Madam Lichtenstein's Cosmic World

Musings on Tarot

For those seeking a way to make sense of the world, I recommend a tarot reading with a reputable reader. I have found that tarot cards are really good at telling you what you already know but may not be ready to hear. And when someone reads your cards, you can also see what is revealed and discover something that may not be said to you.Knowing what certain cards mean can give you added insight into what is what.

 

If you see the following cards, you will get your wish:

The Sun

The Nine of Cups

 

If you see the following cards you can make your own success - I call them Grit cards:

Two of Pentacles

Strength

 

If you see the following card you need to pull back and meditate. You know the answer - you just have to hear it:

The High Priestess

 

Online Tarot Course Starting in June

The Centre for Psychological Astrology is offering a new online course in Mythic Tarot with Juliet Sharman-Burke that starts in June.

Mythic Tarot Course
A Five Week Webinar Course in Mythic Tarot with Juliet Sharman-Burke covering the 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana
Dates: Tuesdays from 18^th June to 16^th July    Time: 18.45 - 21.15 BST (UK Time)

Aim: To give you an overview of the divinatory and symbolic meanings of the whole deck with a view to being able to use the cards to clarify situations and act appropriately.

This online course is presented by Juliet Sharman Burke. This is a wonderful opportunity to hear Juliet explain the tarot live from wherever you are in the world! The five week course will start with a brief overview of the Tarot’s origins. We will then examine the Mythic Tarot in depth as well as referencing other decks.  We will look at the meanings, divinatory and symbolic, as well as the myths associated with each of the twenty two Major Arcana. The sixteen Court Cards, Page, Knight, Queen and King, will be discussed separately, linking them with the astrological signs and qualities as well as their myths. The forty cards comprising the four suits will then be discussed, noting their correlation with the astrological elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, and the myths associated with each suit. The final session will be putting it all together with readings which students can send in. Group questions and participation are encouraged. This course will be suitable for beginners as well as more experienced readers who would like a refresher or new perspective.
 
Session 1 = Introduction and Major Arcana
Session 2 = Court Cards
Session 3 = Suit of Wands & Cups
Session 4 = Suit of Swords & Pentacles
Session 5 = Readings

Cost: £170 for the full course

Full Details and Booking at: https://www.cpalondon.com/tarotcourse.html
Places are limited and booking will close on 10th June.

Don’t forget to also check out our weekend webinars happening this term here: https://www.cpalondon.com/seminars.html

Online Tarot Course from the Centre for Psychological Astrology

If you are ever interested in learning tarot, here is an online course offered by the London based Centre for Psychological Astrology on Mythic Tarot, taught by Juliet Sharman-Burke.

Mythic Tarot Course
A Five Week Webinar Course in Mythic Tarot with Juliet Sharman-Burke covering the 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana

Dates: Tuesdays from 18^th June to 16^th July    Time: 18.45 - 21.15 BST (UK Time)

Aim: To give you an overview of the divinatory and symbolic meanings of the whole deck with a view to being able to use the cards to clarify situations and act appropriately.

This online course is presented by Juliet Sharman Burke. This is a wonderful opportunity to hear Juliet explain the tarot live from wherever you are in the world! The five week course will start with a brief overview of the Tarot’s origins. We will then examine the Mythic Tarot in depth as well as referencing other decks.  We will look at the meanings, divinatory and symbolic, as well as the myths associated with each of the twenty two Major Arcana. The sixteen Court Cards, Page, Knight, Queen and King, will be discussed separately, linking them with the astrological signs and qualities as well as their myths. The forty cards comprising the four suits will then be discussed, noting their correlation with the astrological elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, and the myths associated with each suit. The final session will be putting it all together with readings which students can send in. Group questions and participation are encouraged. This course will be suitable for beginners as well as more experienced readers who would like a refresher or new perspective.
 
Session 1 = Introduction and Major Arcana
Session 2 = Court Cards
Session 3 = Suit of Wands & Cups
Session 4 = Suit of Swords & Pentacles
Session 5 = Readings

Cost: £170 for the full course

Full Details and Booking at: https://www.cpalondon.com/tarotcourse.html

Tarot is Trendy According to Dior

Tarot decks have a beauty unto themselves. And now it seems that designers are incorporating tarot themes in their fashions. That is because tarot is having a resurgence in popularity. Of course, I believe that tarot has never gone out of fashion...

This article from the New York Times explains it all. Here is a short excerpt of the article:

 Vicki Noble, who with Karen Vogel created the Motherpeace Tarot Deck in the late 1970s, hasn’t really kept up with the latest happenings in the community of divinatory playing cards. But when Maria Grazia Chiuri, the artistic director of Christian Dior, called and said she wanted to incorporate the Motherpeace into a fashion line, she and Ms. Vogel agreed. Both felt that it could breathe new life into their 40-year-old deck.

Almost six months after Dior’s fashion show in Santa Monica, Calif., Motherpeace sales have skyrocketed, up 263 percent from last year, according to Stuart Kaplan, the chairman and owner of U.S. Games Systems, a global distributor.

Tarot-deck sales in general are up 30 percent this year, after rising 30 percent in 2016 — the highest in 50 years, according to Lynn Araujo, the editorial and communications director for U.S. Games Systems. The company sells hundreds of thousands of decks a year, including Motherpeace, the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck and 123 other varieties.

The tarot boom comes as no surprise to Libby Edelson, a senior editor at HarperCollins. In 2015 an unusual new deck called the The Wild Unknown caught her eye. With images of plants and animals instead of people, the deck had attracted a dedicated following and was selling out with each new edition. Ms. Edelson acquired the rights to sell the deck with the accompanying guidebook and watched this package climb best-seller lists.

“Now there’s this whole new wave of tarot,” said Kim Krans, the creator of the Wild Unknown Tarot deck. “People are saying things like, ‘I’m going to quit my job and become a tarot reader.’”

 

“Tarot is very trendy right now, but more people are coming in with inquiries that are very thoughtful and beyond themselves,” Ms. Mack said. Contrary to popular belief, she said, and opposed to the fortuneteller’s Crystal Ball, tarot has never been about predicting the future. “It’s a mirror,” she said. “It’s an invitation into the present moment.”

The Unsung Woman Artist Behind Your Tarot Cards

Allison Meier writes for Hyperallergic about Pamela Colman Smith who in 1909 collaborated with occultist A. E. Waite on the most popular tarot deck of the 20th century.The Rider Tarot Deck

The Hermit with his cloak and lantern, the Hanged Man suspended from one foot, the High Priestess seated between two columns — these are all familiar figures to those who practice divination. The most widely used tarot cards, and the first to be mass-marketed in English with original art, are the ones comprising the Rider-Waite tarot deck, first issued in 1909. The 78 illustrations on the cards cemented certain visuals in modern tarot, and accompanying each you’ll find a small monogram of a “P” crossed with a looping “C” and “S.” The letters stand for Pamela Colman Smith, the unsung artist of popular tarot.

Born in England in 1878 to a merchant from Brooklyn, Smith spent time in New York City, London, and Kingston, Jamaica. Nicknamed Pixie, she was an early-20th-century illustrator inspired as much by 19th-century symbolists as Art Nouveau. When Alfred Stieglitz staged the first non-photography exhibition at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later called 291), in 1907, he chose Smith’s work. At different points in her life, you could call her an illustrator, a children’s book author, a storyteller, a set designer, and an active member of the 20th-century occult movement. She collaborated with Jack Yeats, younger brother of W. B., on a series of 1902–03 broadsheets with colored prints (you can find a collection of them online at the University of Pittsburgh) and published collected and illustrated Jamaican stories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Retrievals, his 2014 book on underrecognized cultural figures, Garrett Caples writes that while at Pratt Institute, Smith learned about synesthesia from artist Arthur Wesley Dow, and much of her work “depicted imagery spontaneously brought to her mind while listening to music by the likes of Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann: ‘what I see when I hear music-thoughts loosened and set free from the spell of sound,’ as she wrote in a 1908 article.” In a 1907 watercolor — “Overture. ‘Egmont’ Beethoven” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — the head of a woman becomes a cliff on which figures stand against a fluid background. A similar, undulating use of line and color informs an undated watercolor at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, in which purple and gray waves merge with female forms, while ships sail in the distance.

“The fool” in the Rider-Waite tarot deck (via Wikimedia)

Tarot was not always concerned with divination: back in the medieval era, it was a trick-taking game. But by the time British occultist A. E. Waite collaborated with Smith on the deck, issued by the Rider company, it had become a tool for spiritual guidance. Both Waite and Smith (along with a cast of curious characters, from Aleister Crowley to Bram Stoker) were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which influenced contemporary interpretations of the occult. Peter Bebergal wrote in The New Yorker that Waite “saw magic not as a means to power but as a path toward a higher consciousness.” Smith also brought her own research to the symbolism of the cards.

Smith’s life as a career artist contributed in some ways to the obscurity that followed her 1951 death; steady illustration work and the fact that she dabbled in a wealth of fields have made her legacy difficult to pin down. Recently her name has been revived somewhat, as with the 100th anniversary of the Rider-Waite Deck, a Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative Set; issued by U.S. Games Systems, it comes complete with a biography of the artist by Stuart R. Kaplan. More importantly, though, her art remains alive every time a card is drawn from the Rider-Waite deck, which should rightfully be called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Each ominous specter of death on a horse or trepidatious wheel of fortune, as depicted by Smith, offers personal guidance through direct, captivating imagery.