{"collection":"Tarot","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/tarot/tob/index.htm","path":"tarot/tob/index.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/tarot/tob/index.htm","text":"Tarot of the Bohemians, along with the\nPictoral Key to the Tarot,\nconstitute the core literature of 19th and early 20th century 'Tarotism'.\nHowever, PTK is to the TOB as arithmetic is to differential calculus.\nIf you have no experience reading occult literature of this period,\nyou may find yourself profoundly lost after the first couple of pages,\nstaring at the abundant and profoundly esoteric\ntables, charts and diagrams, trying to get a clue as to what Papus\nis talking about.\nPapus is after a 'Theory of Everything', and finds evidence for it\nin the Tarot and a set of correspondences with everything from\nthe tetragrammaton to numerology and astrology.\nHis claim that the Tarot preserves ancient, profound knowledge by way of\nthe Romany/Gypsies (i.e. 'Bohemians') all the\nway back to Egypt, India and Atlantis is unsubstantiated.\nThere is no evidence of any kind of playing or fortune-telling\ncards prior to the thirteenth century, either in literature or folklore.\nNote that playing cards could not have become popular until the\nintroduction of printing in Europe.\nThe Tarot is believed to have originated from an elaborate deck of cards\ninvented in Italy in the fourteenth century.\nThe Romany people probably started to use this deck for cartomancy\n(fortune telling by cards) about a century thereafter.\nAs Papus notes, all of the early cards depict people dressed in the\ncostume of this period.\nLate in the book, Papus condescends to pen a section, in his words,\n'for the ladies' (cue Barry White music here),\nwhich gives some basic instruction in cartomancy using the Tarot deck.\nHowever, this is by far the weakest portion of this book.\nPapus is at his best when he is spinning elaborate webs of\ncorrespondence between the Tarot and the Macrocosm.\nThis book is hard work, but if you master it you will have a profound\ngrasp of the inner life of the Tarot deck.","title":"Tarot of the Bohemians Index","type":"page"}