the CBD Tarot de Marseille deck includes a “little white book” of 64 pages, with short interpretations, basic symbolism of the suits, tips for opening the deck, some words on the blank card and more. the full text of the booklet ia available at the download page. it is distributed under a creative commons licence, meaning that you are welcome to share, use and distribute freely (non-commercial use).
now the full text of the booklet has been kindly translated into Japanese by Kenji Ishimatsu. thank you so much, Kenji, for your time and effort! may the cards always turn in your favor!
you can download the Japanese text as a pdf file here.
if you are in San Francisco on the Aug. 2-3 weekend, or have friends around there, i will be giving two workshops:
Aug. 2 – therapy cards reading, a very powerful technique to use picture cards in therapy and consultation, practiced today by thousands of Israeli conventional therapists (most of them not Tarot people). you can read more about therapy cards here: https://cbdtarot.com/2014/06/30/therapy-cards-reading/
Aug. 3 – a workshop on CBD Tarot and the Magpie oracle, together with the wonderful Carrie Paris, whom i am sure many of you know.
Therapy Cards Reading (TCR) is an open-ended method of working with picture cards. It was originally developed by Dr. Ofra Ayalon, head of the Israel-based Nord institute and publishing house, who specializes in post-traumatic therapy. Today it is a powerful tool used by thousands of Israeli therapists, social workers, relationships and career consultants, life coaches and similar practitioners. It has also motivated the creation of many new picture cards decks. Outside Israel, it is relatively unknown.
Ofra Ayalon at a Therapy cards workshop, Minsk 2014
If you practice and love tarot, this is a book you must acquire! Buy, beg or borrow the book. But I warn you, if borrowing, you will quickly wish to buy your own copy to read and re-read.
The author is a reader himself and so much of his practice shines through his writing. Many good and interesting tarot books have been written by people who have a lot of information to impart about tarot’s infrastructure, history, or metaphysics. But they aren’t tarot readers. This book writes of tarot’s mythology and philosophy, but above all, gifts us solid and original intelligence about the ‘how-to’ of reading. The combination of tarot theory and practice is most impressive. Continue reading Open Reading book review in Tarot Pages, NZ
CBD Tarot de marseille cards – a beautiful video review by Donnaleigh de LaRose. you can see it here on Donnaleigh’s Tarot blog, or watch the video on Youtube:
and:
Tarot – The Open Reading book (and some words on the cards): a very good review in the respectable Tarot Heritage blog by Sherryl E. Smith.
Scientists today speak of the phenomena of life as existing “on the edge of chaos,” a sort of intermediate region between chaos and order. The perfect order is expressed by a solid crystal where everything is well-ordered and fixed. It has no potential for movement, and thus no place for life. Total chaos is expressed by smoke which has no stable shape. Here too there can be no life, because every structure would quickly dissipate. Biological and social life processes take place somewhere in between the crystal and the smoke. They are characterized by a certain degree of order and stability, but also by creative unpredictability and an occasional collapse of ordered structures.
We can see such a mixture of order and chaos all around us – in biological systems, in society, and in our personal life. To capture the complex interplay of chaos and order in life, the Tarot cards also have to express it in their design. In my view, the sophisticated balance between order and chaos is an essential feature of the Tarot de Marseille, and especially of the Conver deck. Therefore, while many new Tarot decks (Both Marseille and English school) have tried to discipline the cards and to make them more orderly, when restoring the CBD Tarot de Marseille I tried to preserve as much as I could the original balance between order and chaos.
The main expression of order in the Tarot deck is the structure of the suits, and especially the fourfold regular pattern of the minor suits. Chaos, on the other hand, is mostly expressed in the card images, and especially in the irregularities and “gliches” of the Tarot de Marseille illustrations. Looking more closely, we can say that in the major suit the chaos element is more dominant, as it is expressed also in the card sequence and titles. On the other hand, the regular structure of the minor suits makes them more ordered and less chaotic. This is felt most strongly in the repetitive design of the number cards.
You can read more about order and chaos in the major suit in this section from my book Tarot – The Open Reading. Also, in this booksection I discuss the idea of order and chaos in the court cards. As you can read there, the court cards present their own mixture: order in the table structure (four ranks by four suits), and chaos in the irregular images and titles.
Ace of Cups:
symmetric (order) on first impression,
asymmetric (chaos) on a closer look
a Tarot deck is printed as a single page, which is later cut into separate cards. the full page contains 80 cards (8×10), which allows for the standard 78 cards plus 2. as most other printers do, i used one of the extra cards as a “logo card” with the deck name and description. the other one i decided to use as a “blank card” – an empty frame with nothing except the white background. i thought it would be interesting to release it without too many instructions, and see what people do with it. i also did my own experiments.
from feedbacks and by my own experience, the blank card can be used in two ways: either as a separate focusing tool, or as an additional card shuffled with the deck.
as a focusing tool, i keep the blank card separate from the deck. at the beginning of the reading session i put it right in front of the querent and ask him to focus his gaze at the center of the card. then i instruct him to say whatever comes to his mind without moving his gaze.
the results are very impressive. after a minute or two, people enter a mild trance-like state. they may start to see shapes and colors in the card. sometimes they see a specific card appearing in the frame in a skeletal way. once or twice people even experienced the card’s becoming transparent, so that they could see the surface under it.
the logo card
when i feel that we had enough, i kind of “swipe” above the card surface with the palm of my hand to disconnect the querent from the effect. then i proceed with the reading as usual. but first, i ask him about his feelings. quite a few times, it happened that the querent has realized during the exercise that in fact, it is another question or issue which he really wants to raise in the session.
the second option is to shuffle the blank card into the deck and let it show up in the spread like any other one. here i follow an idea of a friend of mine. he tried this and realized that he could treat the blank card literally as a “carte blanche” – meaning, the universe is giving you an open card, anything is possible for you now. whatever you ask for, you will get.
i further thought that if this is so, i can let the querent choose another card to cover the blank one – not at random, but with a deliberate choice. what card would you like to see in this place? put it on the blank. this is a psychomagical act affirming your will and desire. now look at the card combination, and see how things will look like if you get what you want. consider what you see: is this realy your wish? maybe you would prefer something else?
i am sure there are more ways to use the blank card which can be interesting. you are welcome to try and explore them – and if you stumble upon something interesting, please tell me about it..
Mary K. Greer, one of the world’s leading authorities on Tarot, has just published a very favorable review of the CBD Tarot de Marseille cards, the new book “Tarot – the Open Reading”, and the CBD Tarot Android app.
as someone who always appreciated and admired Mary Greer’s contributions to the Tarot world (and profited from her well-known book “Tarot for Your Self”), i am very happy to get such a review from her.
the CBD Tarot de Marseille deck includes a “little white book” of 64 pages, with short interpretations, basic symbolism of the suits, tips for opening the deck, some words on the blank card and more. the full text of the booklet ia available at the download page. it is distributed under a creative commons licence, meaning that you are welcome to share, use and distribute freely (non-commercial use).
If you practice and love tarot, this is a book you must acquire! Buy, beg or borrow the book. But I warn you, if borrowing, you will quickly wish to buy your own copy to read and re-read.
