This is from the Crowley Thoth Tarot, not really recommended for beginners, but that's okay, as it looks pretty cool. Aleister Crowley, of course, is at best a dubious source of occult knowledge, at worst a fraud and weirdo. I can recall getting flack from church-going friends about becoming a student of the Tarot. The usual response- Tarot is 1. demonic and/or of the Devil, 2. will prompt you to explore the occult, and guarantee your passage to Hell, 3. an affront to God, and 4. forbidden by the Bible, or 5. All of the above. By way of response, I have read the Bible cover to cover five times. (Not in one sitting, obviously). The best that I can figure is that there were reasons for forbidding certain things- for example, the people were not to eat pork due to improper cooking procedures that would result in becoming sick from it. So in the interest of keeping people alive and well, pork is off the menu. The famous passage in Leviticus, (ch. 22, verse 18) that says "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live", that is, go kill witches, is another example. The original wording of this has a variety of interpretations, none of which have the slightest thing to do with actual witches. The most accurate version I've heard is do not allow a poisoner to live- someone who uses and creates poisons- an assasin, in other words. Again, having someone running around and poisoning your friends and family is clearly less than desirable. Was this inspired by God, or just practical, common knowledge? I leave that for you to decide.
The Tarot has been grouped together with witchcraft, which in turn has been grouped together with the occult practices for as long as anyone can remember. However, the Tarot has existed for quite a while, and in its simplest form, is nothing but a deck of cards. What you do with them varies widely from application to application- to say that these harmless pictures are evil or bad is rather silly, it seems to me. If indeed we are made in God's image, how is it that something so simple can lead us astray so quickly? Seems to me to be something of a glaring flaw in our design. But at any rate, the history of the Tarot is a long and complicated one- suffice it to say that no one is really sure where they came from. However, it looks like they began as simply a deck of cards, paralleling the more well-known playing cards- these were developed in France and bore simplified versions of the suit symbols for ease of printing and manufacture. Tarot did not become a tool for divination until around 1776, when a Frenchman named Antoine Court de Gebelin encountered an ordinary deck of Tarot cards, and subsequently began a long process of assigning and interpreting arcane meanings from the cards. In actuality, this is the basis for Tarot divination, and can be applied to pretty much any system you want to use it for- an interpretation of a pattern in some part of the world around you can then be extrapolated to include the whole. And so it was that Tarot became used for divination, and summarily condemned by the Church. The Tarot existed before the Church condemned it, presumably in harmony with it, although gambling was generally condemned by the Church as well, and where there are cards, there is always someone who uses them to gamble with. The cards later were incorporated into various systems of magic and witchcraft, however they are not limited to them. I find the principles operate pretty much independently of any system of religion, although individual experience can and will affect how the cards are interpreted.
However, there is an interesting article on the alternate origins of the Tarot- http://www.yhwh.com/Tarot/Tarotint.html that indicates the origins are from Jewish mysticism. It's true, there are Kabbalistic correspondences in the Tarot, but again, whether these are deliberate, accidental or simply point to a greater common ground in all of human understanding, I doubt anyone really knows for certain. There are even Christians who use the Tarot, I'm told. But again, I leave it up to each person to find their own path through all this. Find a way that works for you, and use it!
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