I’ve always liked History as a subject and I’ve found a renewed connection to the Tarot through the study of its past.
I thought it would be a good idea, before getting too involved in the details, to look at history itself; and explore the approaches I’ll be taking when gathering and presenting the information; and also the understanding I’ve derived from the information.
It seems to me that my mind understands phenomena through the concepts of History and Nature. When I talk of phenomena, I mean everything that my mind can conceptualise through both Nature and History; this is done through my minds ability to understand the world around it through the divisions of Time and Space.
This understanding, that is the understanding developed through Time and Space, gives me the impression of ‘things’ being in constant development. In those things that appear to develop or change, I take this ‘advance’ so to speak, due to the Element of time. It is through this that I develop or grasp a History of a ‘thing’.
However, because my mind is separated by Time and Space, I’ll never know what the past was like; this is impossible. In order to get a reasonable impression of the Past I have to examine what is in the present. In a philosophical sense, the past lives in the present and our understanding of the past is based upon the present.
When I explore the Tarot, I will be looking for evidence in the present to understand the past; without corroborating evidence from other sources for certain facts put forward, I will have to consider them myths or unsubstantiated until new evidence supports these mythical claims.
This means that the stories told of the Tarot originating from Egypt will be considered unsupported by other evidence. However, the stories told of the Tarot developing in Europe can be supported by more than one source; this will feature largely in my examination of the Tarot’s past.
Notice, in the last paragraph, that I moved away from calling it a history to calling it a story. This was deliberate, and I did this for two reasons. The first reason is we don’t know the past because we are separated from it. As a result, we must look to the present to understand and tell stories (as accurately as we can) about what has occurred and developed.
Secondly, when we do Tarot readings, we look to the cards for corroborating evidence on the client’s past (notice the cards, client and Tarot reader are all in the present) in order to tell a story, and speculate where the clients future is developing.
The future has either not happened, or like the past, is separated from us by Time. In this sense, we tell stories of the future based on the past.
I want to stress the similarity between Historical methodologies and giving a Tarot reading for a client.
This section of Tarot Eon will attempt to look at all the stories presented on the Tarots past as objectively as possible.
Image by Woudloper.
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2 comments… Let's discuss
Hmmm…what do you think about the whole idea of history repeating itself?
Hi Ginger,
It seems to me that history does indeed repeat itself. Take historical events like War as an example – it’s amazing how often (regardless of Time) two armies fight at specific geographical locations. It’s not just that humans don’t see the relevance in History, but the fact that history means more than human history. Geography, for example, can dictate human decision making regardless of what century those humans live in.
Humans are limited in what choices they can make – historically.
History, as a discipline, studies the past based on information in the present. In many ways, history and the result or consequences of history, are all around us; it’s the only way we can understand the past – and predict the most likely future – mathematical probability theory comes to mind.
In terms of human history, there are naturally those who, for one reason or another, choose to ignore the mistakes of the past. This doesn’t just have to be on a political level; think about human psychology and the self repeating patterns that exist within peoples lives.
One way of thinking about the Ego is to link it to politics – which is effectively to link it to the past. In this sense we can see how easily history can repeat itself.
Hope that helps