The Little Book of Secrets

Can you guess what I am???

I am an esoteric treasure chest disguised as an ordinary household object, slipping with the greatest of ease through epochs of time.

I am underneath your very own nose, and indeed, between your very own fingertips.

I transcend the borders of nationality, language and beliefs - too invisible and too insidious to fall prey to those who would control the dissemination of real knowledge.

Have you guessed me yet?

Commonly found in lavish royal chambers as well as homes of the poor; in the cell of the jailed and the office of the jailer. Indeed, truth is merciful and cannot be shut out - our divine inheritance, and can you name me now???

I am the deck of playing cards.

A simple book of paper, pages unbound; absent of words yet intriguingly symbolic: unassuming. Let us step closer and direct our gaze for a moment at this demure muse, this seeming wallflower compared to its’ more flashy city cousin, the tarot.

Let’s begin with the basics. The deck itself has 52 cards… a random number perhaps… or is it?

Isn't our calendar year comprised of 52 weeks? A coincidence you say? Let us consider that 4 suits, each of 13 cards, correspond faithfully to the 4 seasons, each of 13 weeks. And did you know that one year is made up of 13 lunar cycles, each 4 weeks long?

And now our little deck is becoming less demure. And the secrets have just begun to unfold.

If you add all numbers within a suit, with Aces as one, two’s as two, etc… Jacks are the number 11, Queens are 12, and Kings are 13… what do you get? The answer is 91: the precise number of days in a season. Add all the numbers in a deck and you get 364, the number of days in the old lunar calendar. This is a method of time keeping based on the observation of natural rhythms and sometimes referred to as the Celtic Tree Calendar (see http://www.projectpluto.com/calendar.htm - a great little calendar site).

So now the country cousin is looking radiant, isn’t she?

There is no known game that uses a calendar, so what exactly is going on?? Why put a calendar in a deck of cards?

If you think about it, a calendar is made for charting events in time. And what is divination, but the art of mapping future and past? I believe it is self-evident: whoever created the playing cards did so for the purpose of preserving a working model of planetary harmonics for calculation and prophecy.

Within it are worlds of correspondences, simply awaiting our focused attention to crack it wide open.

The archetypal colors of black, red, and white mix, mingle and sing within numerological patterns and suit dynamics. With each card layout an intricate landscape appears, all within your very own little time machine. Can you imagine the possibilities?

This deck is nothing less than Sleeping Beauty herself. After a centuries long slumber, it is time for knowledge held safe in the sarcophagal chamber to cycle to the surface of our collective human awareness. Without a doubt, all manner of sacred teachings are rising to the surface at this critical moment to align our minds and our being with the greater order. Secrets once held closely are becoming common points of reference for the general population as we prepare for a future beyond imagination.

Interestingly enough, historians have substantiated the existence of the 52-card deck we know and use today to nearly a century before the well-documented emergence of Tarot.* The tarot is an altered version of the original deck made to accommodate the Italian card game of the same name. By this addition, calendar correspondences were lost yet other correspondences gained in terms of card reading.

Over my nearly 30 years of practice in this art of premonition, I have come to understand that it is not the leaves in the tea cup, the stones on the ground, nor the variety of cards on the table that determine the success of the reading. It is the vision of the reader that is the critical ingredient.

Now, at this revolutionary moment in our human history, let us acknowledge playing cards as the profound divinatory instrument they were created to be and return the rightful place of honor to both our beloved card cousins, side-by-side, at long last.©

* In 1377, the 52-card deck is first described in a manuscript written by the German monk, Johannes of Basel. With a few minor changes, this deck, described in wide detail, is nearly identical to what we find in modern American playing cards.