Fantastic article. Long time admirer of Kriss. Pleased to see him out and about again.
Forgive my inability with maths; to be sure, the following from the article is a massive exaggeration, right?
“The Tarot consists of 78 cards, which means that the number of different ways in which a deck can be shuffled consists of a one followed by 115 zeroes: roughly one quadrillion times larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.”
It is not! I am also not great with maths, but it might help to think about it this way: the topmost card in the deck could be any one of 78, the second any one of the remaining 77, the third one of 76, and so on. So the number of possible permutations is 78x77x76x75x74... which becomes a very, very large number very quickly. (Just those first five operations gives us more than 2.5 billion.) Even an ordinary 52-card deck has more permutations than there are atoms in the universe. Actually, I significantly undercounted the number, since any Tarot card can also be either upright or inverted, unlike ordinary playing cards, which have rotational symmetry.
I think you are wrong on 9 of swords; it's nightmares, the burden of the mind. Swords are mental action, they correspond to air. Then again I once pulled 9 of swords for someone who was fired shortly after. Great post and... Sam I agree "the internet is full of demons"....
He gets me thinking. This piece has the advantages of depth, substantial background research and Kriss makes original and plausibe connections without being dry or smug. He writes as if he really means it with a mordant humor maybe. He draws you in and there are unpredictable threads. I look at the tarot with a fresh perspective. Very interesting
I know tarot is 'made up' but in my experience it has some weird truthiness to it.
Example - Sam is not wrong about the nine of swords being the worst. I had that as future in a past-present-future reading in my early 20s and a couple weeks later fell into a drug-induced dissociative state for almost a year. It was like watching the world go by through a screen, disconnected from myself and reality. Afraid I was going mad but the madness was the fear itself.
Funnily enough when it started it was nighttime and I was in my bed, terrified - the image on the card.
Fantastic article. Long time admirer of Kriss. Pleased to see him out and about again.
Forgive my inability with maths; to be sure, the following from the article is a massive exaggeration, right?
“The Tarot consists of 78 cards, which means that the number of different ways in which a deck can be shuffled consists of a one followed by 115 zeroes: roughly one quadrillion times larger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe.”
It is not! I am also not great with maths, but it might help to think about it this way: the topmost card in the deck could be any one of 78, the second any one of the remaining 77, the third one of 76, and so on. So the number of possible permutations is 78x77x76x75x74... which becomes a very, very large number very quickly. (Just those first five operations gives us more than 2.5 billion.) Even an ordinary 52-card deck has more permutations than there are atoms in the universe. Actually, I significantly undercounted the number, since any Tarot card can also be either upright or inverted, unlike ordinary playing cards, which have rotational symmetry.
Extraordinary. And yes, the reversals. Thank you👍
This is brilliant. This shouldn't be floating around on the Net or something - This is powerful stuff. & now I really want to pick your brains
I think you are wrong on 9 of swords; it's nightmares, the burden of the mind. Swords are mental action, they correspond to air. Then again I once pulled 9 of swords for someone who was fired shortly after. Great post and... Sam I agree "the internet is full of demons"....
He gets me thinking. This piece has the advantages of depth, substantial background research and Kriss makes original and plausibe connections without being dry or smug. He writes as if he really means it with a mordant humor maybe. He draws you in and there are unpredictable threads. I look at the tarot with a fresh perspective. Very interesting
I know tarot is 'made up' but in my experience it has some weird truthiness to it.
Example - Sam is not wrong about the nine of swords being the worst. I had that as future in a past-present-future reading in my early 20s and a couple weeks later fell into a drug-induced dissociative state for almost a year. It was like watching the world go by through a screen, disconnected from myself and reality. Afraid I was going mad but the madness was the fear itself.
Funnily enough when it started it was nighttime and I was in my bed, terrified - the image on the card.
I understand that ordinary playing cards are in fact, older than Tarot, and were used for divination as much as for gaming or more.