Tarot Triumphs: Using the Marseilles Tarot Trumps for Divination and Inspiration - Softcover

Gilchrist, Cherry (Cherry Gilchrist)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578636043 ISBN 13: 9781578636044

Verlag: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Focusing on the major arcana, or trumps, of the Marseilles Tarot, the aim of this book is to encourage the reader to experience the tarot in a direct, fresh, and uncluttered way.

Key points:

• Focuses on the 22 trumps, or the major arcana of the tarot
• Offers advice on how to study each card and find its unique significance
• Provides instructions for laying out and reading the cards
• Explores the tarot in terms of history, divination, symbolism, and esoteric traditions

This exploration of the major arcana includes "The Fool's Mirror," a new method for laying the cards out, as well as hints for using the tarot to gain deeper levels of awareness. Cherry Gilchrist offers ways to approach each card, absorb it, and understand its essence. Readers are encouraged to relate this essence to personal experience as the most enduring and rewarding way to prepare for reading the cards.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cherry Gilchrist is a writer and lecturer and a long-time participant in Western traditions relating to Kabbala, meditation, and hermeticism. She is a graduate of Cambridge University, UK, in English and Anthropology, and holds a post-graduate diploma from the University of Bath Spa in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology. As an author, Cherry has published widely on mythology, traditional culture, and inner traditions. She writes both for adults and for children, and has won a UK Reading Award for her Calendar of Festivals. Her books include The Elements of Alchemy, Stories from the Silk Road, The Circle of Nine and Divination. Many of her titles have been translated into other languages, including Italian, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. With something of the merchant also in her blood, she has for many years visited Russia in search of beautiful lacquer miniatures and the rich heritage of Russian folk lore and craft, making a total of nearly sixty trips to Russia. She ran a Russian arts gallery in the city of Bath, England, for a number of years, and has put on leading exhibitions of Russian folk art at museums and galleries. Cherry is also a well-known lecturer, a popular speaker on Russian art and culture and inner traditions. Cherry has visited Russia over fifty times, and has researched its traditional lore as well as dealing in Russian arts and crafts, and staying on many occasions in a wooden village house deep in the Russian countryside. During her contacts with artists and villagers, as well as with museum experts and ethnographers, she not only discovered much about the regional traditions of Russia, but experienced some of them at first hand. She visited a shaman in Siberia, took part in the Maslnitsa festival in Moscow, and celebrated New Year traditional style, in the depths of a frozen forest. Cherry now lives near Stroud, in Gloucestershire, with her partner Robert, an artist. She enjoys travel, and has visited destinations as far apart as Samarkand, Easter Island, and Ethiopia. She also loves music, especially singing early music, walking in the countryside, and cookery.

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Tarot Triumphs

Using the Marseilles Tarot Trumps for Divination and Inspiration

By Cherry Gilchrist, Robert Lee-Wade

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2016 Cherry Gilchrist
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-604-4

Contents

Introduction, 
Chapter 1: Enter the Triumphs, 
Chapter 2: The Tarot as a Method of Divination, 
Chapter 3: Taking On the Tarot, 
Chapter 4: The Wandering Fortune-Teller, 
Chapter 5: Becoming the Diviner — Grasping the Fool's Mirror, 
Chapter 6: A Search for Order and Meaning in the Fool's Mirror, 
Chapter 7: The Fool's Mirror Layout, 
Chapter 8: Managing the Reading, 
Chapter 9: The Fool Leads Us Further, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Glossary, 

CHAPTER 1

ENTER THE TRIUMPHS

The twenty-two picture cards of the traditional Tarot pack are known both as Tarot Triumphs and Tarot Trumps. Colorful and resonant, these cards form a unique set of symbols that can be used for divination, inspiration, and illumination. The Tarot are called the Trionfi in Italy, the country linked to their earliest-known history, and although they have been allied with the four-suit pack of playing cards for much of their existence, they stand apart as an independent set of cards. It is the Triumphs that form the focus of this book. Although "Trumps" is more commonly used, I have chosen to single out the word "Triumphs" because it connects us with a particular kind of spectacle that was current when Tarot first appeared, and which may shed light on the birth of Tarot itself.

THE TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION

We are about to meet the Tarot Triumphs in the guise of a triumphal procession. These processions were popular in fifteenth-century Italy, somewhat similar to carnival parades as we recognize them today, providing a form of street theater with exotic performers and floats passing by. They were accompanied by music and dancing, and enjoyed by people of all classes. But the triumphal processions also had a more exalted purpose, as they included tableaux that portrayed allegorical and cosmological themes. This was a type of renaissance effort to depict the world in all its glory, embracing both sacred and secular knowledge. All this was revealed, often to celebrate weddings or feast days, in a succession of magnificent emblems, a burst of color and spectacle. The triumphal processions also embodied the notion of "trumping"; each successive figure or display in the procession trumped the one that came before it in terms of moral superiority, spiritual value, or just the social order of the day. It had its roots in earlier Roman parades, where a virtue trumped a vice, Death trumped worldly success, and an emperor trumped a slave, for instance.

Tarot historians suggest that these Italian processions may have played a part in the creation of the Tarot, since they accord with the time and place of the earliest Tarot decks known to us. Some specific emblems are found in both contexts, such as the Lover, the Chariot, and Death. Likewise, the concept of Trumps applies to both the parades and the pictorial cards, even if trumping applies more to games played with Tarot than to its use for divination purposes. The processions are unlikely to be the sole source of Tarot, but there certainly seems to be a link. And this aspect of Tarot history is well worth pursuing, as it indicates how some of the Tarot scenes may once have been viewed as life-size moving spectacles, which would have created an intense experience for onlookers. Very shortly, I will suggest that we try this out for ourselves.

MEETING THE TWENTY-TWO TRIUMPHS

The Tarot Triumphs are evoked three times in this book. We shall meet them first of all in this imaginary public spectacle as it might have taken place on the streets of Northern Italy more than five hundred years ago. When we visualize them as large-scale and gloriously majestic figures, this keys us into not only the power of their images but also a significant cultural event that may have played a distinct part in the history of the Tarot.

The second time we encounter the Triumphs as a sequence is in chapter three, as a set of cards rather than a moving tableaux. Here you can find keynote descriptions and interpretations of each card, accompanied by thumbnail images. These serve to set up the basic meanings of cards for Tarot readings.

The third meeting with the Triumphs is in chapter five, where there is an in-depth investigation of each card, including its history and a close examination of the detail of its imagery. A full-size, line-drawn illustration of each card, commissioned especially for this book, accompanies each description. These broader discussions encourage us to see the apparent paradoxes and mysteries in the cards, which will further a deeper and more intuitive form of Tarot interpretation.

I hope that this threefold approach will offer you different ways to experience the symbols of the cards by giving food for the imagination as well as useful background knowledge. You may find it helpful to know this now so that you can navigate the book as you wish, or cross-refer between the chapters.

TRIUMPHS AND TRUMPS

I use the terms Triumphs and Trumps interchangeably throughout this book in referring to the twenty-two cards of the Tarot Major Arcana. The words are linked linguistically: the Italian word trionfi translates into "triumphs" and "trumps" in English. They have different shades of acquired meaning, but I have chosen to combine them here to celebrate their earlier origins in the melting pot of fifteenth-century Italy, both as processions of Triumphs and the earliest gorgeously hand-painted decks of Tarot cards. And, of course, "triumph" is something that Tarot is and does; it triumphs through its powerful images, its persistent survival through the centuries, and its capacity to instruct and illuminate those who study it.

WATCHING THE PROCESSION

Tarot, in the light of the triumphal procession, may be seen as an act of theater, its images a kind of magical performance moving through the sequence of the cards. We can turn this historical link with the triumphal processions to our advantage, and use the context imaginatively, as a way of discovering the kind of impact that these magnificent Tarot Triumphs could have when paraded through the streets.

So let us now step back in time to witness a spectacle of Tarot Triumphs moving through a city street in fifteenth-century Italy. Our procession happens in the hours of darkness, which accords with how some of these spectacles were presented, and for us it intensifies the vision of the Tarot scenes as they pass by, portrayed as characters and tableaux.

As you read the description of the procession, I suggest that you place yourself in the jostling crowd, on a city street, hundreds of years ago. Visualize how these twenty-two images appear from out of the warm darkness. Let these vivid, otherworldly scenes fill your imagination as they pass by, one by one.

Keep your pack of Marseilles or traditional Tarot cards at hand, if you have them, to refresh your memory of each image. If you don't yet have these, and are new to Tarot, then you can look ahead to the main illustrations of the Tarot Trumps in this book first, and quickly acquaint yourself with the sight of them. Or you could even just allow the words to paint the pictures for you, with no external reference at this stage. No matter how familiar you are with Tarot, it helps to renew the link between Tarot and the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Red Wheel/Weiser
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1578636043
• ISBN 13: 9781578636044
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar