Tarot Reference Resources I Found on the Web

Never apologize for asking! That's a powerful way to learn, especially here on AE!

videojob8 said:

Which website has the most accurate Tarot card meanings?

Click to expand...

Despite not being an experienced much less an accomplished Tarot reader, I'd like to offer my understanding of this. It makes sense to me, but if any aspect is inaccurate, someone with more authority needs to ruthlessly correct me.

Think of reading a Tarot spread as adopting a childlike demeanor, beginning with the blank canvas of the querent's unanswered question, and painting a picture using the cards as brushes and pigments.

Different kids seem to be naturally endowed with the ability to paint amazing pictures, drawing on nothing more than their natural abilities. Other kids scribble, going outside the lines and not evenly filling the spaces with color. Still others feel more comfortable with a paint-by-numbers set (or is that concept already alien to the young?!), because they can follow the map and end up with a more or less presentable rendering.

People who read Tarot intuitively for the most part are like the kids with innate artistic talent. They do a good and sometimes astonishingly great job. Generally, they can get better at it — improve their technique — with experience alone, but that gets amplified by any formal training they can get along the way.

The rest of us need to learn the hard(er) way to achieve the ability and effectiveness of "the intuitives'". Like the scribblers, we're drawn to the media (the beautiful Tarot decks, the promise they offer), do what we can with them (even if that's not much, yet), and seek out the knowledge and instruction that we hope will allow us also to become artists.

To teach a kid to paint, one might try imparting the "secrets" of perception, form, space, color theory, various techniques with various media, and so forth. If that works, it's probably the shortest path to artistic excellence. The problem is keeping the student's attention and enthusiasm long enough for all this great knowledge to take root and grow.

An alternative is for one with more experience in painting to draw the color boundaries on the canvas and annotate it with which colors should go where. (You can probably see where this is heading with respect to published Tarot card meanings.) The kid takes that, matches up the colors with the numbers, and depending on how careful they apply the paint, they stand a good chance of ending up having painted a picture that looks pretty good with a decent variety and balance of color.

You might think of those web sites and books (including especially the LWBs) as the "paint-by-the-numbers" keys to card meanings. They are there to give you a jump-start on interpreting the cards when you don't yet have enough background knowledge and understanding to synthesize their meanings on your own.

That jump-start need not be viewed as a "cheat" or a "cop-out". You don't need to memorize those attributions and vow to uphold them forevermore as gospel. What you can do is accept them conditionally to facilitate the exercise and development of your ability to notice and characterize the meanings of a card in the context of its position in a spread — or to go beyond that, to begin understanding relationships between two or more cards in that spread. (The presence of two or more particular cards in a spread can modify one or more of those cards' meanings. One aspect of this is referred to as "card dignities", an area of study unto itself.)

So, why have I posted links to more than one site that lists different card meaning keywords? Can one be said to be "better" or "more accurate" than another? Well, maybe, and I'm sure you can find someone around here to put a fie point on that. My attitude is that — it doesn't matter. It's a tool to get from Point A (a shuffled deck of cards) to Point B (the rewards of consideration and thought about the querent's question) with at least some initial help from someone who has more experience doing so. You can always learn more and then do another spread (or another reading down the road of the same spread, which is a good reason for at least snapping a camera phone pic of your spreads even if you don't keep a Tarot journal.)

If you do invest the considerable personal resources (mostly time and persistence) to acquire the esoteric knowledge that takes you far beyond anyone's assignments of "divinatory meaning" keywords or phrases, you may experience "aha" moments when you suddenly understand why someone assigned particular keywords to cards. You may also find yourself disagreeing with keywords that a supposed authority has chosen. If you stick with it long enough (months? years?), you should be able to dispense entirely with all those keyword lists, like removing training wheels from a bicycle, because you have managed, with effort, to achieve or exceed the capabilities of "the intuitives". (And if you started out as a good intuitive reader and also invest in study, that's even more awesome.)

I apologize for being so long-winded but, if you're still reading , I hope it's more or less comprehensible. And I was serious about ruthless correction. ("Hit me, beat me, make me feel real!!")

Thank You!

Hi a_gnostic ,
Thanks so much for sharing the link to the Symbolist. I was excited to see that. The author also has a great book on Astrology with the Tarot.

Thanks also for sharing all the stuff you refer to online. I'm sure this thread will be helpful to many. Cheers!

Some copies of Liber 777 on the web are incomplete

It has been reported that the copy of the Golden Dawn's Liber 777 book on the hermetic.com site is incomplete, that is, it omits explanatory notes about some of the table columns.

There seems to be another, more recent source for this book in the library at www.golden-dawn-canada.com.

Check out the PDF Liber 777 Revised, "a reprint of 777 with much additional matter by the late Aliester Crowley". (This version is imprinted "Celephais Press" and dated 2004.)

If you already have a copy of the PDF and are wondering which version you have, the attached images are the respective title pages from the old (incomplete) and revised (with explanations) documents. (The title page of the revised document is actually on the third page of the PDF file. The first page of the PDF file says, simply, "777 REVISED".)

Golden Dawn Thoth Colors Study Group resources

What led to the discrepancies in versions of Liber 777 (see the previous post) was that materials are being assembled to aid in a new Golden Dawn Thoth Colors study group.

It turns out there are several threads dealing with that start-up process:

• Would anyone be interested in a study group about colors? thread started by closrapexa on 18 Nov 2012.
• Golden Dawn Thoth Color Scales Study Group - Introduction thread started by closrapexa on 19 Nov 2012.
• Flashing Colors in the Albano-Waite thread started by LRichard on 18 Nov 2012

Also, some useful information is available in earlier threads on this site. As I stumble onto these, I intend to edit this post to maintain a list of links to them here in one place:

• Colors in the RWS and Golden Dawn tarots (split from the Guidelines thread) duplicate thread started by re-pete-a on 30 Mar 2008.
• Where does the color order on the Rosicrucian Cross come from? thread started by Grigori on 23 Oct 2005
• Morgan Greer Colours thread started by Little Baron on 20 Jul 2005
• The Medieval Scapini - Color - meanings thread started by Lady Iron Side on 16 Jun 2009
• Significance/Symbolism of Colors? thread started by PisceanRedhead on 28 Sep 2007
• Color Symbolism thread started by Emily on 17 Apr 2007
• The colors in the Camoin-Jodorowsky Tarot de Marseille thread started by dminoz on 6 Nov 2006
• Help ! The colors of the sephiroth in the 4 different worlds ! thread started by Brammetje on 15 Jul 2003
• Tarot de Marseille Colors? thread started by stella01904 on 25 May 2005
• colors thread started by smileme on 14 Sep 2003

If anyone knows of or encounters additional threads of this type, I would be glad to add links to this post if you would please PM the location to me. Thanks!

More Color (and Other) Attributions

In addition to information from the Tarot of Color deck, here are some additional references for color attributions:

• Tree of Life Colors on the Thelemapedia site. (For each of the 10 Sephiroth and 22 Paths, this shows color attributions for King, Queen, Emperor, and Empress Scales and the Sephirotic Color.)
• See also the Tree of Life:777 page on that same site.
• Table of TAROT Correspondences on the B.O.T.A. in Europe site. (This is a simple table of attributions, including colors and musical notes, for the Majors.)
• Color Chart for meditation on the Eagle Spirit Ministry site. (This is a huge list of colors and their "meanings".)

In the event that the BOTA in Europe site were to disappear someday (it loads very slowly at this writing), an image of their color chart is attached to this post.

I really appreciate your sharing all these great resources, a_gnostic.

Tarot and Astrology

These are just some posts and threads I found on using astrological concepts as a tool in the interpretation of Tarot cards:

• How do you use astrology in a tarot reading?, thread started 4 Dec 2007 by sunstallion.
• Poll: Do you use astrology during your Tarot readings for others?, thread started 24 May 2007 by Statori.
• Astrology - Resources for Study - All Levels
• Can you do readings without any knowledge of the Kabbalah, astrology, numerology etc?, thread started 1 Apr 2006 by Alrisha.
• Book T and the Astrological Signs, thread started 4 Jun 2008 by Grigori.
• Decan graphics, a post by Scion. (Copies of these two images are also attached below.)
• Rachelcat's Book T Tarot Astrological Attributions (An image and PDF version of her document are attached below.)
• Golden Dawn Astrological Associations of the Cards, posted 4 Jun 2008 by rwcarter.
• Alchemical Study Group - The Elements, thread started 12 Apr 2008 by Kenny.

Here are some resources out on the web. (Some of these are referenced in the above posts.)

• RWS Decans: a nice graphic shows relationships between planets, decans, and RWS minors.
• The 12 Sun Signs (The Quality and Element): some good definitions of the basic information on the Signs, Elements and Modes/Triplicities.
• Glossary of Astrological Terms
• Another glossary of astrological terms.
• The Four Alchemical Elements in John Reid's Course on Practical Alchemy (okay, it's not astrology, but I don't want to start a post on alchemy just yet.)
• The Three Essentials: Mercury, Sulphur, Salt on John Reid's site.
• The Alchemical Great Work on occult-advances.org.

Copies of the Golden Dawn's Book T (Liber T, also Liber Θ)

I happened to find two places having the same version of the Golden Dawn's Book T: one here on Aeclectic, and one elsewhere:

• Book T.pdf attached to a post by Scion
• t.pdf on the Hermetics Resource Site's Golden Dawn Documents library.
• Liber T, which is actually Liber Theta (Θ), on arcaneadvisors.com's Libers library.

Note: these other locations which are cited elsewhere on Aeclectic now seem to be broken links:

• http://arcaneadvisors.com/archives/t.pdf, although the arcaneadvisors.com site still exists.
• http://athenaeum.asiya.org/Book_T.pdf

I second LRichard's appreciation. A one-stop shop is always a handy thing to have around, even--especially--for those of us who have some of this information saved in various places.