The tarot, in brief

Never handled a tarot deckDecka single pack of 78 cards, majors and minors mixed, reshuffled at the opening of every scene.part 2? This appendix is for you. Others can skip it: they already know the matter. Nothing here is a rule of the game. It is a footing for reading, enough to hold a card in your hand without being lost. You will find in it what tradition lends the cards, not to shut you into fixed meanings, but to give you a starting point. In play, remember: you always read freely.

◆ A recent birth — the Rider-Waite-Smith

The tarot is centuries old, but the deck you are probably holding is young: it appeared in London in 1909. An occultist, Arthur Edward Waite, conceived its programme; an artist, Pamela Colman Smith, drew it; long forgotten, she now gives the deck her name, and it is called the Rider-Waite-Smith (Rider was the publisher). Both came from the same learned society, the Golden Dawn, fond of symbols.

Its revolution holds in one simple idea. Before it, the minorsMinor Arcanumone of the fifty-six cards of the four suits, from Ace to King: the matter of the everyday.parts 2, 4 were only repeated motifs: five swords in a line, six cups in a row, like our playing cards. Smith staged them: every minor became a small picture, a character, an instant. That is what made the deck’s fortune — and it is exactly what Ask the Sky feeds on. A picture is read at a glance; a motif has to be deciphered. That is why the book advises an illustrated deck: the picture whispers leadsLeada scene declared to make a wait or a stake move: no new gesture, only the intention changes.part 8 to you that you would not have found alone.

◆ The anatomy of the deck

A complete tarot is 78 cards, in two families.

• The 22 majorsMajor Arcanumone of the twenty-two named cards, from The Fool to The World. It does not answer: it names, and it weighs.parts 2, 4, 6 (or Major Arcana): The Fool, The High Priestess, Death, The Sun… numbered from 0 to XXI. These are the great figures, the archetypes: fateFatewhat comes in when you keep a major at the opening, and by no other door: the moment stops being ordinary. It resolves with the coin, never with cards, and what it closes, only it can open.part 6, the forces that go beyond the everydayEveryday (the)what plays out when you have kept a minor at the opening: fate has not come in, nothing is put at stake.part 4. In this game, they are mixed with the minors in a single deck; but when one appears and you choose it, fate invites itself in.
• The 56 minors: four suitsSuits (the four)Wands/Fire, what cannot wait · Cups/Water, what comes back · Swords/Air, the line that separates · Pentacles/Earth, what remains. They say a card’s matter, and how you acted.part 4 (like clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades), each running from Ace to Ten, plus four court cardsCourt cards (the)the Page, the Knight, the Queen and the King of a suit: the cards that show someone. They call up a meeting, a known face, or your character at this moment.part 4: Page, Knight, Queen, King. These are the tarot of the everyday: what tints a sceneScenethe unit of play: you open it, you play it, you close it.part 3, what answers your questions.

◆ The four suits

Each suit carries an element, and that element is a domain, a moodPopulate · mood · widen · hook · probethe ways of asking: who is there and how he is (coin) · the weather (card) · what exists just beyond the frame · what is off · staying with the answer that has already fallen. (parts 1 and 2) of the world.

• Wands — Fire. Impulse, desireDesirewhat your character wants. No mechanism, no count: it orients what you play.part 11, actionActionwhat you play when an attempt is uncertain: two poles stretched, the coin cuts, and a card may explain it afterward. It is played once.part 5, the will that pushes. What burns, undertakes, catches alight. A Wands card speaks of energy: an ambition, an ardent conflict, a wanting that cannot keep still.
• Cups — Water. Emotion, the bondBondwhat an actor seems to expect of you, written in his portrait and never crossed out: you stack, you do not correct.part 7, love, dreaming. What flows between beings. A Cups card touches the heart: a relationship, a joy or a grief, an intuition, what is felt and not said.
• Swords — Air. Thought, speech, clarity, but also conflict, the truth that cuts. A Swords card cuts through: a decision, a lucidity, a tension of ideas, sometimes a wound made of words.
• Pentacles — Earth. The body, matter, money, work, what lasts. A Pentacles card anchorsAnchor (to)to enter an actor on the standing page: not for what he is, for what he wants.part 7: a place, a trade, a wealth or a lack, the slow construction of things.

(This is a neutral footing, for whoever is discovering the tarot. The body of the book gives a livelier, embodied portraitPortraitwhat you write about someone, actor or character: a name, what he wants, his suits, and what he carries when that says who he is. Without any count, and never corrected — you write a fresh one, further on.parts 7, 11 of them, see “The four suits,” part 4.)

◆ Numbers and court cards

Within a suit, the number gives an intensity and a stage. Broadly: the Ace is the seed, the spark; the middle numbers, the climb and its trials (the Fives, everywhere, say trouble, loss); the Ten, fullness, sometimes heavy from having reached the end.

The court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, King — lean toward a presence: someone appears, or acts. Read them as a face rather than a force. One can see in them four degrees of mastery: the Page learns, the Knight launches himself, the Queen embodies, the King reigns.

◆ The majors

Where a minor tints the everyday, a major weighs. Each one is a great archetype: Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, The Devil, The Star… Taken in order, from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI), they even tell a journey: that of a being who seeks himself and comes whole. You do not have to know it in order to play; retain only that when a major falls, it is not a detail that changes, it is fate coming in.

◆ Reading a card, for real

You now have a card’s handholds: its suit (the element), its number (the intensity), its nature as a court card or a major. Reading means making them work together, and, if your deck is illustrated, looking at the picture: what is the figure doing? what is the weather of it? Then you answer your question, with what the world and your character call for.

Five of Swords

A minor staged — that is the whole of Smith’s revolution.

Question: how did the negotiation end? I draw the Five of Swords. Swords: Air, conflict, words that cut. Five: trouble, a victory spoiled. And the Rider-Waite picture: a man gathers up swords, a smirk on his face, while two others walk away, beaten. I read it in one breath: I got my way, but by humiliating — there will be resentment left over. Another time, on another question, the same card would say something else entirely. That is free reading.

A footing, then a tableTable (the)the surface in front of you: the cards drawn stay in view on it for the length of the scene.parts 2, 7 — never a grid. Everything above helps you to begin, and the next appendix goes down to the card itself: all 78, one by one, with what each of them shows (“The 78, card by card”). Lean on them on the day you are stuck, that is what they are for. What neither of them will tell you is what a card means: it has no fixed meaning, it has the one your question calls for. With play, you will forget these markers — and that is the sign that you are really reading. (See “A card stops being generic,” part 2.)