Welcome back to Jack’s year-long deep dive into the Tarot de Marseille system. Today, we’re tackling the Fours of the suit cards. Per the numerological system I’m using for this project, the significance of the Fours is given by two of the trump cards: The Emperor and Temperance. Where it proved rather difficult to find […]
Read more "A Year of Tarot de Marseille: The Fours"There are plenty of ways to draw connections between the cards of the Major Arcana. You can do it through numerology, through astrology, through the septenaries or visual cues in their symbolism. One of the simplest ways to find the connections between the cards, though, is simply to fold the sequence of the Major Arcana […]
Read more "Pairing the Major Arcana, Forward and Backward"About a year ago, I wrote a post called “Five Goddess Prototypes in the Tarot,” where I talked about five archetypes* commonly associated with the divine feminine and where they can be found in the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Go read that post; I’m pretty damn proud of it. Today, I’m going to do […]
Read more "Five God Prototypes in the Tarot"I love James Bond. I grew up with him. The Bond movies are the only films my parents own, and I’ve seen each of them (yes, even Never Say Never Again, which isn’t canon) so many times I’ve lost count. My family’s Thanksgiving tradition during my childhood was always to get Chinese takeout and watch James Bond […]
Read more "The James Bond Tarot (Part 1)"I miss Tarot. That’s a bit of a weird thing to say, considering that I’m a Tarot reader and a regular Tarot blogger. I have more Tarot decks than any reasonable person should (yet still, I covet more). It’s not like I have a dearth of Tarot in my life. But this summer, my Tarot […]
Read more "Rediscovering Tarot"Of the various odds and ends I’ve posted on this blog, three of my favorites are on the relationships between the Hierophant and Death, between the Lovers and Temperance, and between Strength and the Star, respectively. These posts all take a similar approach: looking at the astrological correspondences of the Major Arcana and exploring the […]
Read more "Ugh, Fine, I’ll Talk About Politics: Justice and the Emperor"I have never been able to see utopia. This is, to the best of my knowledge, a deficiency unique to myself and a handful of stray psychopaths, serial killers, and statesmen throughout history. Everyone I’ve ever met has a plan, an ideal, a thought that the world could be better if only such-and-such change were to […]
Read more "When the Emperor Walks in Shadow"At some point in the not-too-distant past, I talked about the mental connection I make between the Magician and the character of Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Here, I’d like to look at two more Shakespeare characters in connection with the Tarot: Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Read more "Oberon and Titania: The Emperor and Empress"This is Part 3 of what is intended to be a three-part post on my personal take on Tarot. And this is the big one. The whopper. The doozie. The great, big, messy, complicated, never-in-my-life-could-explain-it version of what I do in a Tarot reading. Fasten your seatbelt, gentle reader, because I fear it’s going to […]
Read more "How I Use Tarot, Part 3: Form Without Content"
Jack Chanek 