Dr.Nikki's
Tarot/Cartomancy
Reading
You can find out about our Tarot Card and other
Cartomancy Readings here.
No race cars, no streets (unless you count
the mostly mud tracks outside of the few
cobble stone cities and remaining Roman
roads), Europe was emerging from a time
called the Dark Ages into the sparkle and
light of the Renaissance.  It was over cards
that we now associate as Tarot that the 15th
and 16th Century Italian nobility talked,
chatted, wheeled and dealed within the
machinations of their Class.  

Some historians report that for a time there
was quite a competition between the
individual houses as to whom had the most
beautiful deck of cards.  Initially, totally, the
cards were intended to play an engaging and
entertaining game requiring skills not unlike
poker players today.  (You really don’t think
Ascribed to much…mystical messages from the
ancient Egyptians; codes that would cross time
and space; the stock and trade of gypsies; the
the tool of the scam artist and liar.  Associated with witches for
dark and mysterious use, capable of holding spells and power
to use against others, Tarot has been “blessed and cursed” with
it all.

The truth is, the Tarot deck itself originated in the Renaissance
in Italy.  The oldest existing deck dates to the early 1400s.  
They weren’t created by the Rom in their trek out of
Eastern Europe.

They weren’t designed and passed
down through secret religious
societies from before the time of
Christ.  They were designed as a
deck of cards to play a card game
similar to bridge by the nobility.

Try to imagine life in the 1400s.  
Leonardo hadn’t even been born yet.
The Italian nobility would live in towns and cities to conduct
business and engage in Machiavellian games and power
struggles.  When heat brought disease and discomfort many
retired to their summer houses, much like the English gentry.  
These would turn in to revolving parties and entertainments.
Today Tarot is simply based on Jungian philosophy of
Archetypes.  There are certain essential steps that we all go
through in this life.  For example, in order to be alive, we have
all shared the experience of being born.  In order to be
sentient, we have all a shared experience in that time when we
become self-aware.  As the 20th and, now, 21st Centuries
have added their influence to the Tarot they are an amazing
tool for introspection, choices and who we are, where we’re
going, and, sometimes, how best to make that happen for
ourselves.

Our website uses the Art Nouveau Tarot Deck for illustration.  
We choose this deck more for the eye appeal than for
adherence to that specific deck’s symbology.  Here at the
center we have a wide range of Cartomancy Decks running
from the Sfroza to the Art Nouveau.  We have celtic decks,
unicorn decks, Egyptian, Norse, and many more.  Some decks
are based on movies or stories (Lord of the Ring, The Crow),
while others are based on belief systems (Angel Deck and
Mother Earth Peace).  If you have a specific deck you would
like us to use as we conduct reading please ask.

DrNikki.Com offers the Tarot/Cartomancy modality in a variety
of forms:
Standard Reading            Chat Reading      
E-mail Reading           Pro-Bono Reading  
they didn’t gamble on their card games, do you?)  In fact, the
earliest forerunner of the word Tarot doesn’t show up in the
vernacular until over 150 years after documentary evidence of
the first playing decks of cards.  Tarot initially appears as a
noun, the name of a card game.

The components of the decks have changed over the years.  
Today a quick visit to
www.usgamesinc.com will show you a
wide range of decks that are available.  They come in all
shapes and sizes, belief systems, specific question genres,
teach yourself or give a gift.  The cards we use on our site for
examples are the Art Nouveau Tart Deck.  The choice was
more of an artistic one than that of subscribing or promoting
any particular Tarot deck.

Over the years, through the Renaissance, Roccoco and
Baroque periods, the Tarot mutated from a strict device for
palor entertainments to a holder of messages and images.  
During the Renaissance symbolism was king.  Color, flower,
animal, mountain, left, right, up, down, square, soft, harsh; all
had meanings understood by most in the noble class.
Allegorical communication was key.  Numerous portraiture
studies of the time give good examples of the hidden messages
within paintings of the period.

In the early part of the 1900’s what has become to be
considered the “standard” Tarot deck, “Rider Waite” was
developed.  This is the deck most people are familiar with and its artwork has
become the “standard” for the symbolism of the card.  Although Hebrew
associations weren’t made until the late 1700s as it was considerably earlier
that the Tarot started to move into the shadowy realms of self-knowledge and
prediction.  The tarot deck had transposed from the original carte da tarocco to
tarocchi  in approximately a century.  One of the earliest written associations of
Tarot with witchcraft is 1589, but that assumption is tenuous.  It really wasn’t
until the 18th century that the Tarot took on its magic and divinatory allure.

Do they really work?  Cartomancy in general works.  Whether you are using a
deck of standard playing cards, the Visconti-Sforza-Pierpont Morgan Tarocchi
deck which is a facsimile of a nearly complete set of cards from the 15th
Century.  (Four cards have been recreated to fill in the deck.)  Tarot is Tarot!  
Somewhere between the 15th and the late 19th early 20th Century the
symbology of the cards changed.  The Catholic Church even had a hand in
their change and developing demanding the Pope and Popess be replaced by
less offensive figures, thus we are presented with the Priest and Priestess.
- Veterans -
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