The Tarot is the oldest card game in the world. Time has covered up its origins, thus the formation of myths and legends.

The one that is mostly accepted tells us that it was invented by the Great Hermes Trismegisto who is known as the messenger of the gods, who possessed the knowledge of the words of Power as well as their correct pronunciation. He is compared and matched to the god Thot, who created through words, and even sometimes takes his place.

Hermes is the father of Hermetism, a study that is named after its creator. All of his prophesies have come true, like the one he said about his own people when he wrote: "Mercy will end, the religious will me persecuted and when this happens, Egypt will die". And to tell this to a nation whose religion is the foundation of many other religions around the world would seam impossible.

Legend states that at the center of the pyramids, even today, you can see the chambers and passage ways where the initiating rites of the priestess Osiris took place. They were schools of knowledge, as well as forums of reflection, where faith grew and became a profession. There are documents written in heratic language where everything is explained through metaphors and myths. Inside the pyramids one can find: the well of truth, the ascending ladder, the arcane room, and the king’s chamber, which holds a coffin. This arrangement is the same in all the temples of the High and Middle Egypt.

Another prophecy stated by the divine Hermes that came true was: "oh, Egypt, Egypt, the only thing that will be left of you will be incredible fables for future generations, surviving only what is carved in stone."

The relationship between the pyramids and the Tarot cards is due to the fact that they were found painted between two columns in the arcane room and they were considered a sacred language because in these paintings, each card had a number and a letter, therefore it meant the alphabet of the hidden sciences, meaning the absolute principles, the universal keys which, applied at free will, could become the source of all knowledge and power. Each letter, each number, and each image expressed, in that language, a three-part law that had repercussions in the intellectual and physical divine world.

It was explained to the aspiring Osiris priests that if they managed to find the meaning of the cards, this would lead them to the crown of the wizard and, upon the holding of this crown, thy would know that the will to unite with God to manifest the truth and carry out justice, begins to share in this life the divine power over beings and over things.

Since then, and due to its importance, the cards are known as Arcanes, there are higher (22 ) and lower (56) cards. Arcane derives from ark and it refers to a deep secret, it is literally a storing chest. It is also a remedy for the alchemists, a potion that prolongs life. For the Hebrew, it symbolizes a coffin that stores the sacred knowledge and it is the ark of the alliance. Noah maintained life and the knowledge of antediluvian in an ark. Thus, the ark is a symbol of the knowledge and life treasure chest. It is a principle of conservation and it represents the rebirth of beings and salvation. It is the distillery where the magic potion was produced.

Madame Blavatsky says that the arcane knowledge comes from Arka, the Divine Virgin, mother of the Heavens. Graves, says that Arka was the land of the Arkitas, canaanites that worshiped the Astarte or Ishtar goddess.

Like the Ark of Noah, it was a ship to preserve life, In this manner, the Tarot Arcanes are spiritual knowledge salvation vessels. The Alchemists looked for the transformation of beings and the Higher Arcanes allowed such transformation because it represented the cosmic heavens of creation and return, of involution and evolution and it offered spiritual discipline.

It is said that the arcane symbols were saaved into sacred books and charts (images carved in ancient golden charts have been found) and were used to communicate among wise men that spoke different languages. It was the common language, but when a persecution against the Hierophants hit, they were handed over to the gypsies, thinking that the knowledge would seem harmless because it was in the hands of those that were then considered frivolous. However, due to their nomadic habits, they took them out of Egypt, Caldea and Israel and into Greece and the rest of Europe.

That is why there is a version that states that the Gypsies invented the cards and that they are named Tarot because in calo (the language of the gypsies), tar means card. What is true however, is that the date in which the Gypsies started roaming through Europe in the XII century, coincides with the Tarot fuss in Australia and Rumania. As you can see, the Hierophants were right, nobody persecuted the Gypsies, and nobody thought they had deep secrets, however "He who knew what to see, was able to see".

The cards have traveled through France, Spain and Italy since the XII century, some museums, preserve cards, like the Louvre museum, that has a deck used by King Charles VI in 1392. He used this deck of cards for fun. In the middle of the XV century, Bonifacio Bembo (an Italian painter) made the Sforza Visicoti Tarot as a wedding present for the mentioned families, placing Maria Visicoti as the priest, that is why it is sometimes called the "papisa". Since then, the images of the cards have inspired many other painters.

Since the XVIII century (1781), in France, a wise man named Gebelin discovered the Tarot cards and reproduced them in his book called "the primitive world", situating its origins in Egypt. There was an atmosphere favorable to the proliferation of occultism. There were masons, cabalistic, astrologists, among others. The cards were successful as a prophetic instrument. A prophet named "Etteilla" found the relationship between the cards and astrology, even though he painted some cards with some changes, which were later discarded. In 1846; Eliphas Levi, in his book "Dogma and Ritual of higher magic", makes reference to the Tarot as a hidden source and discovers its relationship to the Hebrew alphabet and to the Cabala. The Cabala says that God created the world in four stages which coincide with the letters of the divine name Yod, He, Vau, He. The other source of the cabala are the Sefirot of the tree of life and the Tarot has four mallets of 10 numbered cards (sefirot) and four court characters (the divine letters). Therefore, the tarot recovers its place as the Wizard’s instrument. Like the alchemists do with the crucible, some use it as a process to free the trapped spirit that is in matter and it ends up transforming themselves.

Then, the great wizard Papus, in his " Tarot of the Bohemians", says that the Tarot is the oldest book, it probably came before the Enoch book and therefore is the key to the hidden sciences due to the fact that it is the book of Hermes and it contains the sum of symbolism.

At the begging of the XX century, occultism reached its summit point and many secret societies appeared, like Madame Blavasky’s "the Theosophical society", "The Luminous Lodge or Vrill’s Society" and in England, "The Golden Dawn", which had famous adepts like Bulwue Lytton who was a great hermit, Mathers, who tried to be related with unknown beings, Henry Bergson’s sister and the poet, William Blake. One of the Golden Dawn’s members found some manuscripts on hidden sciences and there is where they found the Tarot, which they carefully studied, stressing the place that the fool card had on the mallet because on some of these cards the number zero appeared, but in others, it was number twenty two. Eliphas Levi placed it between the twenty and twenty-one cards, which represents the Final Judgement and the World.

The importance on the Fool is due to the fact that it is the only Major Arcane that remained thorough all the card games, as the Joker, whose changeableness allows it to take the place of any other card.

The English studious suggested the placing of this card in first place because they considered the Tarot as a symbol of the hero’s epic (the fool). It is a heroic voyage that all men must travel during their lifetime.

Eduard Waite, a member of the Golden Dawn translated " The Bohemian’s Tarot" and there he learned the ideas of the "papus" regarding the Tarot’s symbols and dedicated his life to rescuing the original symbolic meanings, observing the invariable in the mallets. He published "The key to the Tarot" in 1910.

After this briefing, we can confirm that the secrecy of it all is not done in secret, it is talked in secret. The knowledge is manifested through images of all kinds that refer to its essence. In this manner, many philosophers through many centuries (from Petrarca in "Triumphs" to Italo Calvino in "The Castle of the Opposed Destinies") have taken hold of the Tarot as a topic. The same thing happened with multiple painters like Bonifacio Bembo and Andrea Mantegna, to Salvador Dali who even made Tarot cards. Poets like T.S. Elliot and Yeats and lately, many psychologists have studies the Tarot. Jung and his school of learning have found in these symbols, archetypes that are related to the activities of the collective unconscious.

What is true about the Tarot is that it opens up a door that allows us to take a journey to the center of our being, to our primary source: it is a door to our unconscious.

We can conclude that the esoterical teachings transmitted through the bases of symbolic images called Tarot, continue nowadays impacting the human’s subconscious.

The images of the tarot do not mean people, things or events; they project to people, things, or events within the context of the inevitable mental odyssey. Thus, when the Tarot is consulted, it is not the cards that we have to read rather than our own life reflected on these images.

The Tarot, like the images that we see in our dreams, burst into our lives to show us aspects of our personality that want to be recognized. They bring us messages of great importance in non-verbal languages, which are symbols.

This is why the Tarot has an immense power to activate our imagination, because the cards are inspired in human experience and in the deepest levels of our mind.