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Friday, February 09, 2007

Mercury goes retrograde the day before Valentine's

CupidHow do you avoid miscommunications in the realm of Love? Read my article 'Love Gone Wrong' at tarot.com.

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posted by Jeffrey Kishner at 2/09/2007

2 Comments:

Anonymous Tarot_Is_A_Card_Game said...

With all due respect, I think websites such as tarot.com are doing damage to an important aspect of culture. I am a player of Tarot card games. Tarot, like Bridge and Skat, has been called the "Chess of card games" I think for good reasons. Tarot is the game that brought forth the notion of a trump suit in card games. Tarot has clearly made a valuable contribution to our game playing culture. This contribution is sadly being obscured by those who continue to see Tarot exclusively as a divination tool.

I am not here to condem divination or any applications of Tarot decks, but I do think that tarot.com and similar websites are misleading the public into believing that Tarot is nothing but an occult tool which is far from the truth.

I want to point out that tarot.com's Paul O'Brian has made some assertions about Tarot for which there is no evidence at all. "It was masquerading as a card game for a long time because people could be burned at the stake for using it. And the court cards are modeled after the different royalty of Italian at the time -- there's a pope card, for example. It comes out of medieval Europe and its growth coincides with the printing press and the ability to print cards. It basically coexisted with the Church but was never part of any religion. It was more related to alchemy than religion." is a prime example of such disinformation.

Another misleading piece of disinformation has been picked up by the mainstream press when they covered the story of the sex tape Tarot reader,"Tarot is a divination system that uses a set of cards to gain insight and achieve greater control over issues involving relationships, opportunities, and life changes. The Tarot deck is over 500 years old. With archetypal roots that go back almost 2000 years, Tarot has become a repository of ancient wisdom. Interestingly, our modern playing cards are a subset of the Tarot." This is completely false!

Tarot was as originally intended, and still is in many regions, a card game having nothing to do with alchemy or divination according to the best available evidence. Also the best available evidence tells us that the modern playing cards are NOT derived from the Tarot.

I do not believe that Tarot reading is in itself harmful. The harm occurs when stereotypes are created and the public is misled about Tarot's true nature. I have found that a number of our card playing websites are being wrongly categorized as "occult" or "paranormal" by some internet filters. Our websites are also being targeted by "psychic readings" Google ads which are inappropriate to their content. A message board for the popular Hoyle Card Games CD-ROM software even displayed a complaint from a confused Christian user because of the software's inclusion of the French Tarot card game. The above are just three examples of the damage that these occult stereotypes have been causing.

By all means continue to read the cards and derive all the benefits that can be obtained from this practice, but let us all recognise that Tarot, like Runes and tea leaves, also has a non-divinatory aspect. Most people know that Runes are for languages and that tea leaves are for beverages. Isn't it about time we restore Tarot to its proper context so most people will finally recognize that Tarot is for card games and is not exclusively for divination.

9:29 PM  
Blogger Jeffrey Kishner said...

By all means, keep playing your card games.

10:03 AM  

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