Tarot Stuff

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Every spook needs a way to encrypt messages without carrying anything incriminating on his person. What more innocent than a pack of cards?

Long-haired and bearded Bruce Schneier is a cryptographer and computer security expert. He invented the Solitaire system referred to as Pontifex in the novel Cryptonomicon.

The system uses a standard deck of playing cards to generate a key exactly the same length as the message to be encrypted, but the encryption process (like that for pencil and paper systems of equivalent strength) is slow and requires great care.

One other problem is that sender and receiver must possess decks with the cards in identical sequences. You could shuffle one deck, then give your spook one or two decks with the cards in the same sequence - but then they’d be useless after encrypting one message, and what if he drops the deck on the floor? You need an ever-changing source available to you both that he can use to decide the order of his deck before each message he encrypts, and he shouldn’t need to carry this with him.

If you’re  both operating in the same country, he can use a daily column in a newspaper, but what if your spook is hiding in a foreign country? One trick is to use a poem that the sender knows by heart - then use the date of encryption to decide which bit(s) of the poem to use to create the key.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t use a Tarot pack instead of standard modern cards - but your spook had better make it clear that he has a good reason for carrying such a pack, which shouldn’t be too difficult.

We’re mystics at heart. The human brain evolved the ability to develop symbolic representations of the world around it, and its driving force is to try to fit everything into patterns.

Logic and science are very recent developments, and the brain is not well suited to them. Those of us who believe in them have to work hard to learn and apply the tenets, and we rely more and more on computers to extend our reach and do the heavy work.

All religions and occult practices like divination are nonsense, but that doesn’t stop a huge number of otherwise very intelligent people from believing in them at least part of the time. If we are to believe the popular press, a fairly recent president of the United States of America set at least some store in what his wife heard from her favourite fortune-teller.

The problem is that the groups that develop divination practices surround them with tales that owe nothing to easily proven facts, and continue to do so in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, because they no longer have access to the source of their beliefs. Here’s an example:

The tarot deck was invented in northern Italy early in the 15th century (1420-1440). There is no evidence for it originating in any other time or place. The earliest cards still in existence are portions of hand-painted decks from the courts of the nobility and were used for games. The illustrators were artists of the period, and the images are typical allegorical images of the period.

However, in the 18th and 19th century, fortune-telling was a common occupation of wandering ‘gypsies’, whose name is derived from the false idea that they came from Egypt. It wasn’t a very big leap for people to start suggesting that the tarot deck (not the commonest deck used for fortune-telling, but far the most mysterious-looking to people of the period) had its origins in Egypt.

This year, a round of the French national championship is being held at the same time, so Tulle’s tarot festival has been reduced from a five-day event to a weekend affair.

Although there will only be about ten players, it will still be a serious event for players and audience alike. Local contestant Christophe Greda was runner-up in the 2001 French national championships, and the usual contingent from New Caledonia will have travelled half way round the world from this group of islands way to the east of Australia.

At first sight, you would never guess that Christophe was the Limousin region’s great hope for the competition. 35 years old, born and brought up in Toulouse, he started playing tarot at the age of 14. “Like pétanque, it’s one of my passions, and if you can finish in the first five it pays well enough to cover your travel costs.”

At 1500 euros, the winner’s prize isn’t trivial, either. Read the rest of this entry »

My goal for this blog is to search out the unusual in the world of the tarot cards. Although I’ll discuss the history of the cards, and their use both for game playing and for divination, I’ll always try to include something a little different. Like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Does the word tarot make your spine tingle? Do you believe the cards can convey messages? Or are you fascinated by the images artists have created to illustrate Tarot cards? Perhaps you are more interested in the history of playing cards, and the origins of the tarot pack?

I’ll be discussing all of these aspects of tarot in this blog, so why not use my RSS Feed to keep up to date?

Even if you know nothing about tarot, you cannot fail to enjoy browsing some of the designs artists have been inspired to create.

‘Transfer’ - a design from The Uncarrot Tarot