Sunday, November 18, 2007

Oracle Card Decks

Oracle card decks claim to provide insight and positive outlooks to people.

They are similar in form and use to Tarot cards, but do not have suits or negative connotations as Tarot may do. Common themes used in oracle card decks involve the power of positive thought and metaphysical beings such as angels, fairies, mermaids and unicorns.

There are many Oracle Card decks on the market by many authors, including Doreen Virtue, Steven Farmer, Wayne Dyer and Louise Hay. Hay House is a leading publisher of Oracle Card Decks.

Source: Wikipedia

Tarot Card Games Tarot And Tarock

Tarot Card Games
Tarocchi (Italian, plural form of Tarocco), also known as Tarock (German-Austrian name), Tarot (French name) and similar names in other languages, is a specific form of playing card deck, which in its history was used for different trick-taking games and later for cartomantic interests and divination (concrete forms appear at least since the article of Court de Gebelin in the year 1781), also as a field for artists to display specific iconographical forms often connected to an ideological system in the background.

It is recorded as one of the oldest types of playing card decks known.

The game is nowadays known in many variations, first basic rules appear in the manuscript of Martiano da Tortona (before 1425; translated text), the next are known from the year 1637. In Italy the game has become less popular, one version named Tarocco Bolognese: Ottocento has still survived and there are still others played in Piedmont, but the number of games outside of Italy is much higher, there connected to the words Tarot and Tarock.

It is played with a tarot deck of playing cards. The so-called "esoteric" decks used for divination are usually ill-suited for playing, for example the corner symbols are missing; thus there are regular playing decks in the countries where tarocchi is popular.

The 78-card deck contains:

Four suits: depending on the region, either the Anglo-French hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs or the original Latin suits of swords, batons, cups, and coins; numbered one through ten, plus four court cards — a jack, a knight, a queen, and a king;

the twenty-one tarots, known in divination as the Major Arcana, which function in the game as a permanent suit of trumps;

the Fool, also known as the Excuse, an un-numbered card that in some variations
excuses the player from following suit or playing a trump, and in others acts as the strongest trump.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Tarot Cards 78 Major Arcana And Minor Arcana Tarot Cards

Major 78 Tarot Cards

The modern, 78-card tarot deck has two distinct parts:

The Major Arcana ("greater secrets"), or trump cards, consists of 21 cards without suits, plus a 22nd card, The Fool, which is often given the value of zero: The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, and The World.

The Minor Arcana ("lesser secrets") consists of 56 cards (sometimes referred to as pips), divided into four suits of 14 cards each: ten numbered cards and four court cards. The court cards are the page, knight, queen and king in each of the four tarot suits.


The traditional Italian tarot suits are swords, batons, coins and cups; in modern tarot decks, however, the batons suit is often called wands, rods or staves, while the coins suit is often called pentacles or disks.

The terms major arcana and minor arcana are only used in esoteric practice.

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