I'll admit the timing of this hop and the adventures in Tarot that has been happening on this side of the screen are brilliant. I couldn't have planned it better even if I had been trying to, and the concept of hidden things and Easter Eggs, has been playing out as my adventure has developed.

So, what is this adventure that I have been hinting at? Well it begins back at the end of 2021, when I bought my friend the Easy to Read Tarot Set, featuring Ciro Marchetti's Gilded Tarot.

This kind of set me off on an adventure to find and collect all the available decks. I didn't really understand why to begin with, as I wasn't aware that any others had been released.

I already had Gilded Tarot both as part of the Easy Read Set and on its own, plus I had the Legacy of the Divine Tarot, both of which I had been actively using in my work. 

Throughout this post, you'll notice that I am focusing on the Major Cards of Strength and Justice, but I am also looking into the uniqueness of the Palace and Tree of Life, something that you only find in certain of the 13 availabel decks. The imagery of these unique cards speaks loudly to someone that is mostly a visual and auditory learner. It is also where the treasure hunt for the hidden things begins. 

Within the Gilded Tarot, Strength and Justice are placed within the Major Arcana at 8 for Strength and 11 for Justice, which depending on how you are introduced to Tarot, and its lore can be common place and accepted as 'standard'.

That is unless you look for the hidden things, there are actually two histories for the Tarot, that eventually meet up and at some point blend and merge together, meaning that both are correct and neither path is wrong.

It purely depends on how you learnt, and who your teacher was. If like myself, you picked it up naturally and then filled in blanks later, firstly welcome to the club and secondly, your knowledge isn't flawed, its unique.

Tarot began as a French/Italian card game known casually as Tarocchi, which had the commonly known playing cards, with the addition of the Page, it also featured certain of the Major Arcana as well, which ones featured depended on the locality of the game, the most commonly featured ones were; The Fool, Empress, Emperor, Heirophant.

I remember playing the French version once, and saw the Fool, Emperor and Heirophant, according to our flat guests of the time, there were versions with the Empress and Heirophant out there usually closer to Itally.

Until recently I'd archived that memory! With the addition of two decks; Tarot Decoratif and Encore Tarot, it brought it back along with the confirmation that they follow a different timeline journey through history...

So far as you have been travelling the paragraphs with me, we've been following one of the Tarot history pathways. In this pathway Strength has been the eighth card of the Major Arcana, and Justice has been the eleventh card.

Within this pathway, we've been traveling out of France, through Itally, Germany and eventually settling in Romania, where by this point Tarocchi had begun to evolve from being a card game into a Divination Tool.

The additional Major Arcana cards, tell their own stories in a manner of speaking, each cards addition explains its journey, Emperors and Empresses, could be found in countries such as Itally, Virginal High Priestesses were part of many royal court or associated families.

As the Tarot journey continued out of Romania through to Germany and back into France before crossing the waters into the United Kingdom and eventually the United States, the cards went through more significant changes, including a period of being hidden and reverting back to a card game so as to avoid the reformations and witchcraft trials.

It is believed that the Cathari, who were a Christian dualist or Gnostic movement hid and brought Judgement, Chariot, Justice, and possibly the Hanged Man into the fold for the Major Arcana.

Once it left their possession, the cards continued to travel and become well known for their divination properties.