January 12, 2023 • 43 mins
This is not a hit piece! Tarot helps plenty of people navigate their lives and reflect on their feelings – plus the art is unbelievable. We cover the backstory, real and imagined, and lure the innocent into tarot’s grip, er, offer basic tips for beginners.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, So it's a
good old fashioned hooting and holler and how down of
a Stuff you Should Know episode. Yeehaw. Uh, this is
(00:24):
your pick the tar Otah, I'm sorry, that's okay. Uh.
You know who's into this a little bit? Uh? Fortune tellers,
wealth tarrot specifically who my wife? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily has gotten into it a little bit, and she's
definitely of the of the state of mind of like, listen,
(00:45):
this is something I do in the morning to sort
of have a little quiet time. And I don't think
she thinks that it like guides her life or has
any sort of magic qualities. I think it's a little
more one of those things like I'm gonna see what
my cards say and just sort of ruminate on that
stuff and maybe it'll open up some new ideas and
thoughts about life. I was reading a Vogue article that
(01:09):
was pretty in depth about it, and that seems to
be the general usage of tarot these days, and it's huge.
It's gotten really big lately, apparently in a billion dollars
worth of tarot cards were sold around the world. Yeah,
and they're expecting it to go up by another quarter
billion in the next three years. So it's definitely a thing.
(01:30):
For sure, it's having a moment, But um, it is
kind of reassuring that it's not like following like the
crystals are essential oil healing tract and instead people are like,
I'm just using this to reflect on my my life. Yeah.
And I think she also likes just thinks the cards
are beautiful and cool looking and appreciates the art and
(01:52):
that kind of thing, which they They are very and
they can be expensive and super beautiful. Yeah. Do you
do you know what deck she has them? Sure, it's
probably just the standard shopping ball tech from Spencer's Gifts.
The the Green Day Tarot Day? Is there really a
green Day? I know some bands have their own, I
(02:12):
don't think so it's possible. Who knows that Billy Billy
Joe Armstrong is. He's very innovative little guy. So, um,
we are talking about tarot cards today. I think we
let the cat out of the bag already. Um, and
they are not as old as you would think. And
(02:34):
then their use of um for divination purposes is even
younger than that. And there was a really long standing
myth that I thought was correct up until yesterday. The
day before that, playing cards evolved out of tarot cards
in in an effort to conceal them at a time
(02:54):
when people had to like watch out with their mysticism,
their esoteric knowledge the occult, else they might be persecuted,
so they developed them into playing cards like we have today.
That is absolutely false, and in fact, playing cards were
around centuries before the tarot deck came along. Yeah, that's true. Uh.
And people generally think it seems like so many things
(03:17):
go back to ancient China, but a lot of people
agree that they were invented in China in the thirteenth
century and then sort of spread their roots from there.
But like you said that, regular playing cards were around
before this and the tarot we're twenty two different designs
(03:37):
that were eventually added to a deck. And this was
for playing games like card games. Uh. And it became
like a much larger deck and all of a sudden
you could play, you know, with more cards that are different.
You can play more complex than interesting games. Right, So
you have China inventing playing cards apparently, it's spreading to Egypt,
(03:58):
which I had not heard of this UM group. Had
you before the mom Luke Empire? I had not mom
Luke without an a in the middle. It's not a
Mama Luke right now, just that mom Luke. They were.
They were Muslims who controlled Egypt for about three hundred years,
from like I think the to the sixteenth centuries maybe,
(04:22):
and they UM somehow got their hands on the playing
cards that China had invented, and they kind of made
their own flourishes to it. UM. The suits were kind
of familiar UM like you might UM you might see today,
kind of especially in the Tarot deck. But one of
the big differences was polo sticks. That was one of
(04:42):
the suits because apparently the UM, the people who were
running the show really liked playing polo. But polo was
invented in Iran. If I'm not mistaken, is that correct?
I didn't know that it was the word clue the
other day, very nice, which which cross Chicago Tribune, New
York Times. Is there any other No, there really isn't. UM.
(05:02):
I'm sorry a person who writes the Chicago Tribune cross word,
you do a very good job. It's not fair um So,
the mom Luke Empire spread out from Egypt. They they
they had conquests and I think maybe even trade with
other places around the Mediterranean. One of the things they
did was they went to Italy and they brought with
them their cards, and it seems like in Italy that's
(05:26):
where Tarot was first created. And it wasn't again, not
created for divination. It was created to make games much
more interesting. Yeah, I found it really interesting how many
cultural things were spread through either war, uh in the military,
or you know, I guess you know, oftentimes trade as well.
(05:46):
But it seems like we talk a lot on the
show about like someone went to war with something else
and the people that they were fighting he loved this
food or this game or this whatever and took it home. Yeah,
that's how Lincoln Logs came about. Really, I don't think
it sounds like I don't know about this Lincoln guy,
but these logs, right, people are crazy for them, So
(06:11):
that's they exported. I guess in that sense. Yes, that's
how Lincoln Logs got over there. So, um I think
we're gonna cut that last little lame addition to the
joke out later. Um So, when it arrived in in uh, Italy, Chuck,
it was known as try no Fee, which is another
term for the Italian carnival festivals that you see with
(06:33):
the masks and everything. But then shortly after that it
changed the names to taroak, which apparently means foolish, stupid, simple,
something like that. And they think that that the name
change happened when they introduced the fool and they by
introducing the fool card, which is a very well known
(06:54):
um tarot card as we'll talk about later. Uh, it
signified like a huge change. They took regular playing cards,
added twenty two more to them, made them all trump cards,
and now you had so much more complicated complex games.
And as a matter of fact, they think this is
where trick taking games came from. Yeah, I mean you
mentioned trump taking cards. That's what I mean. If you've
(07:18):
never played any trick taking games, do yourself a favor
and learn spades or hearts or something. Sure, j Yeah, Jen,
Remy counts. I guess, Uh no, it totally counts. I guess.
I always think of spades. Really, um, I had I
went through a spades phase when I was kind of
in college. It was kind of early on for some reason.
(07:39):
And oh and then what's the one in the Midwest
that my wife's family always plays, Get us out of here.
That's very funny, uh Yuker Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, my
parents played too. Of course, idea how it's played, no clue. Well,
I'm fame us in our family for forgetting every single
(08:02):
year how to play uk and then every Christmas they
would then, you know, re explain the game. But long
way of saying, these are all like trick taking games
where you have, um, you're laying down hands and then
someone will lay down like a trump card and you
can like take all those tricks that are on the board.
And there are all kinds of variations of trick taking games.
But they're basically saying that, I mean, was Tarrocco the
(08:25):
original the o G I think so? Yeah. I think
it originated in Italy and the north of Italy. Um,
and then after that, uh, it's spread to France and
they took the same name Tarok, which in French is
Tarot with the A U X. Obviously we evolved into
tarot t a R O T from there, right, So
(08:48):
that's what they think the progression was. But this was
just for making trick taking games, um interesting or creating
trick taking games as a matter of fact, and the
people are parent you still play it. In Europe. I
think it's super hipster. I'll bet if you're a euro
hipster you probably play the original Arrak or Tarrok show,
(09:10):
especially in northern Italy. But um, I think also if
you're just kind of like a normal person too, you
might you might find it attractive. So it's still being played.
So there's two kinds of taro out there in the world,
and I say we kind of move on to the
one that everybody knows over here. Um after an ad break. Hey,
that sounds like a great plan alright. So I think
(09:49):
when people click on an episode called hall Terror Works,
they're not really interested in hearing about the early origins
of just another like spades light game. Uh. They want
to talk about it's spreading cards on the table and
having someone sit across from them and tell them how
their day or week or life is going to go.
And that's the divination aspect. Divination has been around a
(10:11):
long long time. People have been using cards for a
long long time. It's called cartomancy, and I think the
French basically invented this and like the seventeen hundreds or so, right, Yeah,
and um it was originally they used playing cards. They
didn't even use the Saro deck. And people still do
(10:32):
cartomancy using regular playing cards. Yeah. Um, so I guess
to kind of differentiate it, if you're doing taro, that
would be called tarot ology, and then cartomancy is using
I guess probably any other kind of cards. And so,
um you think like, okay, taro is kind of presented
as like this ancient esoteric knowledge. It's frequently connected to
(10:56):
ancient Egypt or ancient Greece. Um that like there's oracles involved,
and that it's just kind of um evidence of a
longstanding tradition of mysticism and fortune telling, and that is
made up. Uh it is. And you had a tone
(11:16):
in your voice like you're about to yank the rug
out from us, you know, uh, and yank we are
because we actually know for sure where this all came from.
It was invented by a couple of guys, a couple
of French guys, one couple of dudes, just a couple
of dudes or whatever dude in French might be. Uh.
(11:39):
One gentleman was named Antoine court Day. How would you
say that, Gibeline, Yeah, I think that's great, all right. Uh.
He was born in seventeen twenty five. He was a writer,
he's a freemason. He was super as was not a
lot of people, but some people back then interested in
the occult and esoteric ideas and things like that. And
(12:02):
when he was I guess and his uh what would
that be like forties or fifties, Tara was not super
popular at the time, And as the story goes, he
saw some woman that we're playing it, and he looked
down and, UM, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically said he
glanced down and recognized that the allegory of these pictures
(12:24):
on the cards, uh he found were relative to all
of life, and there were unlimited numbers of combinations to
combine these cards, and that was sort of the inspiration
of inventing this divination process. Yeah, like he said, oh,
I've discovered these cards and it's clear that I've uncovered
(12:45):
something here. So Gebelin was a very annoying person. Um,
and he he took a Um, he took that inspiration
and then went back and reversed engineered everything to support
the inspiration that he just had, and he did so
again by just making up a lot of stuff. Um,
he wrote this thing that was it came out multiple volumes.
(13:07):
I get the impression it was a little bit like
maybe the Paris Quarterly or something like that, or the
Paris Review Quarterly legitimizes it more than I was thinking.
But this, okay, how about the Hoboken Quarterly. But it's
true though, you know. Um, So he called it the
(13:27):
primeval World Comma Analyzed and compared to the modern world,
which seems pretty straightforward. It's fine with me. The thing
is is each volume he just started talking about esoteric stuff.
He wrote essays about whatever was on his mind, and
he was trying to kind of build up this compendium
of ancient knowledge that again, this guy was just pulling
(13:50):
out of thin air. And it wasn't like he was
the guy who pointed to ancient Egypt and said their
mystery lies. There's there's an esoteric mystery tradition there. He
wasn't even the original with that. He was just kind
of playing off of some stuff that was popular at
the time and really going to town with it. Yeah,
(14:12):
I mean I think, um, the franchise did a lot
of people saw Egypt as this sort of um mystical,
magical place, uh with you know, for a lot of reasons.
But he's the one that sort of again didn't invent it,
but borrowed on that idea. In one of these volumes,
he wrote an essay Ontario connecting to Egypt. Uh. And
(14:34):
then he had his friend, uh Louis Raphael uh Lucresse
de Fael, Count of Mela. That was beautiful. I'm not
sure how much of that is right, but um, they
got together as a team, and he was also a
dude that was interested in the occult and stuff like that.
They tended to hang they tended to hang around together,
(14:57):
and so they got together and sort of of made
up these description of the game and the Tarot deck
were not the game, but I guess the practice and
the Tarot deck connecting it to Egypt. Yeah. What was
pretty cool was that they they, um, they said, you
know what the tarot deck is, these seventy eight cards. Um,
I don't know if we said and if we didn't, sorry.
(15:20):
When they added the tarot trump cards to the existing
deck of cards, it it made seventy eight cards. They
had fifty six cards and then playing cards um deck
before added twenty two tarot cards as trump cards, so
you had a deck of seventy eight. So what um
uh did Gibelin and defoy yell I like you um
(15:45):
said was that these things were actually existing disguised pages
from the Book of Thoth. And it's actually really cool
if you stop and think about, like along the lines
of like ghostbuster UM like like sumer Um kind of
mysticism cool and both if I'm I hope I'm pronouncing
(16:07):
it correctly. He was a god of ancient Egypt, a
real one. He was known for um balance in the universe.
He was credited with um creating, if not all knowledge
on Earth, at the very least certain knowledge like law, magic, philosophy, religion, science, writing.
So he's a good guy. And he also was known
(16:28):
as an infallible judge. I saw it put somewhere Um.
So he would be perfect to be the one who
you could use the Book of Thoth to kind of
predetermine the future, because you were basically tapping into thowth
to say, um, hey, buddy, can you help me out here?
I need to know the future. Can I sidebar for
(16:48):
a moment? Yes, please, or what do we call it?
What approach when we talk about tangents? Yeah, yeah, can
I tangent approach? Uh? You mentioned Ghostbusters. I just wanted
to point out very fast that we showed my daughter
the original Ghostbusters for the first time UH last week
and it was surprisingly like okay for a seven year old.
(17:11):
The jokes that weren't super appropriate as usual kind of
go over her head and she loved it. And so
the next night we watched the recent UH sequel. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I saw that, and that movie I think is very
unfairly piled upon. I don't care. It's not good, and
(17:31):
maybe it has something to do with watching it with
my daughter and watching them two days in a row.
But I thought it was quite fun and super super enjoyable. Yeah,
I would say it's p t. Anderson's like deepest movie.
At the very least, it's most entertaining. I didn't think
it was perfect, and I don't know it was a
big nostalgia play, but I bought in and we just
had a great time watching it. So I like a
(17:54):
lot of fun. It was a little weird that, like
Egan at the end was like, mmmm, I'm not gonna
say anything, but I'll give you some head nods kind
of thing. I think that they really could have worked
shop that a little more. Um, sorry for spoiling it
for everybody, but um that. Other than that, I thought
it was really engrossing, really cool. I liked all the
characters because Paul Road, of course, is amazing, so I said,
(18:16):
go see it too. I think they kept him from
talking a lot at the end because they didn't want
to overdo a sort of dodgy uh you know, resurrection
totally like it could have gone off the rails if
he was like, hey everybody, no, completely for sure, they
featured they gave him too much screen time then okay,
(18:36):
so then cut back a little more even totally see that.
That's my take on it. Anyway, back to tarot Um,
I'm all about the new Ghostbusters though, and we're going
to show her the reboot with that Kristen Wiggan the
Gang too? What about chew Ghostbusters too? You can't skip
over that? Yeah, sure you can with Jano Hello, Where's
the Baby? It had its moments, but I don't know,
(18:58):
even even Bill Murray in the whole cast, we're kind
of like that was a garbage movie. What. Yeah, Ghostbusters
do was they were not very proud of it. I'm
gonna have to go back and watch it because I
liked it. Right, Well, maybe we will. Um where were we?
We were talking about how these guys, the Geblin and
um his buddy defoy yell um had just basically made
(19:21):
all this stuff up. And I think we left off
with how it was actually kind of cool that they
linked it to lost pages from the Book of Both Sure,
so they have now described this uh divination process, and
it wasn't like it was a huge deal all of
a sudden and like the latest fad that you know,
caught like wildfire all over the world. Um, it did
(19:43):
catch on in a pretty big way, but that came
a little bit later. But what is clear is that
all of these sort of stories that you hear about
Tarot was um of like the origins of it. And
then there's some pretty fanciful stories written up about you know,
uh punks that created this game and these decks were
found in ruined temples and stuff like that. Like all
(20:06):
of that just seems to literally have been made up
to create kind of a fun back story. Yeah, And
I mean you can kind of get the idea like
this is pretty cool stuff, and like a bunch of
people took a crack at it. Um eliphas Levi, who
created Baffa met Our buddy Um, he contributed to it, said,
this is actually has to do with Kabbala, the Jewish mysticism.
(20:27):
Paul christian Um, who I can't remember what his original
name was, he added to it too, but he was
a very famous mystic um or occult person, and like
that whole spiritualism. Remember we did a whole episode on that.
Those same people interested in in mediumship and the occult
and all that just basically added to this. They'd be like,
(20:50):
also this and also that it was just a lot
of people who are out of their minds contributing to
this really neat totally made up mythology rounding tarot cards.
And then finally Chuck, we arrive at Alistair Crowley. Yeah,
all roads point till old a c. I guess if
(21:10):
you listen to that episode and and got through my
sort of sneering through the whole thing, you will remember
the gold the Temple of the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, which was in London, and this was a
group that Crowley was was he the leader of or
just a he staged a coup if I'm not mistaken,
(21:31):
and they ended up breaking up UM rather than just
let him lead, all right, that that sounds familiar. So
the breakup led to different factions in different groups sort
of splintering off, and one of which was led by
someone named A. E. Waite. Uh. And this is where
the story UM kind of takes Taro to the uh
(21:52):
to the forefront of popularity. UM. In nineteen ten eight
e Waite published the pictorial Key to the Tarot and Uh,
this is where the most famous deck, like the deck
that you would probably buy today in the shopping mall,
comes from A. E. Wait Uh getting together with Pamela
(22:12):
Coleman Smith, who I believe was the artist, and this,
you know, kind of change to the deck up and
this is this became sort of the most popular one,
I believe in early nineteen hundred, nineteen o nine or so,
and it's still the most popular, Yeah, I mean far
and away, especially in the United States, called the um
Wait Smith deck or the Ritter Weight because I think
(22:35):
Ritter published it, and it's it's if you saw you'd
be like, oh, yeah, that's that's a tarot deck. That's
what I think of it as it's this beautiful art
deco UM illustrations. UM that like if you, if you again,
if you just think of a tarot card, like they're
probably imagining a um Waite Smith tarot card because Pamela
(22:56):
Coleman Smith just nailed it. I mean, this is nineteen
o nine and there's a lot of different decks that
have the same thing, but they're just drawing differently or whatever.
They're still publishing this um a hundred years plus later.
It was just that well done. Yeah, and I think
they also, um, I don't know if it was to
make it more popular or not, but there was a
lot of Christian imagery on previous decks and they kind
(23:19):
of toned those down a little bit for this deck,
Like they said, hey, why don't we get the pope
off of their and include some cool like ancient Grecian
priest instead. Uh. Maybe it was just to make it
a little more sort of mysterious. I think so for sure,
but also not they didn't want to scare off the occultists,
you know, they didn't want it to poppy, right. They
(23:42):
also there was a papist to papists um, she became
the high priestess Um. But and it also followed a
lot of tradition to I think the moon card um
has been generally unchanged for like five hundred years. It's
still still contains the same baffling imagery that it always did.
(24:03):
The moon card means um. It means illusion and deception
and that things are not as they appear, and so,
of course, to demonstrate that and get it across, the
moon card has a moon um. It also has a
path that leads off into the distance. Animal on either
side of the card to represent two sides of human nature.
I guess good and evil kind of thing. Yeah, I
(24:23):
got that part. Here's what it really takes a weird turn.
There's towers in the in the background. Odd, and then
there's a crawfish crawling out of the water. Yeah. I
mean that's got to symbolize some sort of evolution, right,
I don't know. I have no idea what the crawfish means,
and I don't really want to know. It's just so
odd that that I would rather that be some sort
(24:45):
of hermatic mystery for me forever. Well, don't write in
about that then, yeah, please don't tell me dear listener. Uh,
let's take a break. Yeah, let's take a break, and
we'll talk a little bit about the deck itself, because like,
what's even on these cards? Right? Yeah? Okay, Chuck. Where
(25:19):
we left off, Basically, a man discovered a deck of
cards and decided that they were mystical in much the
same way that if somebody discovered a World of Warcraft
deck two years from now and decided that you could
use them to tell the future. Exact same thing, but
he made such a cool mythology around it that it
(25:40):
it just called on. Yeah, so we're gonna talk a
little bit about the deck there, not the most in
depth thing. We can't get into every card, but just
sort of an overview. We mentioned that there are seventy
eight cards, fifty six of these, or what's known as
the minor Arcana, and they are the number car and
they're divided into four different suits, which are wands, swords, pinacles,
(26:05):
and cups um, which sort of explains the Terrence Malick
film Night of Cups was in reference to the Tarot.
Oh yeah, I saw there's a compilation of tarot and
films on Vimeo that it just made of Yeah, just
imagery from the tarot that that shows up in films
without you know, making a big deal out of it,
(26:26):
kind of subtly. But was that one of those like
look it's everywhere kind of things a little bit, but
I mean they didn't hammer at home. They really just
showed you, like, yeah, there's some pretty cool stuff. And
that the end it said, see it's everywhere, she told you.
All right. So the pinacles, the cups, the wands, and
the swords are the four suits, and uh there are
(26:49):
also face cards in these suits, the page, the Night,
the Queen, the King, and the ace, right yeah, And
I mean just like a regular deck of playing cards,
there's one through ten cards and in the face cards,
and then on top of that there's the twenty two
tarot cards that you think of like like the fool
that we mentioned or the hero font we mentioned earlier, um,
(27:11):
and there I think the minor arcana or arcana um
those are like the one through ten, Jack, Queen, King,
um kind of thing. And then the major arcana or
arcana the twenty two um those are the ones that
are like the money divin divination cards, but you can
(27:31):
also divine the future based on some of the lesser
cards too, and I think people have kind of added
to that over time, and that was one of the
reasons I think that the um the Waite Smith deck
was so interesting is that they really took some of
the formerly just kind of disused cards and really dressed
them up with new imagery. And I think that was
(27:53):
one of the reasons that became so popular. Should we
talk about some of the big daddy cards. Yeah, let's
see that. All right, there's the hour card and this
is not a card that you want, and we'll talk
about readings and how those go in a minute. But generally,
you know, you sit across from someone or you do
it yourself, and you spread a certain number of cards out,
depending on what kind of spread you're gonna use. Uh.
(28:14):
If you get that Tower card, it's it's not a
great card. It's probably the worst card you can get. Um.
It indicates all sorts of bad things. Uh Uh, something
that might happen to you that really has a negative
impact on your life, destruction, chaos. Uh, sort of like
the rug getting pulled out from under your feet. Um,
(28:35):
it's just no good. So you don't want to you
don't want to get that Tower card. No, you definitely
don't and then just kind of as a nod to
what I was just saying about some of the minor
Arcanic cards also being fairly potent. I've seen um and
also thanks to to the Tarot Guide and I Publishing
for some of this info. UM that the Ten of
Swords again, they'd be like the Ten of Spades and
(28:57):
like a regular deck. That it is actually one of
the the worst cards, that it's a runner up to
like the worst cards you can get, and it's more
about like being bad mouth behind your back or betrayed, um,
the the end of a relationship or a situation hitting
rock bottom. Nobody likes that. But we should say at
this point that when the card is pulled, it can
(29:20):
be pulled upside down. And there's a couple of interpretations
with that. One is that it means the opposite of
what it normally means, right side up or basically bizarro taro.
Or it also means um that the effect that it
means right side up is just gonna have like it's
gonna be weaker than it would have been had the
(29:42):
card been right side up. Yeah, I mean the direction
certainly matters with how the card is drawn and laid
and spread. Uh, and it seems to matter even more
maybe when there if you're not just doing sort of
a standard one card thing or like the three card spread,
which is very common is uh, past present, future, But
(30:05):
it seems like the more cards. What's the Celtic Cross,
that's the sort of the most common complex one, and
that one really it really matters which way these cards
are pointing in relation to one another. Yeah. And also
each spot on the Celtic Cross spread represents a specific thing.
So the card, the card you draw for that spot
(30:28):
is how that whatever that card says, like say chaos
or something like that, Um, how it relates to that
part of your life, um, like work like say um.
And then you've got not just the interplay between the
card and its position, but also that card and its
position and the other cards and their position. So it's
really complicated and complex very quickly. But I mean it's
(30:51):
kind of like a really like a full astrology reading,
like you can you can really go to town and
come up with some really in depth readings for people. Well,
starting with the Celtic Cross for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
You've also got the fool card, which we mentioned earlier,
just to follow up on that. That is the first
card of the major arcana, and that is that's a
(31:12):
good card. Generally speaking. It's a positive thing a lot
of times, and it can indicate like a fresh start,
a new beginning. Um, if you're gonna go on some
exciting new adventure, you might uh draw the fool card
if you believe in that kind of thing. It's a
cute card. There's especially in the um um Wait Smith's deck.
(31:34):
It's like a youth who's got like a little bindle
over his shoulder, cute little white dog jumping up barking
at him like, hey, you're about to step off of
a cliff. I think he's got a flower that he's smelling,
and just kind of like a happy transfixed look. You know,
the fool is usually a pretty happy person, and that's
a that's like a good example, though like you would
(31:55):
not necessarily think the fool is a good card. Same
with the death card. Um Ibviously, anytime somebody gets the
death card, they are a little flipped out until the
reader tells them, actually, don't worry. The death card doesn't
actually mean death. You'd be way closer to being worried
about dying with the tower card. The death card is
much more um associated with change, transition, new beginnings, ends
(32:21):
of old things. It doesn't it doesn't mean you're gonna
die unless it does. In case, it does not help
though that when they draw that card, they say, and
the kind of death is it on your head? That
was so good? That was such a great to geblin
Or maybe we should get meagle to Uh I can't.
I can't, right well, I think, yeah, I need to.
(32:45):
I need to sort of parse that out. I can't
over meagle you. I can't. I just miss him so much.
He'll be back. Don't worry his taff it is sweaty
right now though. Uh So those are you know, some
of them major Arcanada that are sort of the money
cards that you might see if you go to a
terror reading and get told by some you know a
(33:07):
little old lady, what's going to happen in your life? Yeah?
Or a young lady or a young man or an
old man, and you know, buinary non binary person, all
sorts of different people. And that's the point. Any single
person can be a tarot card reader. And one of
the things that I saw, suggested Chuck, was to do
(33:28):
what Emily does, like every morning, take a card and
just think about it for the rest of the day.
What does that card mean to you? How does it
tie into your life right now? And by doing that,
you know, over and over again on a daily basis,
you're just kind of wading into the world of Tarot cards,
and you're also just absorbing what each card means and
(33:48):
how it can possibly relate to somebody's life. So I
saw that in Vogue UM as a really great way
to kind of start and get into Tarot. And that's
um that again, it's evidence that anybody who's interested can
become a terror reader. Again, I just want to stress
there's nothing magic about Tara. There's nothing magic about terror readers, um.
(34:09):
But that doesn't mean that they're not accomplished. Some of
the terror readers out there are really really talented at
what they do. They're just not performing anything magical, and
any reasonable Tara reader will tell you the exact same thing,
right And for listeners, I was desperately trying to think
of an InVogue joke, and all I can think of
something about you're never going to get it, but never
(34:30):
gonna get it, never gonna get it. The time came
and went. But I know we're all thinking the same thing. Yeah,
but I mean, I'm with you. It's clunky, but sometimes
you just have to go back and like cite a joke,
even if you don't pull it off right, then I
do that too. I'm with you. Okay. So I guess
you know, we we said that there's a spread that happens,
and you know, there's different ways of doing it and
obviously different ways of reading and interpreting the cards, but
(34:54):
generally you will have someone or yourself will do whatever
spread you've decided upon. And if you're giving, so what
else are reading? There are some people that that think
that that person being read should, like as the cards
are being shuffled and such, should talk out loud sort
of about the questions that they might have. Uh. Some
people think that they should actually cut the deck so
(35:14):
they physically interacted with it, while others say no, they
shouldn't touch the deck hands off. So there's sort of
different ways of going about it, depending on your methods.
I guess yeah, um, and I also saw that the
there your tarot deck is supposed to have been gifted
to you. You're not supposed to buy your own Tarot deck.
But again, there's no hardened fast rules in tarot, and
(35:35):
anybody who's like stressing you to to adhere to hardened
fast rules does not get tarot. So they just need
to be quiet. That's your mouth. So UM. One of
the one of the ways that this pops up is
that tarot is actually sometimes used by psychotherapists and it
actually has a kind of a lengthy tradition in psychotherapy
(35:55):
dating back to Carl Jung, who starting in the twenties
or thirties, became interested in tarot among some other divination
tools like the aging astrology. UM was trying to find
these archetypes that are universal the human consciousness that you
believed tarot kind of reflected, whether on purpose or not,
(36:15):
and that you could use that as a way to
kind of unlock that part of yourself that or that
part of the universal consciousness that was in yourself. Carl
Young was maybe a little off the mark with that,
but there's this idea that you can use this terror
reading to really stop and reflect and think about your life,
(36:36):
and that's a really great tool when you're in psychotherapy
UM or counseling or any kind of therapy. UM anything
that can kind of get you to stop and think
about chaos at work or your love life or whatever
in a certain way. Um, that's kind of guided by
the card that you draw. Um, that's that's helpful, that's useful,
(36:57):
and there's there's nothing wrong with that at all. Yuh.
I agree, I think uh. And I don't think there
are a lot of psychotherapists out there that are saying like,
let this be the guide to your life or anything
like that. No, run if your psychothapal. I think it's
more along the lines of like if they if the
if it helps the patient, and if they get something
out of it as far as delving deeper into their
(37:18):
own psyche, and as long as the psychotherapist gets money too,
that's all good. Sure. I mean that fifteen o'clock is
going to run. It's right, you get fifty lucky attree
forty three? Is that real? Okay, I'm kidding. I can
see forty five. But this is like what do they
break for commercials? Right? Okay? What if, um, you go
(37:43):
to a tarot reader and they just nail it, especially
if it's presented to you is like m you can
kind of see a little bit of future with these cards.
I'm not supposed to say that, but it's true, and
they nail the reading like it just speaks to you.
And there are plenty of people out there who have
that have had that experience. But luckily science can swoop
in and say, calm down, calm down. There's actually a
(38:05):
really good explanation to this. And there are two sides
of the same coin. One is cold readings. The other
is what's called the Forer effect. Yeah, and we you know,
we talked about cold readings and uh, she's I feel
like we've done a few episodes where we kind of
touched on that. But that's the idea that when you
sit down in front of a a reader or it
(38:27):
could be whatever, if they have the crystal ball or
the tero or they're reading lines on your hand and
stuff like that, uh, that they are really um, if
they're good and they stay in business, then they're probably
really good at cold reading, which is sort of just
picking up on either obvious clues that you may not
realize that you've even said out loud, or even sort
(38:49):
of subconscious clues that they pick up on. And how
you carry your life or maybe how you walked in
the room or what kind of car you arrived in,
and just sort of picking up on all ease blatant
or non blatant clues that a person might unconsciously or
consciously give. Right. Um, So uh, that's where the reader
(39:10):
is doing the work. There's also another way where the read,
the person getting the reading, actually does the work, and
that is that for effect I mentioned, which is uh.
It's named after a psychologist who coined it. It's also
called the Barnum effect, based on P. T. Barnum's famous
uh saying there's a sucker born every minute. It's people's
willingness to accept very generic, very generalized information as tailored
(39:36):
exclusively to them, which is something that can happen into
terror reading. And in that case, it's not the reader
doing the work. It's you, the read who's like, oh,
that makes a hundred percent sense. I totally see how
that that jibes with my life. Obviously, these tarot cards
are perfect and showing me the future. Yeah, I mean
it's kind of a confirmation bias in a way, because
you'll you'll remember the things that work infirm and you
(40:00):
kind of don't really think about the other like six
or seven things that didn't come true, right exactly? Yeah,
for sure. One other thing that they could read our
strangers in a cup of tea or beverage that can
be read as well cold read too. Thank you. You
got anything more about tarot? Nah? Neither. I think that
(40:23):
that's the end of this episode then, And since Chuck
said nah, I said me either. Obviously, every one's time
for listener mail. I'm going to call this a correction.
And um, we got we heard from a few people
on this. This email was a little bit of a
spanking about the condition of John Denver upon his death.
(40:45):
Oh yeah, sorry, John Denver's family of John Denver, it
was very disappointed to hear Josh make the false claim
that John Denver at cocaine in his system at the
time it was plane crash. Toxicology test were neg for
all drugs including ethanol. The following pertinent paragraph was taken
from the NTSB investigation. I'm not gonna bother reading it,
(41:09):
but it basically says what this guy says, which was
tests were negative for all screen drugs. Uh. If you'd
like to review the whole report, you can find it here. Um.
While Mr Denver was no altar boy, drugs played no
role in the crash that killed him. Uh, And it's
a sad disservice to say otherwise to his memory and
his family. Very disappointing, you guys, And that's from John.
(41:31):
Maybe it's the ghost of John Denver good he and
uh George Burns are hanging out, that's right. Um, so yeah,
I'm sorry John Denver and John Denver's family. That's I
don't know how I felt for that, but I totally did.
I knew that like years and years and years ago,
and I guess I just never bothered to look it up.
So my apologies for that one, and I take it back.
(41:53):
We should do a short stuff one day on the
West Virginia controversy and country roads. Oh yeah, yeah, there's
two sides that have long been fighting, and I think
they each think it's settled of whether or not Almost
Heaven was the state of West Virginia or the western
part of the state of Virginia. Oh, that is a
(42:14):
that's a feud. I don't know if we should wage
into that hornet's nest. Chuck, You're probably right, And also
I think John I'd like John John Denver by the
way I've said it before. I think he wrote one
of the best songs about Toledo ever, made Saturday Night
in Toledo, Ohio, where he talks about how you can
go to the park and watch the grass dye because
it's so boring. I love other good stuff. So hats
(42:38):
off to John, hats off to John Denver, and hats
off to us for being big people, especially me and
admitting our mistake. If you want to get in touch
with us and let us know about another mistake we made,
doors wide Open, you can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
(42:59):
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, So it's a
good old fashioned hooting and holler and how down of
a Stuff you Should Know episode. Yeehaw. Uh, this is
(00:24):
your pick the tar Otah, I'm sorry, that's okay. Uh.
You know who's into this a little bit? Uh? Fortune tellers,
wealth tarrot specifically who my wife? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily has gotten into it a little bit, and she's
definitely of the of the state of mind of like, listen,
(00:45):
this is something I do in the morning to sort
of have a little quiet time. And I don't think
she thinks that it like guides her life or has
any sort of magic qualities. I think it's a little
more one of those things like I'm gonna see what
my cards say and just sort of ruminate on that
stuff and maybe it'll open up some new ideas and
thoughts about life. I was reading a Vogue article that
(01:09):
was pretty in depth about it, and that seems to
be the general usage of tarot these days, and it's huge.
It's gotten really big lately, apparently in a billion dollars
worth of tarot cards were sold around the world. Yeah,
and they're expecting it to go up by another quarter
billion in the next three years. So it's definitely a thing.
(01:30):
For sure, it's having a moment, But um, it is
kind of reassuring that it's not like following like the
crystals are essential oil healing tract and instead people are like,
I'm just using this to reflect on my my life. Yeah.
And I think she also likes just thinks the cards
are beautiful and cool looking and appreciates the art and
(01:52):
that kind of thing, which they They are very and
they can be expensive and super beautiful. Yeah. Do you
do you know what deck she has them? Sure, it's
probably just the standard shopping ball tech from Spencer's Gifts.
The the Green Day Tarot Day? Is there really a
green Day? I know some bands have their own, I
(02:12):
don't think so it's possible. Who knows that Billy Billy
Joe Armstrong is. He's very innovative little guy. So, um,
we are talking about tarot cards today. I think we
let the cat out of the bag already. Um, and
they are not as old as you would think. And
(02:34):
then their use of um for divination purposes is even
younger than that. And there was a really long standing
myth that I thought was correct up until yesterday. The
day before that, playing cards evolved out of tarot cards
in in an effort to conceal them at a time
(02:54):
when people had to like watch out with their mysticism,
their esoteric knowledge the occult, else they might be persecuted,
so they developed them into playing cards like we have today.
That is absolutely false, and in fact, playing cards were
around centuries before the tarot deck came along. Yeah, that's true. Uh.
And people generally think it seems like so many things
(03:17):
go back to ancient China, but a lot of people
agree that they were invented in China in the thirteenth
century and then sort of spread their roots from there.
But like you said that, regular playing cards were around
before this and the tarot we're twenty two different designs
(03:37):
that were eventually added to a deck. And this was
for playing games like card games. Uh. And it became
like a much larger deck and all of a sudden
you could play, you know, with more cards that are different.
You can play more complex than interesting games. Right, So
you have China inventing playing cards apparently, it's spreading to Egypt,
(03:58):
which I had not heard of this UM group. Had
you before the mom Luke Empire? I had not mom
Luke without an a in the middle. It's not a
Mama Luke right now, just that mom Luke. They were.
They were Muslims who controlled Egypt for about three hundred years,
from like I think the to the sixteenth centuries maybe,
(04:22):
and they UM somehow got their hands on the playing
cards that China had invented, and they kind of made
their own flourishes to it. UM. The suits were kind
of familiar UM like you might UM you might see today,
kind of especially in the Tarot deck. But one of
the big differences was polo sticks. That was one of
(04:42):
the suits because apparently the UM, the people who were
running the show really liked playing polo. But polo was
invented in Iran. If I'm not mistaken, is that correct?
I didn't know that it was the word clue the
other day, very nice, which which cross Chicago Tribune, New
York Times. Is there any other No, there really isn't. UM.
(05:02):
I'm sorry a person who writes the Chicago Tribune cross word,
you do a very good job. It's not fair um So,
the mom Luke Empire spread out from Egypt. They they
they had conquests and I think maybe even trade with
other places around the Mediterranean. One of the things they
did was they went to Italy and they brought with
them their cards, and it seems like in Italy that's
(05:26):
where Tarot was first created. And it wasn't again, not
created for divination. It was created to make games much
more interesting. Yeah, I found it really interesting how many
cultural things were spread through either war, uh in the military,
or you know, I guess you know, oftentimes trade as well.
(05:46):
But it seems like we talk a lot on the
show about like someone went to war with something else
and the people that they were fighting he loved this
food or this game or this whatever and took it home. Yeah,
that's how Lincoln Logs came about. Really, I don't think
it sounds like I don't know about this Lincoln guy,
but these logs, right, people are crazy for them, So
(06:11):
that's they exported. I guess in that sense. Yes, that's
how Lincoln Logs got over there. So, um I think
we're gonna cut that last little lame addition to the
joke out later. Um So, when it arrived in in uh, Italy, Chuck,
it was known as try no Fee, which is another
term for the Italian carnival festivals that you see with
(06:33):
the masks and everything. But then shortly after that it
changed the names to taroak, which apparently means foolish, stupid, simple,
something like that. And they think that that the name
change happened when they introduced the fool and they by
introducing the fool card, which is a very well known
(06:54):
um tarot card as we'll talk about later. Uh, it
signified like a huge change. They took regular playing cards,
added twenty two more to them, made them all trump cards,
and now you had so much more complicated complex games.
And as a matter of fact, they think this is
where trick taking games came from. Yeah, I mean you
mentioned trump taking cards. That's what I mean. If you've
(07:18):
never played any trick taking games, do yourself a favor
and learn spades or hearts or something. Sure, j Yeah, Jen,
Remy counts. I guess, Uh no, it totally counts. I guess.
I always think of spades. Really, um, I had I
went through a spades phase when I was kind of
in college. It was kind of early on for some reason.
(07:39):
And oh and then what's the one in the Midwest
that my wife's family always plays, Get us out of here.
That's very funny, uh Yuker Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, my
parents played too. Of course, idea how it's played, no clue. Well,
I'm fame us in our family for forgetting every single
(08:02):
year how to play uk and then every Christmas they
would then, you know, re explain the game. But long
way of saying, these are all like trick taking games
where you have, um, you're laying down hands and then
someone will lay down like a trump card and you
can like take all those tricks that are on the board.
And there are all kinds of variations of trick taking games.
But they're basically saying that, I mean, was Tarrocco the
(08:25):
original the o G I think so? Yeah. I think
it originated in Italy and the north of Italy. Um,
and then after that, uh, it's spread to France and
they took the same name Tarok, which in French is
Tarot with the A U X. Obviously we evolved into
tarot t a R O T from there, right, So
(08:48):
that's what they think the progression was. But this was
just for making trick taking games, um interesting or creating
trick taking games as a matter of fact, and the
people are parent you still play it. In Europe. I
think it's super hipster. I'll bet if you're a euro
hipster you probably play the original Arrak or Tarrok show,
(09:10):
especially in northern Italy. But um, I think also if
you're just kind of like a normal person too, you
might you might find it attractive. So it's still being played.
So there's two kinds of taro out there in the world,
and I say we kind of move on to the
one that everybody knows over here. Um after an ad break. Hey,
that sounds like a great plan alright. So I think
(09:49):
when people click on an episode called hall Terror Works,
they're not really interested in hearing about the early origins
of just another like spades light game. Uh. They want
to talk about it's spreading cards on the table and
having someone sit across from them and tell them how
their day or week or life is going to go.
And that's the divination aspect. Divination has been around a
(10:11):
long long time. People have been using cards for a
long long time. It's called cartomancy, and I think the
French basically invented this and like the seventeen hundreds or so, right, Yeah,
and um it was originally they used playing cards. They
didn't even use the Saro deck. And people still do
(10:32):
cartomancy using regular playing cards. Yeah. Um, so I guess
to kind of differentiate it, if you're doing taro, that
would be called tarot ology, and then cartomancy is using
I guess probably any other kind of cards. And so,
um you think like, okay, taro is kind of presented
as like this ancient esoteric knowledge. It's frequently connected to
(10:56):
ancient Egypt or ancient Greece. Um that like there's oracles involved,
and that it's just kind of um evidence of a
longstanding tradition of mysticism and fortune telling, and that is
made up. Uh it is. And you had a tone
(11:16):
in your voice like you're about to yank the rug
out from us, you know, uh, and yank we are
because we actually know for sure where this all came from.
It was invented by a couple of guys, a couple
of French guys, one couple of dudes, just a couple
of dudes or whatever dude in French might be. Uh.
(11:39):
One gentleman was named Antoine court Day. How would you
say that, Gibeline, Yeah, I think that's great, all right. Uh.
He was born in seventeen twenty five. He was a writer,
he's a freemason. He was super as was not a
lot of people, but some people back then interested in
the occult and esoteric ideas and things like that. And
(12:02):
when he was I guess and his uh what would
that be like forties or fifties, Tara was not super
popular at the time, And as the story goes, he
saw some woman that we're playing it, and he looked
down and, UM, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically said he
glanced down and recognized that the allegory of these pictures
(12:24):
on the cards, uh he found were relative to all
of life, and there were unlimited numbers of combinations to
combine these cards, and that was sort of the inspiration
of inventing this divination process. Yeah, like he said, oh,
I've discovered these cards and it's clear that I've uncovered
(12:45):
something here. So Gebelin was a very annoying person. Um,
and he he took a Um, he took that inspiration
and then went back and reversed engineered everything to support
the inspiration that he just had, and he did so
again by just making up a lot of stuff. Um,
he wrote this thing that was it came out multiple volumes.
(13:07):
I get the impression it was a little bit like
maybe the Paris Quarterly or something like that, or the
Paris Review Quarterly legitimizes it more than I was thinking.
But this, okay, how about the Hoboken Quarterly. But it's
true though, you know. Um, So he called it the
(13:27):
primeval World Comma Analyzed and compared to the modern world,
which seems pretty straightforward. It's fine with me. The thing
is is each volume he just started talking about esoteric stuff.
He wrote essays about whatever was on his mind, and
he was trying to kind of build up this compendium
of ancient knowledge that again, this guy was just pulling
(13:50):
out of thin air. And it wasn't like he was
the guy who pointed to ancient Egypt and said their
mystery lies. There's there's an esoteric mystery tradition there. He
wasn't even the original with that. He was just kind
of playing off of some stuff that was popular at
the time and really going to town with it. Yeah,
(14:12):
I mean I think, um, the franchise did a lot
of people saw Egypt as this sort of um mystical,
magical place, uh with you know, for a lot of reasons.
But he's the one that sort of again didn't invent it,
but borrowed on that idea. In one of these volumes,
he wrote an essay Ontario connecting to Egypt. Uh. And
(14:34):
then he had his friend, uh Louis Raphael uh Lucresse
de Fael, Count of Mela. That was beautiful. I'm not
sure how much of that is right, but um, they
got together as a team, and he was also a
dude that was interested in the occult and stuff like that.
They tended to hang they tended to hang around together,
(14:57):
and so they got together and sort of of made
up these description of the game and the Tarot deck
were not the game, but I guess the practice and
the Tarot deck connecting it to Egypt. Yeah. What was
pretty cool was that they they, um, they said, you
know what the tarot deck is, these seventy eight cards. Um,
I don't know if we said and if we didn't, sorry.
(15:20):
When they added the tarot trump cards to the existing
deck of cards, it it made seventy eight cards. They
had fifty six cards and then playing cards um deck
before added twenty two tarot cards as trump cards, so
you had a deck of seventy eight. So what um
uh did Gibelin and defoy yell I like you um
(15:45):
said was that these things were actually existing disguised pages
from the Book of Thoth. And it's actually really cool
if you stop and think about, like along the lines
of like ghostbuster UM like like sumer Um kind of
mysticism cool and both if I'm I hope I'm pronouncing
(16:07):
it correctly. He was a god of ancient Egypt, a
real one. He was known for um balance in the universe.
He was credited with um creating, if not all knowledge
on Earth, at the very least certain knowledge like law, magic, philosophy, religion, science, writing.
So he's a good guy. And he also was known
(16:28):
as an infallible judge. I saw it put somewhere Um.
So he would be perfect to be the one who
you could use the Book of Thoth to kind of
predetermine the future, because you were basically tapping into thowth
to say, um, hey, buddy, can you help me out here?
I need to know the future. Can I sidebar for
(16:48):
a moment? Yes, please, or what do we call it?
What approach when we talk about tangents? Yeah, yeah, can
I tangent approach? Uh? You mentioned Ghostbusters. I just wanted
to point out very fast that we showed my daughter
the original Ghostbusters for the first time UH last week
and it was surprisingly like okay for a seven year old.
(17:11):
The jokes that weren't super appropriate as usual kind of
go over her head and she loved it. And so
the next night we watched the recent UH sequel. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I saw that, and that movie I think is very
unfairly piled upon. I don't care. It's not good, and
(17:31):
maybe it has something to do with watching it with
my daughter and watching them two days in a row.
But I thought it was quite fun and super super enjoyable. Yeah,
I would say it's p t. Anderson's like deepest movie.
At the very least, it's most entertaining. I didn't think
it was perfect, and I don't know it was a
big nostalgia play, but I bought in and we just
had a great time watching it. So I like a
(17:54):
lot of fun. It was a little weird that, like
Egan at the end was like, mmmm, I'm not gonna
say anything, but I'll give you some head nods kind
of thing. I think that they really could have worked
shop that a little more. Um, sorry for spoiling it
for everybody, but um that. Other than that, I thought
it was really engrossing, really cool. I liked all the
characters because Paul Road, of course, is amazing, so I said,
(18:16):
go see it too. I think they kept him from
talking a lot at the end because they didn't want
to overdo a sort of dodgy uh you know, resurrection
totally like it could have gone off the rails if
he was like, hey everybody, no, completely for sure, they
featured they gave him too much screen time then okay,
(18:36):
so then cut back a little more even totally see that.
That's my take on it. Anyway, back to tarot Um,
I'm all about the new Ghostbusters though, and we're going
to show her the reboot with that Kristen Wiggan the
Gang too? What about chew Ghostbusters too? You can't skip
over that? Yeah, sure you can with Jano Hello, Where's
the Baby? It had its moments, but I don't know,
(18:58):
even even Bill Murray in the whole cast, we're kind
of like that was a garbage movie. What. Yeah, Ghostbusters
do was they were not very proud of it. I'm
gonna have to go back and watch it because I
liked it. Right, Well, maybe we will. Um where were we?
We were talking about how these guys, the Geblin and
um his buddy defoy yell um had just basically made
(19:21):
all this stuff up. And I think we left off
with how it was actually kind of cool that they
linked it to lost pages from the Book of Both Sure,
so they have now described this uh divination process, and
it wasn't like it was a huge deal all of
a sudden and like the latest fad that you know,
caught like wildfire all over the world. Um, it did
(19:43):
catch on in a pretty big way, but that came
a little bit later. But what is clear is that
all of these sort of stories that you hear about
Tarot was um of like the origins of it. And
then there's some pretty fanciful stories written up about you know,
uh punks that created this game and these decks were
found in ruined temples and stuff like that. Like all
(20:06):
of that just seems to literally have been made up
to create kind of a fun back story. Yeah, And
I mean you can kind of get the idea like
this is pretty cool stuff, and like a bunch of
people took a crack at it. Um eliphas Levi, who
created Baffa met Our buddy Um, he contributed to it, said,
this is actually has to do with Kabbala, the Jewish mysticism.
(20:27):
Paul christian Um, who I can't remember what his original
name was, he added to it too, but he was
a very famous mystic um or occult person, and like
that whole spiritualism. Remember we did a whole episode on that.
Those same people interested in in mediumship and the occult
and all that just basically added to this. They'd be like,
(20:50):
also this and also that it was just a lot
of people who are out of their minds contributing to
this really neat totally made up mythology rounding tarot cards.
And then finally Chuck, we arrive at Alistair Crowley. Yeah,
all roads point till old a c. I guess if
(21:10):
you listen to that episode and and got through my
sort of sneering through the whole thing, you will remember
the gold the Temple of the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, which was in London, and this was a
group that Crowley was was he the leader of or
just a he staged a coup if I'm not mistaken,
(21:31):
and they ended up breaking up UM rather than just
let him lead, all right, that that sounds familiar. So
the breakup led to different factions in different groups sort
of splintering off, and one of which was led by
someone named A. E. Waite. Uh. And this is where
the story UM kind of takes Taro to the uh
(21:52):
to the forefront of popularity. UM. In nineteen ten eight
e Waite published the pictorial Key to the Tarot and Uh,
this is where the most famous deck, like the deck
that you would probably buy today in the shopping mall,
comes from A. E. Wait Uh getting together with Pamela
(22:12):
Coleman Smith, who I believe was the artist, and this,
you know, kind of change to the deck up and
this is this became sort of the most popular one,
I believe in early nineteen hundred, nineteen o nine or so,
and it's still the most popular, Yeah, I mean far
and away, especially in the United States, called the um
Wait Smith deck or the Ritter Weight because I think
(22:35):
Ritter published it, and it's it's if you saw you'd
be like, oh, yeah, that's that's a tarot deck. That's
what I think of it as it's this beautiful art
deco UM illustrations. UM that like if you, if you again,
if you just think of a tarot card, like they're
probably imagining a um Waite Smith tarot card because Pamela
(22:56):
Coleman Smith just nailed it. I mean, this is nineteen
o nine and there's a lot of different decks that
have the same thing, but they're just drawing differently or whatever.
They're still publishing this um a hundred years plus later.
It was just that well done. Yeah, and I think
they also, um, I don't know if it was to
make it more popular or not, but there was a
lot of Christian imagery on previous decks and they kind
(23:19):
of toned those down a little bit for this deck,
Like they said, hey, why don't we get the pope
off of their and include some cool like ancient Grecian
priest instead. Uh. Maybe it was just to make it
a little more sort of mysterious. I think so for sure,
but also not they didn't want to scare off the occultists,
you know, they didn't want it to poppy, right. They
(23:42):
also there was a papist to papists um, she became
the high priestess Um. But and it also followed a
lot of tradition to I think the moon card um
has been generally unchanged for like five hundred years. It's
still still contains the same baffling imagery that it always did.
(24:03):
The moon card means um. It means illusion and deception
and that things are not as they appear, and so,
of course, to demonstrate that and get it across, the
moon card has a moon um. It also has a
path that leads off into the distance. Animal on either
side of the card to represent two sides of human nature.
I guess good and evil kind of thing. Yeah, I
(24:23):
got that part. Here's what it really takes a weird turn.
There's towers in the in the background. Odd, and then
there's a crawfish crawling out of the water. Yeah. I
mean that's got to symbolize some sort of evolution, right,
I don't know. I have no idea what the crawfish means,
and I don't really want to know. It's just so
odd that that I would rather that be some sort
(24:45):
of hermatic mystery for me forever. Well, don't write in
about that then, yeah, please don't tell me dear listener. Uh,
let's take a break. Yeah, let's take a break, and
we'll talk a little bit about the deck itself, because like,
what's even on these cards? Right? Yeah? Okay, Chuck. Where
(25:19):
we left off, Basically, a man discovered a deck of
cards and decided that they were mystical in much the
same way that if somebody discovered a World of Warcraft
deck two years from now and decided that you could
use them to tell the future. Exact same thing, but
he made such a cool mythology around it that it
(25:40):
it just called on. Yeah, so we're gonna talk a
little bit about the deck there, not the most in
depth thing. We can't get into every card, but just
sort of an overview. We mentioned that there are seventy
eight cards, fifty six of these, or what's known as
the minor Arcana, and they are the number car and
they're divided into four different suits, which are wands, swords, pinacles,
(26:05):
and cups um, which sort of explains the Terrence Malick
film Night of Cups was in reference to the Tarot.
Oh yeah, I saw there's a compilation of tarot and
films on Vimeo that it just made of Yeah, just
imagery from the tarot that that shows up in films
without you know, making a big deal out of it,
(26:26):
kind of subtly. But was that one of those like
look it's everywhere kind of things a little bit, but
I mean they didn't hammer at home. They really just
showed you, like, yeah, there's some pretty cool stuff. And
that the end it said, see it's everywhere, she told you.
All right. So the pinacles, the cups, the wands, and
the swords are the four suits, and uh there are
(26:49):
also face cards in these suits, the page, the Night,
the Queen, the King, and the ace, right yeah, And
I mean just like a regular deck of playing cards,
there's one through ten cards and in the face cards,
and then on top of that there's the twenty two
tarot cards that you think of like like the fool
that we mentioned or the hero font we mentioned earlier, um,
(27:11):
and there I think the minor arcana or arcana um
those are like the one through ten, Jack, Queen, King,
um kind of thing. And then the major arcana or
arcana the twenty two um those are the ones that
are like the money divin divination cards, but you can
(27:31):
also divine the future based on some of the lesser
cards too, and I think people have kind of added
to that over time, and that was one of the
reasons I think that the um the Waite Smith deck
was so interesting is that they really took some of
the formerly just kind of disused cards and really dressed
them up with new imagery. And I think that was
(27:53):
one of the reasons that became so popular. Should we
talk about some of the big daddy cards. Yeah, let's
see that. All right, there's the hour card and this
is not a card that you want, and we'll talk
about readings and how those go in a minute. But generally,
you know, you sit across from someone or you do
it yourself, and you spread a certain number of cards out,
depending on what kind of spread you're gonna use. Uh.
(28:14):
If you get that Tower card, it's it's not a
great card. It's probably the worst card you can get. Um.
It indicates all sorts of bad things. Uh Uh, something
that might happen to you that really has a negative
impact on your life, destruction, chaos. Uh, sort of like
the rug getting pulled out from under your feet. Um,
(28:35):
it's just no good. So you don't want to you
don't want to get that Tower card. No, you definitely
don't and then just kind of as a nod to
what I was just saying about some of the minor
Arcanic cards also being fairly potent. I've seen um and
also thanks to to the Tarot Guide and I Publishing
for some of this info. UM that the Ten of
Swords again, they'd be like the Ten of Spades and
(28:57):
like a regular deck. That it is actually one of
the the worst cards, that it's a runner up to
like the worst cards you can get, and it's more
about like being bad mouth behind your back or betrayed, um,
the the end of a relationship or a situation hitting
rock bottom. Nobody likes that. But we should say at
this point that when the card is pulled, it can
(29:20):
be pulled upside down. And there's a couple of interpretations
with that. One is that it means the opposite of
what it normally means, right side up or basically bizarro taro.
Or it also means um that the effect that it
means right side up is just gonna have like it's
gonna be weaker than it would have been had the
(29:42):
card been right side up. Yeah, I mean the direction
certainly matters with how the card is drawn and laid
and spread. Uh, and it seems to matter even more
maybe when there if you're not just doing sort of
a standard one card thing or like the three card spread,
which is very common is uh, past present, future, But
(30:05):
it seems like the more cards. What's the Celtic Cross,
that's the sort of the most common complex one, and
that one really it really matters which way these cards
are pointing in relation to one another. Yeah. And also
each spot on the Celtic Cross spread represents a specific thing.
So the card, the card you draw for that spot
(30:28):
is how that whatever that card says, like say chaos
or something like that, Um, how it relates to that
part of your life, um, like work like say um.
And then you've got not just the interplay between the
card and its position, but also that card and its
position and the other cards and their position. So it's
really complicated and complex very quickly. But I mean it's
(30:51):
kind of like a really like a full astrology reading,
like you can you can really go to town and
come up with some really in depth readings for people. Well,
starting with the Celtic Cross for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Um.
You've also got the fool card, which we mentioned earlier,
just to follow up on that. That is the first
card of the major arcana, and that is that's a
(31:12):
good card. Generally speaking. It's a positive thing a lot
of times, and it can indicate like a fresh start,
a new beginning. Um, if you're gonna go on some
exciting new adventure, you might uh draw the fool card
if you believe in that kind of thing. It's a
cute card. There's especially in the um um Wait Smith's deck.
(31:34):
It's like a youth who's got like a little bindle
over his shoulder, cute little white dog jumping up barking
at him like, hey, you're about to step off of
a cliff. I think he's got a flower that he's smelling,
and just kind of like a happy transfixed look. You know,
the fool is usually a pretty happy person, and that's
a that's like a good example, though like you would
(31:55):
not necessarily think the fool is a good card. Same
with the death card. Um Ibviously, anytime somebody gets the
death card, they are a little flipped out until the
reader tells them, actually, don't worry. The death card doesn't
actually mean death. You'd be way closer to being worried
about dying with the tower card. The death card is
much more um associated with change, transition, new beginnings, ends
(32:21):
of old things. It doesn't it doesn't mean you're gonna
die unless it does. In case, it does not help
though that when they draw that card, they say, and
the kind of death is it on your head? That
was so good? That was such a great to geblin
Or maybe we should get meagle to Uh I can't.
I can't, right well, I think, yeah, I need to.
(32:45):
I need to sort of parse that out. I can't
over meagle you. I can't. I just miss him so much.
He'll be back. Don't worry his taff it is sweaty
right now though. Uh So those are you know, some
of them major Arcanada that are sort of the money
cards that you might see if you go to a
terror reading and get told by some you know a
(33:07):
little old lady, what's going to happen in your life? Yeah?
Or a young lady or a young man or an
old man, and you know, buinary non binary person, all
sorts of different people. And that's the point. Any single
person can be a tarot card reader. And one of
the things that I saw, suggested Chuck, was to do
(33:28):
what Emily does, like every morning, take a card and
just think about it for the rest of the day.
What does that card mean to you? How does it
tie into your life right now? And by doing that,
you know, over and over again on a daily basis,
you're just kind of wading into the world of Tarot cards,
and you're also just absorbing what each card means and
(33:48):
how it can possibly relate to somebody's life. So I
saw that in Vogue UM as a really great way
to kind of start and get into Tarot. And that's
um that again, it's evidence that anybody who's interested can
become a terror reader. Again, I just want to stress
there's nothing magic about Tara. There's nothing magic about terror readers, um.
(34:09):
But that doesn't mean that they're not accomplished. Some of
the terror readers out there are really really talented at
what they do. They're just not performing anything magical, and
any reasonable Tara reader will tell you the exact same thing,
right And for listeners, I was desperately trying to think
of an InVogue joke, and all I can think of
something about you're never going to get it, but never
(34:30):
gonna get it, never gonna get it. The time came
and went. But I know we're all thinking the same thing. Yeah,
but I mean, I'm with you. It's clunky, but sometimes
you just have to go back and like cite a joke,
even if you don't pull it off right, then I
do that too. I'm with you. Okay. So I guess
you know, we we said that there's a spread that happens,
and you know, there's different ways of doing it and
obviously different ways of reading and interpreting the cards, but
(34:54):
generally you will have someone or yourself will do whatever
spread you've decided upon. And if you're giving, so what
else are reading? There are some people that that think
that that person being read should, like as the cards
are being shuffled and such, should talk out loud sort
of about the questions that they might have. Uh. Some
people think that they should actually cut the deck so
(35:14):
they physically interacted with it, while others say no, they
shouldn't touch the deck hands off. So there's sort of
different ways of going about it, depending on your methods.
I guess yeah, um, and I also saw that the
there your tarot deck is supposed to have been gifted
to you. You're not supposed to buy your own Tarot deck.
But again, there's no hardened fast rules in tarot, and
(35:35):
anybody who's like stressing you to to adhere to hardened
fast rules does not get tarot. So they just need
to be quiet. That's your mouth. So UM. One of
the one of the ways that this pops up is
that tarot is actually sometimes used by psychotherapists and it
actually has a kind of a lengthy tradition in psychotherapy
(35:55):
dating back to Carl Jung, who starting in the twenties
or thirties, became interested in tarot among some other divination
tools like the aging astrology. UM was trying to find
these archetypes that are universal the human consciousness that you
believed tarot kind of reflected, whether on purpose or not,
(36:15):
and that you could use that as a way to
kind of unlock that part of yourself that or that
part of the universal consciousness that was in yourself. Carl
Young was maybe a little off the mark with that,
but there's this idea that you can use this terror
reading to really stop and reflect and think about your life,
(36:36):
and that's a really great tool when you're in psychotherapy
UM or counseling or any kind of therapy. UM anything
that can kind of get you to stop and think
about chaos at work or your love life or whatever
in a certain way. Um, that's kind of guided by
the card that you draw. Um, that's that's helpful, that's useful,
(36:57):
and there's there's nothing wrong with that at all. Yuh.
I agree, I think uh. And I don't think there
are a lot of psychotherapists out there that are saying like,
let this be the guide to your life or anything
like that. No, run if your psychothapal. I think it's
more along the lines of like if they if the
if it helps the patient, and if they get something
out of it as far as delving deeper into their
(37:18):
own psyche, and as long as the psychotherapist gets money too,
that's all good. Sure. I mean that fifteen o'clock is
going to run. It's right, you get fifty lucky attree
forty three? Is that real? Okay, I'm kidding. I can
see forty five. But this is like what do they
break for commercials? Right? Okay? What if, um, you go
(37:43):
to a tarot reader and they just nail it, especially
if it's presented to you is like m you can
kind of see a little bit of future with these cards.
I'm not supposed to say that, but it's true, and
they nail the reading like it just speaks to you.
And there are plenty of people out there who have
that have had that experience. But luckily science can swoop
in and say, calm down, calm down. There's actually a
(38:05):
really good explanation to this. And there are two sides
of the same coin. One is cold readings. The other
is what's called the Forer effect. Yeah, and we you know,
we talked about cold readings and uh, she's I feel
like we've done a few episodes where we kind of
touched on that. But that's the idea that when you
sit down in front of a a reader or it
(38:27):
could be whatever, if they have the crystal ball or
the tero or they're reading lines on your hand and
stuff like that, uh, that they are really um, if
they're good and they stay in business, then they're probably
really good at cold reading, which is sort of just
picking up on either obvious clues that you may not
realize that you've even said out loud, or even sort
(38:49):
of subconscious clues that they pick up on. And how
you carry your life or maybe how you walked in
the room or what kind of car you arrived in,
and just sort of picking up on all ease blatant
or non blatant clues that a person might unconsciously or
consciously give. Right. Um, So uh, that's where the reader
(39:10):
is doing the work. There's also another way where the read,
the person getting the reading, actually does the work, and
that is that for effect I mentioned, which is uh.
It's named after a psychologist who coined it. It's also
called the Barnum effect, based on P. T. Barnum's famous
uh saying there's a sucker born every minute. It's people's
willingness to accept very generic, very generalized information as tailored
(39:36):
exclusively to them, which is something that can happen into
terror reading. And in that case, it's not the reader
doing the work. It's you, the read who's like, oh,
that makes a hundred percent sense. I totally see how
that that jibes with my life. Obviously, these tarot cards
are perfect and showing me the future. Yeah, I mean
it's kind of a confirmation bias in a way, because
you'll you'll remember the things that work infirm and you
(40:00):
kind of don't really think about the other like six
or seven things that didn't come true, right exactly? Yeah,
for sure. One other thing that they could read our
strangers in a cup of tea or beverage that can
be read as well cold read too. Thank you. You
got anything more about tarot? Nah? Neither. I think that
(40:23):
that's the end of this episode then, And since Chuck
said nah, I said me either. Obviously, every one's time
for listener mail. I'm going to call this a correction.
And um, we got we heard from a few people
on this. This email was a little bit of a
spanking about the condition of John Denver upon his death.
(40:45):
Oh yeah, sorry, John Denver's family of John Denver, it
was very disappointed to hear Josh make the false claim
that John Denver at cocaine in his system at the
time it was plane crash. Toxicology test were neg for
all drugs including ethanol. The following pertinent paragraph was taken
from the NTSB investigation. I'm not gonna bother reading it,
(41:09):
but it basically says what this guy says, which was
tests were negative for all screen drugs. Uh. If you'd
like to review the whole report, you can find it here. Um.
While Mr Denver was no altar boy, drugs played no
role in the crash that killed him. Uh, And it's
a sad disservice to say otherwise to his memory and
his family. Very disappointing, you guys, And that's from John.
(41:31):
Maybe it's the ghost of John Denver good he and
uh George Burns are hanging out, that's right. Um, so yeah,
I'm sorry John Denver and John Denver's family. That's I
don't know how I felt for that, but I totally did.
I knew that like years and years and years ago,
and I guess I just never bothered to look it up.
So my apologies for that one, and I take it back.
(41:53):
We should do a short stuff one day on the
West Virginia controversy and country roads. Oh yeah, yeah, there's
two sides that have long been fighting, and I think
they each think it's settled of whether or not Almost
Heaven was the state of West Virginia or the western
part of the state of Virginia. Oh, that is a
(42:14):
that's a feud. I don't know if we should wage
into that hornet's nest. Chuck, You're probably right, And also
I think John I'd like John John Denver by the
way I've said it before. I think he wrote one
of the best songs about Toledo ever, made Saturday Night
in Toledo, Ohio, where he talks about how you can
go to the park and watch the grass dye because
it's so boring. I love other good stuff. So hats
(42:38):
off to John, hats off to John Denver, and hats
off to us for being big people, especially me and
admitting our mistake. If you want to get in touch
with us and let us know about another mistake we made,
doors wide Open, you can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you
(42:59):
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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