Decoding Tarot Cards Infrastructure - Why tarot cards are NOT magic but Practical tools Part I

Life is a very complicated process of lessons and experiences designed to spiritually enlighten us through our path. Although most of us make it a complicated trip the reality is the complication is what actually extracts the lessons burned into our soul's hard drive so to speak.

The irony is that life is a very simple design as far as we have to be aware of that is.. But without awareness of the road map life is pretty confusing. Take boys and girls trying to understand each other and why they do things they way they do. Naturally boys and girls serve as a balance and imbalance simultaneously. It's in learning to get along with and nurture the other that we discover our strengths and weaknesses.

A valuable tool has come about and utilizes the very hierarchy of life to "map" out answers to very tough questions. This tool is tarot cards. Most people ignorant of what this tool really is think it holds some kind of magic, or that it inherently itself is magic or supernatural in power, much like a Ouija board.

The truth is the cards hold no magic other than their ability to provoke an emotional response in the mind of the "reader" or witness to the pictures. The pictures are not magic either they simply depict brilliantly the different parts of the hierarchy of life. Much like when you see a family picture then when you see each person in the family complete with their character (how their dressed, their expressions that you recognize "is them" and so forth) if these people in your family were printed into cards depicting their different characteristics and talents in a very efficient way then all the cards of the "family" pack were shuffled and displayed you could say this is like taking the potentials of each member in the family and plan events based on how the cards land. For example say you were to say Joey landed in the "dishes tonight" spot, and Jane landed on the "wash the walls" spot then you could say this "spread" were the spring cleaning spread.

You name each position in the spread and randomly shuffled the "family" cards and deal the cards into a specific pattern and use that pattern to assign the chores. Although I've never seen a deck like this, this is very much how alot of decks these days called "themed" decks are created. They deal with a range of spiritual concepts, instead of spring cleaning so their magical power perception is often preserved.

I think alot of people have the wrong idea about tarot cards. The cards don't tell your future. Even though one of the famous Celtic (pronounced Kel-tic) cross spread is the future position, this simply means probable outcome.

I want to start this by saying I'm no tarot expert, I'm not certified in the art of tarot reading, however I've studied many books, classes and personally use the cards every day for guidance. I don't see them as fortune telling cards so much as a tool in helping me make decisions, and in alot of ways I think they give a pretty accurate representation of my current state of mind, emotions and they help me see the thoughts in my subconscious mind through interpreting the pictures.

I lend you here my insight and what I've learned about them but I too am still a student. But I find tarot cards not to be magic any more than a car is a magic vehicle allowing people to move fast across the earth.. no I see them as a technology that works primarily on psychology and through tools like astrology, and numerology and exercising intuition. If you're constantly wondering what the meaning of life is you can discover this in the tarot cards and lessons about them. Tarot cards are the hierarchies of life defined in pictures.

I will break these down further in a future hub but here are the basic meanings of the Major arcana (in another hub I'll break down the minor arcana as well) this hub will be linked to right here when it's finished.

The first set is so you can see the cards. Meditate on the cards picture and realize each one has an amazing amount of detail. No color or part of the picture is benign. Think of it as a zip file where every file in the listing is a part of the picture, and everything, and I mean every single thing, even things you don't see right away, have a real and detailed meaning. In the subconscious these things come out and when you master the reading of the cards you'll see that these things are further dimensions than simply decoding the picture. They add rich details to your reading such as time, places, and even events surrounding the meaning!

The first set is just the cards (below this paragraph) the second set I added the keywords found in a book called The Instant Tarot Reader by Monte Farber and his wife Amy Zerner. This book is an excellent way to get started if you know absolutely nothing about the cards.

The cards depict the hierarchies of life using what's called the major arcana, or the major issues faced by everyone in life (like judgment, money, security etc..) these are like face cards in a regular deck. From their each of these major hierarchies are broken down into 10 sub hierarchies.

Believe it or not life actually has an infrastructure, but what's facinating is that most people follow it out of order. It's in trying to organize your life into a managable state that the lessons come in. Suffering often happens when were "mixed up". Tarot cards show us the structure and where our path is, so we can organize our actions and reactions with more power.

How does this hierarchy work?

It would be like in my spring cleaning family deck saying that their are two major arcana cards MOM and DAD then their are the ACEs such as older brothers or experienced family members who are in charge of the younger kids. Below the aces are different "characteristics" or suits. The suits (cups, pentacles, swords and wands) are the defining of the motivations of the actions. So Joey of cups is like saying what joeys character means say hes responsible and loving, mix this with the suit of cups and you have the emotional side of Joey's character.

This again is over simplifying the cards structure. I want to give you the concepts not the exact definitions of the cards. You can read more details on the cards with more competent to teach you authors and such (as I'll list below at the end of this hub).

you got your kids in the family that are energetic those in the tarot are the wands or "movement" energy and such.. Then you have the sweet kids the hearts or in tarot the cups "suit", you have your intelligent kids those in tarot are the swords or intellect and moral fiber, then you have your entrepreneurial kids those would be the pentacles in tarot or money, finance, security.

in tarot their are many more dynamics than you'd find in a family, because it encompasses the entire spectrum of life. They break the deck down into the following hierarchies or threads: (this is only a very basic idea of the dynamics involved, they go much deeper but to keep this simple I'll show you the top layers of meaning).

Ace(1)-9 = this helps to create time, hierarchy of order and degree of intensity

King, queen, knight, prince, princess = these are like the major personalities of life, king would be like the head of household.. a king of pentacles is like the leader of money, competent and wise and it continues through the different sub hierarchies of the deck below.

The "face cards" would be:

King: wisdom,

Queen: competence intuition

Page: Messenger/news

Knight: sudden change (depending on what suit i.e. knight of pentacles is sudden change in finance or security, also depending on the surrounding cards that give clues into what kind of financial or security change is involved)

Ace: usually the beginning of something, i.e. in ace of cups could be beginning of new romance (cups are water or emotions flowing)..

Wands = actions and movements, ambitions, work,

Pentacles = money, security, finance,

Hearts/cups = emotions,

Swords = intellect, morals

These are very over simplified definition (useless if you don't realize the cards meanings, timing etc.. but I wanted to wet your appetite for decoding them by showing you how the hierarchy works. Decoding each of the face cards for example is a complex process as they are timing indicators, person indicators, and can depicts events or vocations that are associate with their astrological correlation: they mean more than one thing depending on cards around them and your question)

What do the numbers mean in astrology (newspaper? and tarot?)

The major and minor arcana aren't distinct like the maturity of a family member although the numbers leading to the cards do depict a maturity much like age (in one aspect of the cards meaning). Progressively from ace (1) to 9 a growth of a sort is happening. The meaning of the numbers will give you more insight into what the newspaper horoscope means when it says "Today is an 8". It's based on numerology. In reality the cards utilize many forms of fortune telling technologies. Numerology, astrology, and so on..

In numerology according to Author of the tarot bible the numbers mean:

• one = The Number of actions. Single minded. Independent. The number one informs you that you need to be innovative, and motivated to succeed in your plan
• Two = The number of negotiation. Cooperative and laid back, this number is telling you to adapt to circumstances to fulfill your dreams.
• Three = The number of communication. Express yourself through creative outlets and your life journey will benefit from fun loving relationships.
• Four = The number of realistic thinking.If you are practical and self reliant you will have the motivation to achieve whatever you set out to do, and can turn any situation to your advantage.
• Five = The number of creative adventure. it is time to be more outgoing, exploring and questioning of others' motives. The expressive side of your nature will enable you to make changes to suit you.
• Six = The Number of the protector. It is time to be of service in some way to bring out your nurturing side. However, six also reminds you not to let others decide your future for you.
• Seven = The number of mysticism. On your life journey you will encounter many people involved in healing. You have an extraordinary talent for understanding the world. Listen to your intuition for the answer to a current dilemma.
• Eight = The number of ambition. Right now you have a secret inner drive for success and power and you'll feel cheated if you don't achieve material results. Plan ahead. Sort out finances and the results will be equal to your goal.
• Nine = The number of vision. you have extraordinary vision for the future but following things through will be hard, you must try to avoid making promises you can't fulfill, then you will gain the top prize.

The numbers, the suit, the picture on the card, and the place in the hierarchy (i.e. a face card, a lower or major arcana card, like queen vs 3 of pentacles) all network and mean something on their own but when mixed with where they land in the "spread" and what cards land near them or in other key spots in the spread, these things mean different things. Learning the tarot deck is as amazing as learning to fly a helicopter.. it takes knowledge, balance and intuition to keep everything meaningful.

The cards are read differently between many different people however their is a basic infrastructure. Think of it like art. Their is a basic way to learn to draw, to paint, to make buildings or sculptures, but once you learn the basics the rest is personalized by the person and incredible insights come out in that persons understandings of the tools and the magic is really in the person not the tools. The paintbrush didn't paint the painting, the painter did.. the insight didn't come from the tools it came from the persons mind.

To discover balance in your life learn to exercise your intuition, conscious and unconscious mind through tarot reading. You can do your own readings for insight or you can use the cards to help others see what you "feel" intuitively. I believe we can read the energies of others and the cards are often stacked based on the focus of energies of the shuffler. Because you're both focused on the same result while they shuffle and you deal your synergizing energies to make the reading happen.

The answers and questions still come from your minds, the cards just give you a way to structure the intuitive information your both feeling. In the end the cards are just pictures, the answers come from your intuition and accessing the subconscious minds of the two people doing or receiving the reading.

You can find alot of books and online courses that will give you the rich detail about this you need if you Google the term learn tarot, but for this hub I'm focusing mostly on the circle of life of the major arcana.

I wanted to brief you on the decks infrastructure here but I'll go into individual cards later in another hub. What's fascinating about a tarot deck is its like taking the fundamentals of life's infrastructure, and compressing it all into a very detailed yet simple set of 78 pictures. When you shuffle the deck your literally shuffling the meanings of life into a random order and placing them into a spread or order predetermined by you. Learning the cards and how to use them do many amazing things.

The cards just give you scenarios to work with, almost like an abstract painting only with much more precision of context. It plays your emotions into context, your thoughts into more lucid form, and helps you to guide into what your thinking, like those ink blots the psychologists use, only these ink blots are far more complex and easier to interpret. Learning the cards helps you in many areas of living:

• Teach you the infrastructures of life
• Train your intuitionand your conscious mind so your subconscious and conscious mind communicate more clearly and decisions are made more wisely
• train you to make decisions WITHOUT needing the cards at all eventually
• more..

Much like the spring cleaning spread explained above your just trying to get an idea of how to react to a decision. In your mind you have answers you aren't consciously accessing and the cards make your mind probe for those answers more intuitively. It's like exercising your intuitive mind to link up your conscious mind and subconscious information.

Much like the 8 ball you shake and get a sentence that helps you hop off the fence to one side or the other the tarot cards help you in a much more detailed way (but simply implemented and understood by the subconscious). Even with the 8 ball everyone knows the answers are usually just random, but what they do is allow you to think about your question in a new way based on the answer your presented with. Like a trigger to another pathway, the answer is not in the 8 ball but the stimulation to a new line of thinking is. With the tarot cards you get much more rich details and more intuitive "cues" to your answers.

Law of Synchronicity

Nothing happens "randomly". The law of synchronicity states even seemingly random events are done with precision. (Google synchronicity for more on this law).

They say nothing we do is actually beyond our perceptions, not even shuffling cards. If you look at each card just before you shuffle them your mind knows where each card is, and what each card means (for more accurate results). Much like you look at the clock before going to sleep you can consciously decide you will wake up at 5 am and its now 10 pm your mind will keep track of time because it knows how many seconds to count till that moment at 5 am arrives, and although your not consciously keeping track the subconscious mind has its orders your telling yourself to wake up at that particular time.

Because you know what time it is now and what time you want to wake up your mind will wake yourself up (because it was told to do so by yourself). Weather you stay awake or fall back asleep is up to you but you will awaken even if you're in a dream at the time. This is how tarot cards work.

You look at each card (calibrate) assuming you've learned what each card means to you, then shuffle with your question(s) in mind. The questions are not magically answered by the cards they are focal points to think about, and your mind formulates the answer (as were all connected to god or the super-conscious and all knowing at some level) from the intuition and subconscious mind discussing it as you shuffle, and the subconscious mind is like the jury speaker who says the verdict, it does so by formulating the cards to land at the top of the deck in the order based on your preconceived pattern you will lay them down in. With practice you will be able to do this more quickly and accurately.

What seems to be a random act of shuffling is actually a conscious / subconscious mind meeting your simply not paying attention to. You stop shuffling the cards when you get the "feeling" that their "ready", until you get the signal you get the urge to keep shuffling.

When the cards are laid out, you interpret them individually based on their placements definition and what the cards "speak" to you through the pictures. Much like you look at red and get a picture in your mind. You network the pictures and meanings both at the individual level and as a networked effort. One card may make another card mean something different, and they influence each other.

A "Reading" is really just an advanced exercise in thinking using picture cards and a programmed hierarchy (the spread is just a goal definition of the answers) of placements to help you focus. In the end the answers to your question come from and are generated in your mind, using your intuition, your subconscious and your knowledgebase, skill sets etc.. The cards do nothing more than provoke you to think at a deeper level than you're used to!

knowing the basic meanings (to the cards individually and how they influence one another) helps sharpen your skills in interpreting what thoughts come to mind when you see the pictures, but most of the interpretation is based on what the picture provokes in your mind at the time of the reading (like the ink blots different people see different things depending on what the current issues are, the pictures are just stimulation to bring what's in your subconscious mind to the front (conscious mind) so you can consciously process your thoughts more lucidly.

The magic happens in your mind not in the cards. The cards stimulate your thinking using amazing thought provoking pictures that help you reconnect to your intuition. Most people ignore their intuitive thoughts and these pictures bring it to surface in a fascinating way.

You could say you "get to know your deck" and when you get practice at reading cards you'll find that your not trying to define them so much as interpret the thoughts in your mind when you look at the pictures. You get accustomed to certain thought forms coming with certain pictures and over time all the cards become connected to other cards in different formats and where they land etc.. It's a lot like how language is formed by learning how to talk/write the words then eventually people develop their own style of talking, forming words and sentences and thoughts become communicated through language but it's not the words but how you use them that change their meaning.

For example, come here is different from she's coming this way, the same word is flavored by the other words in the sentence. The cards do this in a way only the language is more telepathic in nature, pictures translate into thoughts and embed emotional responses and so on.. The thoughts and motivations for your answers are often there but beyond your awareness..

Much like you get nervous at a job interview but when your away from the stress the things you really wanted to say seem to surface.. The cards are pictures that have been shown to almost magically stimulate your thoughts into a lucid form from your subconscious processes and allow you to more clearly understand what your mind discovered but simply didn't share with the conscious mind.

The fascinating thing is when you lay a spread down like the Celtic cross you can look at the cards pretty fast and your answer seems to poke out at you like staring at a very vivid painting of something, then as you look at each position (card in different places in the spread have different meanings i.e. present, past, past influence etc..)

You start to see the big picture so to speak come alive in more rich detail.. You look at for example position 6 (near future) and position 11 (or 10 depending on your format) (distant future or consolidated answer (position 11 tells what all the other cards are saying in one card) then you can see the bridge between how card 11 got its answer and card 6 came to be.. The left card in the cross and the right card are past to future so you can see how the past event unfolded to the future circumstances.. And so on.. a great free tarot learning site is here (I forgot to add it to the hub so here it is): (you can click on the hyperlink title to go there or you can copy paste the URL just incase it doesn't work for some reason:

I did alot of searches for tarot lessons when I started out but this site has everything you need. Most sites don't explain the cards intuitively or systematically in a learning format so I put this site I used. I get no credit for sending them traffic or anything, I just enjoy the format because it is very good. They even explain how the hierarchy works in a story format here:

This is what I wanted to write but I simply couldnt do it better than she did so click here to read the incredible "FOOLS JOURNEY" which you'll come across in lesson two. I think you should read this first as it really nails everything in this hub into 3 pages using the cards hierarchy to show you how the meaning of life works.

Root site:

http://www.learntarot.com/

Index to Lessons (links and overview)

http://www.learntarot.com/course.htm#lessons

You can buy the Waite Rider deck and use this site as your interpretation site, you just lay the cards out (they show you the two most used spreads) then click on the particular card you want to define (at first you use crutches like this to get familiar with the cards hierarchy definitions then as you go you start to sway into your own definition and meaning as you practice. You develop an intuitive sense of what that card means to you then eventually you do it naturally. This site shows you the entire course and its where I learned, its one amazing class in tarot.

This is the direct link to the cards definitions. Just click the card for each definition. In the cards just count the pentacles or cups or swords or wands to get the number i.e. if you count three wands its the 3 of wands, face cards all have the card name on the bottom.

Although their are spreads that are used alot, you'll realize later as you get the hang of it that these spreads are just training wheels (although many like me use the Celtic cross religiously lol, because its truly a powerful way to read the cards) but you can generate your own spreads, just define each position before the reading so your mind knows how to select the cards as you shuffle. One spread uses all 78 cards, talk about a detailed reading. It's like taking every aspect of life based on the question and putting the entire map into perspective! Don't stress right away, you'll get it, it just happens as you play with it..

You wont get amazing and accurate readings right away, well often you do but don't realize it because you haven't yet trained yourself to know the cards meaning (at many intuitive levels) to you until you do a few readings.. But when it kicks in you'll feel an almost magical thing happen like answers just appear without effort.. That's when the cards get really fun..

They train your intuition and you'll feel almost psychic after a while as you discover the training/fun unlocks a power to perceive life more fully and accurately even with out the cards! it exercises your brain in a very interesting way that will feel magic and brilliant. The best way to learn and get motivated is to do mock readings for friends. When I started I worked at Wal-Mart and would take my deck to work. I did readings on over 300 people over a month's time, I picked up the cards meaning pretty fast, as I did the readings I literally just guessed what the cards meant,

I didn't use my books (too cumbersome to carry around all the time) I was often pretty close, I never even let them tell my their question and often answered it by what I "saw" the pictures made me feel something and I just said what I felt.. It was magical really.. People wanted me to do readings so much (I got really good at it) that I left my deck at home to get a moments peace..

Card Definitions Index

http://www.learntarot.com/cards.htm

Enjoy!

I'll release a hub soon on the cards individually then I'll do some spread examples to show you how they work.