User:Ogopogo/Complete History of Tarot
"Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and three people died."
~ Steven Wright on Tarot cards
Welcome to the world of Tarot
- Tarot is a secret and mysterious system of metaphysical teachings of the Illuminati that is physically represented in the mundane world by 79 (or later 78) tarot cards, consisting of 23 (or later 22) Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana cards. The 56 minor arcana are divided into 4 suits of 14 cards each: Batons, Swords, Cups and Coins.
- Tarot is a method of thought control and levitation and travel between the five dimensions. However, it is not a religion and has no creed. It seeks only the Truth.
- It enjoys a cult following among espresso coffee drinkers and call-center employees throughout the Southern United States.
- The Tarot is also a cool way to control people through the power of suggestion.
Uses of Tarot in the Aquarian Age of Tarot
Highest Use according to the Illuminati:
- For (re-)discovering the True Essence of tarot (see section below)
Acceptable according to the Illuminati:
- Psychological Tarot readings, i.e., using tarot cards for Depth Psychology, or Rorschach® ink blot tests. (A way to practise as an analyst without being a qualified psychologist, psychiatrist or Jungian analyst -- The Illuminati are all for Equal Opportunity.)
Mundane Uses: (Not Recommended; Listed Here for Completeness, as this is Uncyclopedia, dude)
- For earning pocket change or the rent shortfall, by fortune-telling (fatalistic prediction) with the cards
- For planning your choice of wardrobe or lover (in that order)
- For having something to collect
- For letting it collect dust
- For having an internet forum to join (as you would otherwise have no outside interests and be forced to edit articles on Uncyclopedia)
- For editing articles on Uncyclopedia
- For selecting which DVD's to play in your Sony 5 disc changer
- For attracting members of the opposite sex (If you figure this one out, please tell me, so I'll know too.)
Re-Discovering the True Essence of Tarot
You won't find it in the bandes dessinées and dusty tracts of the 18th and 19th century French occultists à la Etteilla Barber, Wirth, Papus, and Napoleon. Their works and words are misguided and bear no resemblance to the True Essence of tarot. They know nothing of Life and its Spirit.
Benefit from my errors and experiences: The one only sure Way is to seek out and find an Illuminati to be your pupil-master, to lead you by the hand out of the proverbial Platonic cave of darkness. Get thee to a coffee-shop, look for someone who looks like they drink too much espresso in a day, and odds are, they're an Illuminati to illumine you out of the darkness. However, make sure that they're not an Illuminati newbie; that's worse than reading the French occultists. Or, you could just get high.
The Complete Alleged History of Tarot
Golden Age of Tarot (and the Master Card)
Tarot was invented by the Illuminati while sojourning in Pharaonic Egypt after being exiled from Mesopotamia during the Roman Empire’s Neo-Punk Purges. Because of persecution of the Illuminati by the Pharaonic priests of the Order of Isis who burned Illuminati manuscripts and pillaged Illuminati universities, the Illuminati devised tarot in order to preserve their esoteric teachings for future generations of Illuminati newbies.
Originally, the Illuminati tarot deck consisted of 23 major arcana. However, because of covert Pharaonic corruptive cognitive influences, the 23rd card (the Master Card) became deleted from the major arcana, leaving the 22 major arcana that one sees in most of today’s tarot decks. Because of the Irreversible Flow of Universal Intelligence, the 23rd card was subsequently unable to be undeleted.
The Master Card aka Happy Squirrel is in fact the ultimate Key to full mastery of tarot and its life-fulfilling mysteries, but it has been all but lost. The Order of the Keepers of the Master Card (which still exists today) is a covert, élite, high-ranking inner-order of Illuminati that is the Guardian of the only extant specimen of an original Master Card in the Known World. The Master Card is the Philosopher's Stone of the alchemists and is the Holy Grail of hockey fans. Possession of the Master Card has allowed the Order of the Keepers of the Master Card to amass great fortunes and to own large banks and investment houses worldwide.
The Illuminati invented mango pudding, baseball, duct tape, Kaballah, the Pyramids, Stonehenge, alchemy, the Language of the Birds, and the original 23 letters (which subsequently was mysteriously reduced to 22 letters) of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets in an effort to make at least some of the simplest aspects of tarot mysticism somewhat intelligible to the profane, i.e., the non-Illuminati.
Silver Age of Tarot
The Illuminati in Egypt, forced to flee Egypt because of civil war unrest during the reign of Egyptian queen Cleopatra 2525, brought with them the tarot deck to the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula (in what is now the United Arabic Oil Kingdoms).
As a way of disguising the true nature of tarot cards, the Illuminati cosmetically altered the cards by incorporating traditional Arabic design motifs and Art Deco calligraphy while still retaining the Illuminati symbolic import.
The first documented use of tarot cards for fortune-telling was in 200 B.C. in Starbucks coffee-shops by the more psychic among the Illuminati (disguised as Gypsies, as the Roma were then known) in that part of the Arabian Peninsula that is present-day Kuwait, as a means of securing their livelihood as the Illuminati were prevented by the local civil authorities from pursuing emotionally-satisfying, self-actualizing forms of paid employment. This inaugurated the Silver Age of tarot.
As well, for their amusement, the Illuminati devised a poker-like card game that they called Tarocchi, after the Arabic pronounciation of the word ‘tarot’.
Bronze Age of Tarot
For no particular reason that we know of, the Illuminati arrived by gondola in Italy in 1300, disguised as Knights Templar returning from the Crusades. They became court artists to wealthy Italian families like the Viscontis and the Stalones.
Some of the Illuminati subsequently moved to what is now France and became the architects commissioned to design and oversee the construction of the Cathedrals that were the fad in Europe at that time. These Illuminati ensured that tarot symbolism was secretly inserted in the architecture and artwork of the Cathedrals.
To disguise the Illuminati origins of tarot, the Illuminati successfully spread rumours throughout Europe that tarot was invented by the Merovingians; that the card-game of Tarocchi was invented by Italians; and that the various gold-and-plastic tarot decks that the Illuminati artists painted to commemorate various Visconti family weddings were painted by Italian artists.
For selfish commercial reasons, French card-makers in the south of France, notably in the city of Marseille, claimed a French origin for tarot, going so far as to rename ‘Tarot’ as the ‘Tarot de Marseille’ and to publish tarot decks with such a title on the box.
Stone Age of Tarot
In the late 19th century, artist Pamela Colman Smith started the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, England, an esoteric lodge like today’s Moose and Elks lodges in the United States, and used the tarot deck to give meat and substance to the lodge’s teachings. The Golden Dawn was famed for its toga parties and thus attracted many members from High Society.
To help pay for art supplies, Colman Smith designed and drew her own black-and-white version of a tarot deck with a view to selling tarot decks, even though the idea was commercially risky. To make her deck more saleable, she decided to have storybook picture images on the minor arcana (something that the Illuminati had, in the beginning, originally considered but rejected on doctrinal grounds); in her search for imagery ideas to incorporate, she travelled to Egypt to research Pyramid tomb art of Pharaonic Egypt that ended up being Colman Smith's greatest influence in drawing the minor arcana.
With the marketing assistance of A.E. Waite, an occult-book promoter and a colourist, who attended to the colouring of the card images, the deck was self-published in London in 1910.
To everyone's surprise, the deck became a best-seller, used by elegant Victorian ladies for fortune-telling parlour games. As Colman Smith's agent, A.E. Waite became the second wealthiest man at that time in Britain.
Unfortunately, following World War II, the popularity of tarot waned in the world, except for Tarocchi game leagues in France.
Aquarian Age of Tarot
The Aquarian Age of tarot (otherwise known as the Neo-Silver Age of tarot) began with the Summer of Love (or The High Renaissance) in 1967 in San Francisco, as Hippies (among them Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley, the members of the Beatles, and George Martin) began to use Colman Smith’s tarot deck in mind-blowing psychedelic experiments, and to read tarot cards on street-corners in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco to earn money to buy pot.
Soon thereafter, hippie wannabes all wanted to have their very own tarot deck.
With the advent of the New Age movement, the popularity of tarot cards has reached an all-time ‘high’; the Hippies of 1967, now in retirement homes, would indeed be proud. Today, there are many varieties of tarot decks, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the downright dumb. Although tarot's mass popularity and delusion|dillution clearly is not what the Illuminati had intended, who cares! It sure makes publishers and starving artists happy.
In 2000, Britain's weather-forecasting agency introduced the use of tarot cards to predict the weather, and finds it to be more accurate than other methods of weather-forecasting.
The 22 Surviving Major Arcana of the Illuminati tarot deck (with restored Illuminati card titles)
