Shadow Tarot - an explanation 03/04/2004

A while ago, I bought a Tarot deck. I was never really interested in it, except from a mild fascination with the Major Arcana, but when I saw this particular deck, I had to have it. It is a Tarot deck designed by H.R. Giger, a German surrealist, and the guy who designed the original Alien.

After I bought the deck, I realized that it wasn't your ordinary Tarot deck. Traditional Tarot decks have 56 Minor Arcana cards, which are the same 52 cards in a regular deck, though with one extra face card, and the suits are different. Instead of hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, there are wands, staves, cups, and pentacles (stars).
Then there are 22 Major Arcana cards, such as The Fool, Death, The Sun, etc... What I thought was odd about the deck I bought is that it only consisted of the Major Arcana.

When I started reading the book that came with it, I realized that I truly hadn't bought a regular Tarot deck. What I had purchased was something called Shadow Tarot.

When you do a regular Tarot spread, you usually come to the table with a question in mind. "What direction is my career going?" "Where will my relationship go?" Stuff like that. And then, using aspects of Numerology and the ability of our unconscious to find meaning within symbolism, the Tarot cards help us find the answer.
Shadow Tarot is different, however. It isn't concerned with finding the answer, what it does is help us understand why we are asking the question, enabling us to have greater insight and help us help ourselves answer the question.

I found it all very interesting, and so after I bought it, I did a spread concerning my relationship with my exgirlfriend, who I was dating still at the time. It provided some very interesting insights and fascinating revelations, all of which I took with a grain of salt, and that was that.
Now that we are broken up, I thought it would be interesting to do another spread, and again, I found it had some very interesting things to say.

I was originally planning on posting it here, but the entry is getting a little lengthy already, and I realized that this sort of thing really should be private, but maybe I'll do a different sort of spread and post the results, so you get an idea of what Shadow Tarot is all about. So tune in next time...