpus Hermeticum that was translated by Cosimo Di Medici's guy Marsilio Ficino which fired off the Hermetic and alchemical revolution of the Renaissance. All of that is deep in both Masonic and Rosicrucian heritage which is why I don't think it's particularly out there to see, say, the sphinxes in The Chariot, Hermanubis in The Wheel of Fortune, IAO referenced in The Judgement, etc. etc.

I'd probably just redouble my suggestion to get The Tarot by Paul Foster Case. It elucidates a lot of the obscurities in AE Waite's guide and seems very much to be on message with AE Waite's deck but without nearly as many blinds.

Cybernetic_Jazz wrote:I don't necessarily know that the Egyptian motif means that the cards need to have originated in Egypt. Hermeticism is Greco-Egyptian, Pythagoras is cited as having received much of his number theology and sacred geometry ideas from the Egyptians, many seem to suggest that Mosaic belief and the Levitical priesthood came as a product of Akhenaten (Imhotep IV), and of course it was the Corpus Hermeticum that was translated by Cosimo Di Medici's guy Marsilio Ficino which fired off the Hermetic and alchemical revolution of the Renaissance. All of that is deep in both Masonic and Rosicrucian heritage which is why I don't think it's particularly out there to see, say, the sphinxes in The Chariot, Hermanubis in The Wheel of Fortune, IAO referenced in The Judgement, etc. etc.

I'd probably just redouble my suggestion to get The Tarot by Paul Foster Case. It elucidates a lot of the obscurities in AE Waite's guide and seems very much to be on message with AE Waite's deck but without nearly as many blinds.

Okay, I'll start buying his books.

Yeah, I didn't think that was exactly what you were looking for.

And also, how the cards change in correlation with each other.

But that's the Art of Tarot. That comes with experience. You can't really write about that because each position and each card in different positions has it's own correlation to the cards around it.

RoseRed wrote:
But that's the Art of Tarot. That comes with experience. You can't really write about that because each position and each card in different positions has it's own correlation to the cards around it.

You would need a library for this purpose...

If you are looking for anything more consistently divinatory I'd agree with a lot of the posts further up the thread - that the divinatory meaning vs. occult/esoteric meaning of most cards have some shared data but overall the meanings and focus are quite different.

The divinatory meanings will generally cleave much more to the surface value of the symbolism while the occult/esoteric use means a very specific thing by, say, the use of a male or female character, whether they have blonde or brown hair, the colors of the clothing their wearing, the type of metal on a particular given emblem a figure is wearing or holding, whether or not they're posed to mimic an alchemical symbol, the count of flowers or trees in one particular part of the picture or another, the number of rays the sun has or counting the yods hanging in the air and seeing what that value times 10 is equivalent to, the number of pearls on a necklace and what that number stands for as well as the relative color and location - ie. it's very a number correlation and gematria-laden game whereas divinatory tarot, AFAIK, has none of that. Even the direction that the figure in the picture is facing has something to do with esoteric North, South, East, West, etc. and what those directions imply.

Maybe 30% of a card's divinatory description will have hints of the card's esoteric meaning but that's usually about it. Case does have some divinatory classes (there's a 100 page pdf out there online with five stages or something like that) but if you were looking more strictly for divinatory then scrap my suggestion of 'The Tarot' because that's purely esoteric.

Cybernetic_Jazz wrote:If you are looking for anything more consistently divinatory I'd agree with a lot of the posts further up the thread - that the divinatory meaning vs. occult/esoteric meaning of most cards have some shared data but overall the meanings and focus are quite different.

The divinatory meanings will generally cleave much more to the surface value of the symbolism while the occult/esoteric use means a very specific thing by, say, the use of a male or female character, whether they have blonde or brown hair, the colors of the clothing their wearing, the type of metal on a particular given emblem a figure is wearing or holding, whether or not they're posed to mimic an alchemical symbol, the count of flowers or trees in one particular part of the picture or another, the number of rays the sun has or counting the yods hanging in the air and seeing what that value times 10 is equivalent to, the number of pearls on a necklace and what that number stands for as well as the relative color and location - ie. it's very a number correlation and gematria-laden game whereas divinatory tarot, AFAIK, has none of that. Even the direction that the figure in the picture is facing has something to do with esoteric North, South, East, West, etc. and what those directions imply.

Maybe 30% of a card's divinatory description will have hints of the card's esoteric meaning but that's usually about it. Case does have some divinatory classes (there's a 100 page pdf out there online with five stages or something like that) but if you were looking more strictly for divinatory then scrap my suggestion of 'The Tarot' because that's purely esoteric.

Yes, I want the esoteric meaning more then the fortuneteller meaning.

But, they're one and the same.

RoseRed wrote:But, they're one and the same.

Could you clarify what you mean by that? You may very well be right but I think we'd be saying that at a much more profound level than where his question is coming from.

What's rough about this is that there are different study 'spreads' as well, for instance there's the 3 rows of 7 (ie. 1-7, 8-14, 15-21) with the Fool above the Emperor in more modern times or off to the left of Key 8 in older ones, there's a study pattern set by arranging the 22 majors into a ring, but the situation of these cards is, well, canned to put it in the best expression I can find. Some people do take the Hebrew letters and run gematria with the cards themselves, such as taking a three-letter word in Hebrew and, providing all three letters are different, pulling out the three major trump that associate with the letters to extrapolate a deeper meaning of a Hebrew word from the tarot.

In that sense it at least seems like it would be a different thing to have a metaphysical doctrine based on pre-set configurations of the cards and to be practicing/studying that doctrine and columnar relationships for 30 or 40 years than it would be to, say, have a profound understanding of each card and their relationships from 30 or 40 years of doing divinatory spreads. At least from where I'm at they both look like they'd lead to incredible levels of competency with the tarot but they still seem like they'd be somewhat different competencies, much like one person doing raja yoga all their lives vs a person doing hatha yoga all their lives. There's validity I suppose to say it's 'all the same' as in all under one roof but they at least seem like rather distinct legs of the system if you get my meaning.

The cards mean what they mean regardless of how you're using them. The imagery and the meanings don't change from purpose to purpose.

I've been working with tarot for 25 years. There is still so much for me to learn. And yes, there are different competency levels of readers. Some people are great at the book knowledge and do cold readings. Some people have never opened a book because the cards talk to them and they feel it unnecessary. Others, talk to the cards (or listen) and studied the books and have a more developed understanding of them.

The different spreads are used for different types of readings. Each spread is created to tell a different kind of story. How the different cards interact with each other based on their placement within the spread comes from experience.

And I do understand what you mean by 'different legs of the system'. Tarot is a HUGE subheading. You can study that your entire life and still never learn all of it. It's like astronomy that way. Once you have an intimate relationship with your cards, consciously devote yourself to learning them and then actually do it - you'll see that the difference between the 'legs' isn't as great as it seems at first.

Great reply and also thank you for reminding me about Biddy again. I'm going through her major trump and realizing that she has a lot of granular detail on the trump for the RW.

She has a lot of detail on every card.

I hope you find something helpful.