Cartomancy: Fortune-Telling with Playing Cards
What Is Cartomancy? Cartomancy is the practice of divination using a deck of ordinary playing cards, in which the four suits, the courts, and the numerical pips are read as a layered symbolic vocabulary. The art predates the rise of the Tarot in popular esoteric use, traveled from Mamluk Egypt through Italy and France into […]
The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot: Decoding the Imagery
What Is the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot? The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot is a 78-card deck published in London in 1909, designed by occultist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by artist Pamela Colman Smith. It was the first widely circulated deck to give every Minor Arcana card a full narrative scene, and its imagery still defines what most readers […]