Appendix: Sample
About The Solution To The Tarot Puzzle
The Tarot cards are well known today wherever Western civilization has
spread. Those who delight in the ways of science have a tendency to despise them
as an anachronism, a survival of irrationality fit for the untrained,
undisciplined mind. They are a metaphor
for chaos, and they elicit the fear chaos engenders deep in
the human psyche. Association with them would be tantamount to an act of
professional suicide for an academic. In contrast, those who find science and
its organization of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world cold and
unfeeling (annoyingly at odds with intuition) have often found satisfaction in
the vague yet stirring, undefined images and impressions the Tarot creates. It
speaks to their emotions, collecting them into a strangely compelling and
comforting, if somewhat personal sense of order. The scientifically oriented
dislike the Tarot for its magic, the very thing that draws others to it. In a
sense, the Tarot has become one of the many battlefields where men and women
assert the view of the world that appeals to them most. Everyone longs for
order, but finds it in different ways.
In fact the Tarot involves both magic and
reason, religion and philosophy, intuition and logic. The Tarot’s creators
were comfortable in both worlds, and that is part of what has made the cards
indecipherable for so long. Those who detest magic and vague symbolism have
never been able to look beyond them in the cards. Those who love these same
things have rarely sought to begin with careful deduction and observation in
their search for understanding of the cards. Without a little of both these
things, the Tarot cannot be understood. But there is more to the mystery of its
long survival in obscurity.
The solution of the Tarot’s puzzle is not
simple, or it would have been solved centuries ago. It was made difficult by a
subtle understanding of human prejudice and tunnel vision. It must be solved
through a balance between the specific and the general, the details and the
whole, the forest and the trees. The solution, once found, is incontrovertible,
but finding it is no easy matter.