Description
- 1 1/2" x 1" Steel Tarot Card
- 16" Leather Cord Necklace
Description
In occult practices, the Major Arcana are the trump cards of a tarot pack. Prior to the 17th century, the trumps were simply part of a special card deck used for gaming and gambling. There may have been allegorical and cultural significance attached to them, but beyond that, the trumps originally had little mystical or magical import. When decks are used for card games (Tarot card games), these cards serve as permanent trumps and are distinguished from the remaining cards, the suit cards, which are known by occultists as the Minor Arcana. The terms "Major" and "Minor Arcana" are used in the occult, and divinatory applications of the deck as in practising Esoteric Tarot and originate with Jean-Baptiste Pitois (18111877), writing under the name Paul Christian.[4] Michael Dummett writes that the Major Arcana originally had simple allegorical or esoteric meaning, mostly originating in elite ideology in the Italian courts of the 15th century when it was invented.[2] The occult significance began to emerge in the 18th century when Antoine Court de Gbelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published Le Monde Primitif. The construction of the occult and divinatory significance of the tarot, and the Major and Minor Arcana, continued on from there.[5] For example, Court de Gbelin argued for the Egyptian, kabbalistic, and divine significance of the tarot trumps; Etteilla created a method of divination using tarot; liphas Lvi worked to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory tarot, bringing it back to the tarot de Marseilles, creating a "tortuous" kabbalastic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life.[4] The Marquis Stanislas de Guaita established the Major Arcana as an initiatory sequence to be used to establish a path of spiritual ascension and evolution.[2] In 1980 Sallie Nichols, a Jungian psychologist