Tarot among the divining arts

By now you have shuffled, laid out a spread and read it as one picture. It's a good moment to step back and see that tarot isn't alone. It belongs to a family of ways people have used to look at their lives, and some of its relatives are much older than the cards.

This lesson is a short family portrait: what the members have in common, how they differ, and why you might reach for one rather than another.

The cards grew up beside books of lots

When tarot was young, in Renaissance Italy, chance was already a popular way of asking questions. Fanti's Triumpho di Fortuna, published in Venice in 1527, set out a game of fortune: you chose your question, then followed a trail of wheels through the book, guided either by the hour at which you asked or by a throw of two dice, until you reached your answer. Each wheel had twenty-one divisions, because two dice can fall in exactly twenty-one different ways.

Its frontispiece shows two figures side by side: an athletic nude holding a die, and an astrologer with his instruments. Chance and the heavens, guiding the same question.

In 1540 another book published in Venice, Le Sorti, did the same job with playing cards. Some historians have noticed that twenty-one, the number of combinations of two dice, is also the number of numbered trumps in the tarot. Nobody has shown a link, and it may be coincidence. But it is a reminder that the cards were born into a world that already read meaning into chance.

What the family shares

Look at any of these practices closely and you find the same three parts.

• Something outside your control. A shuffle and a cut, a throw of coins, the fall of dice. In astrology it is the moment itself: the sky at your birth, or at the moment a question is asked. Numerology has no chance in it at all; it works on numbers you didn't choose, such as your birth date.
• A set of symbols. Seventy-eight cards, sixty-four hexagrams, the planets, signs and houses, the numbers from one to nine.
• A reader. Someone who brings the symbols to bear on a real situation. Without the reader, none of these systems says anything.

That last point matters. Every one of them inclines and suggests, and every one depends on a person to turn it into something useful.

Where they differ

They differ most in what they look at.

• Astrology looks at time. A birth chart is the same every time you look at it, so it describes the long shape of a life, and the movement of the planets since then describes the season you are in. Horary astrology, the branch that answers single questions, treats the moment a question is asked as the birth of the question.
• The I Ching looks at change. Its sixty-four hexagrams each picture a situation and how it is moving. It asks how to meet that moment well, and to adjust your effort as the times turn. Traditionally it was cast with yarrow stalks, a slow method that takes twenty minutes or more and leaves room to think; three coins came later and are quicker.
• Numerology looks at number. It reduces a date or a name to a few digits and reads their meaning, often for a year at a time. Tarot borrowed from it: the number positions you learned in lesson XI come from old number symbolism, and some readers turn a birth date into a "birth card" from the Major Arcana.
• Tarot looks at the situation in the round. People, feelings, pressures, choices, all at once, in pictures. That makes it especially good at "what am I not seeing here?".

Which question wants which

There is no rule, but there are good fits.

• "What kind of season am I in, and how long will it last?" suits astrology, which can put dates to it.
• "How should I act now, while this is changing?" suits the I Ching.
• "What is really going on here, and what am I missing?" suits tarot.
• "What is this year about for me?" suits numerology, or a year card.

Many questions sit across more than one. A career change has a season, a choice and a lot of feeling in it. Asking more than one instrument isn't cheating; it's like getting a second view from someone who looks at things differently. What is worth avoiding is asking the same question over and over until something says what you hoped.

The family here

You don't need to leave tarot behind to use this. Here, the same matter can be put to the cards, to the I Ching or to the sky. Our tarot readings can take your birth chart into account, so the cards and the planets speak in one reading. Our I Ching readings work from a question you have actually asked. And the intermediate astrology course has lessons on the I Ching and on horary astrology, if either relative interests you.

What to take from this

• Tarot is one instrument in a family. It grew up beside Renaissance books of lots that used dice and the hours.
• They share three parts: something outside your control, a set of symbols and a reader.
• They look at different things. Astrology at time, the I Ching at change, numerology at number, tarot at the situation in the round.
• Choose by the question, and ask a second instrument when a matter has more than one side.

Next, reading for yourself, and the times when the honest thing is to put the deck down.