Discover the Esoteric Roots Underlying Modern Tarot!
The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, the Thoth Tarot, and contemporary decks share a vocabulary of esoteric symbols, mythology, and lore. This illustrated, card-by-card analysis reveals detailed insights drawn from the multi-layered traditions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the magical order that most strongly influenced modern tarot, helping you give better readings informed by the history of spiritual practice.
For each card, you will discover how astrology, mythology, alchemy, the elements, and Qabalah contribute to the card’s overall meaning. Authors T. Susan Chang and M. M. Meleen, co-hosts of the popular Fortune’s Wheelhouse podcast, decipher the symbols and stories of tarot. Their and provide a carefully researched synthesis of esoteric ideas is designed to support a foster a deeper connection with the wisdom of the cards.
Discover How Tarot Reflects Life and Life Reflects Tarot
This beginner-friendly book reveals how to find personal, everyday meanings in all seventy-eight tarot cards. No more memorizing pre-determined definitions! Now you'll learn to see, breathe, and feel the tarot wherever you turn.
T. Susan Chang demonstrates how to associate each card with your personal experiences, rather than consulting a list of abstract concepts. With her guidance, you can teach yourself to read tarot and develop your own correspondences, keywords, and more.
Chang enncourages you to fully engage with tarot until you know the shape and personality of every card. She also presents tarot magic, ethics, rituals, multi-card spreads, and new techniques for asking questions. You'll always know what each card means because you won't just draw it, you'll also live it.
Use the Power of Correspondences to Breathe New Life and Magic into Your Tarot Practice!
Correspondences are woven into the structure of every modern deck. Focusing on four main systems of correspondences—the elements, astrology, numbers, and Kabbalah—this remarkable book helps you explore and integrate the images, associations, and myths that give tarot its unique power.
Author T. Susan Chang provides comprehensive correspondence tables for court cards, majors, minors, and the four suits, making this book your must-have resource whether you’re a student, professional reader, spiritual seeker, or magical practitioner.
Tarot Correspondences also shares methods for working with correspondences in readings, focusing on elements, astrology, numbers, or Kabbalah separately or in combination.
Fire. Water. Air. Earth. For 2000 years these four elements dominated our understanding of matter. Everything in the cosmos had its place in one of these four realms; their pervasive influence colored philosophy, art, science, culture, shaping our symbolic language even as post-Enlightenment thought stripped them of their primacy. As elemental beliefs passed from fact into lore, they retained some of their power and currency in spiritual and divinatory practices. Borne along on the inesorable tides of Western astrology, the elements found their way into the esoteric substructure of tarot, where they would each weave a rich tapestry of story for those with the eyes to read it.
In this book the ancient elements and the zodiacal signs they govern come to life: the Story of Fire ignites adventures and acts of heroism, while the Story of Water dreams of sacrifice and surrender. The Story of Air obsesses over knowledge and its price, and the Story of Earth guides us through the dark mysteries of reproduction and rebirth.
Using myths and fairy tales, author T. Susan Chang shows how these elemental correspondences hide in plain sight in the tarot, scattered like colorful stars amongst the major arcana, the pip cards, and the court cards. Jung-influenced and alchemically informed, this book offers a way to unlock the trove of spellbinding narrative in the magical arc of your own life.
The minor arcana of the tarot have an astrological secret: 36 of them, in fact. In the early 20th century, members of the British secret society of the Golden Dawn created what would become the world's best-known tarot deck: the Rider Waite Smith tarot. They also created an infrastructure of esoteric correspondences around the deck, assigning each minor card numbered 2 through 10 in each of the four suits, to a decan—a 10° section of the zodiac, and by extension a 10-day section of the calendar year.
For magical practitioners, these decans have a deep and lasting relevance; their mythic history, their imagery, and their use in talismanic work date back millennia. In our time, the yearlong "decan walk" has become a means of honoring that occult legacy, a way of experiencing firsthand the qualities reflected in each of these cosmic windows.
36 Secrets is the chronicle of one such walk, taken by T. Susan Chang in the period from March 2019 to March 2020. It explores the ways tarot and decan imagery overlap and depart from one another, and the metaphorical language they share. Beyond that, it is a deep excavation of the meaning to be found in the minor arcana, or "Lesser Secrets," and one practitioner's heartfelt contribution to the lore and mythic legacy of the cards.