What is Tarot?
A tarot reading can be a very effective method to gain insight into one’s current situation in life, whatever that may be. On the unconscious level, the cards can help to unlock understandings which may exist within the seeker, but are simply not recognised, or acknowledged, until the cards bring the information out into the open with the assistance of the tarot reader.
Specific questions can be looked at within a reading. They may relate to a choice to make within a career, a relationship issue, what to do about a major decision with regards to a project or hobby, a move of location, or perhaps what needs to be focused on to help with getting onto the spiritual path.
Situations around upcoming events can turn up in a reading, which may be a relationship, financial based inheritance or even a job opportunity; this really depends on the type of card layout which can be chosen, if provided as an option to the seeker. Situations in the past can also appear, along with new insights surrounding them.
Tarot came from the mid-15th century and is said to have originated as card games which were played in courtly circles of Northern Italy, and later used around different areas of Europe. From the late 18th century up until today, tarot has become a method for readings — what some may refer to as divination.
With the multitude of tarot decks in use, the images on the cards usually have ties into the Hermetic Qabalah and are influenced by the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The artwork of the Rider-Waite deck, first published in 1909, was drawn by artist Pamela Colman Smith, based on instructions by the poet, and mystic, Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942). As a result of the influence of the Qabalah and Waite, esoteric based symbolism is used within many decks in existence today.
As a tarot reader, my feeling is that the results of the cards are a combination of the seekers connection to their higher self. In other-words, the results relate to the connection that the seeker establishes with their own psychic and subconscious nature — when choosing each card from a shuffled deck — and the tarot readers intuitive influence based on their own higher self connection, and guides, depending on how they read the cards. The symbolism in the cards can be very accurate in combination with the type of card in reference to the specific tarot deck. There are varying ways to read the cards, so it really depends upon a reader’s personal preference and technique as to what can be seen and said, within a spread.