Mystical Origins of the Tarot: From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage Paperback - 2004

From the rear cover

TAROT "Thirty years ago, at the very start of the modern tarot renaissance, Paul Huson showed us how to uncover the mythical images and truths of the tarot. Now he has returned to incorporate modern scholarship into a visionary new concept for deciphering the mystery of the tarot's origins and meaning." --Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot "Paul Huson brings to his quest for the origins of tarot the insight of an accomplished practitioner and the scholarship of a dedicated historical detective. The result is a fascinating 'biography' of the tarot images, tracking their shifting forms and attributions from their earliest appearances. Mystical Origins of the Tarot will undoubtedly be a classic in the field of tarot studies." --Robert Moss, author of Conscious Dreaming and Dreamgates and creator of the "Tarot for Dreamers" study course The origins of the tarot have been lost in the mists of time. Most scholars have guessed that its origins were in China, Egypt, or India. In Mystical Origins of the Tarot, Paul Huson has expertly tracked each symbol of the Minor Arcana to roots in ancient Persia and the Major Arcana Trump card images to the medieval world of mystery, miracle, and morality plays. A number of tarot historians have questioned the use of the tarot as a divination tool prior to the eighteenth century. But the author demonstrates that the symbolic meanings of the Major Arcana were evident from the time they were first employed in the mid-fifteenth century in the popular divination practice of sortilege. He also reveals how the identities of the court cards in the Minor Arcana were derived from a blend of pagan and medieval sources that strongly influenced their interpretation in tarot divination. Mystical Origins of the Tarot provides a detailed account of the original historical source for each card and how the cards' divinatory meanings evolved from these symbols. Huson also provides concise and practical card-reading methods designed by the cartomancers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and reveals the origins of the card interpretations promoted by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and A. E. Waite. PAUL HUSON has been a student of the tarot for over forty years. He received initial esoteric training from the Society of the Inner Light in London and he later studied the methods of the Order of the Golden Dawn. He is the author of Mastering Witchcraft and The Devil's Picturebook: The Compleat Guide to Tarot Cards. He lives in Los Angeles.