The word Tarot is said to be derived from two Egyptian words, Tar, meaning ‘road,’ or ‘path’ and Ro, meaning ‘royal’. Thus… The Royal Path.
One popular legend claims that before the Great Library of Alexandria , dedicated to the nine goddesses of the arts, was burnt down, scholars and Egyptian tribesmen rescued some of the most precious papyrus scrolls and ancient texts from the burning library – including the Book of Enoch, or Thoth.
After the sacking of Alexandria, the City of Fez in Morocco, the only North-African state to evade Ottoman occupation, became the focal point for mystics, philosophers and wise men. It was there that they a special pictorial language was devised, portraying the esoteric teachings and wisdoms of the ancients saved from the fires. The images and symbology were claimed to have been the foundation and essence of what became the Tarot.
These Egyptian nomads, then called Gypsies, became wanderers upon the face of the earth. They remained a people apart with an ancient language and a birth right of magic and mystery. The ancient wisdom, now in the form of the Tarot, was carried from Alexandria to India and from there, on their travels, to Europe and eventually to all continents of the world.
However there are also correspondences in the Tarot with the Hebrew Kabbalah, Numerology, Gnosticism and Celtic religion. Whatever its origin, the universal significance of the Tarot’s symbology was said by alchemists and mystics to spring from the ‘Soul of the World’ (anima mundi.) Ancients called this concept ‘The Sympathy of all things’. Carl Gustav Jung later named this concept the ‘Collective Unconscious’.
Others claim the word Tarot means ‘above and below together’ – what we now call the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, because in it are summed up every agency contributing to life at all levels.
These descriptions are not dissimilar from the idea of the Akashic Records. This is the compendium, believed by theosophists to be encoded in a vibrational, non-physical plane of existence known as the ‘Etheric Plane’ or ‘Field’. The Akashic Records are believed to hold the energetic imprint of all events, human deeds, thoughts, words and emotions ever to have occurred in the past, present or future on this planet. Not a small record!
Notwithstanding all the above claims, my Tarot teacher claimed that the ‘arrival’ of the Tarot is somehow obscured and cannot be ‘seen’ in the Akashic Records in the way other energies are recorded, making the Tarot’s origin, like the Cards themselves, an enduring, intriguing mystery.
