Sightsee the Tarot is a series on my channel through which I take you on a tour of tarot
books, spreads, techniques and tips, different decks, and more.
Today we are going to explore geopolitical divination with the tarot, inspired from Antoine
Court de Gébelin’s 1781 treatise, Le Monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde
modern, or The Primeval World, Analyzed and Compared to the Modern World.
Court de Gébelin asserted that the ancient Egyptians left instructions on how the tarot
could be used to divine on geopolitics, but then he also says we don’t really know how
these Egyptians used the tarot for geopolitical divination.
So…he says he’s going to take it upon himself to reconstruct how this might’ve
been done.
Alrightey then.
Let’s hear it.
But first, what exactly is geopolitics?
Basically, international relations.
Foreign policy.
Understanding how nations interact with one another, the ebb and flow of power between
them, and how geography affects political and social influence.
So geopolitical divination with the tarot is using the cards to divine on our current
global political landscape.
Court de Gébelin gets really specific about the tarot pip card correspondences to the
geography and civilizations of our world.
Well.
His world.
And his world leaves out like three-fourths of the earth, but it’s all good.
I’m not bitter that he left out China.
Are you?
I’m fine.
I’m totally fine.
So I’m going to run through the geopolitical assignments for the pip cards rather quickly,
and you can pause, take notes, only if it interests you.
There’s a supplemental download with card meanings specifically for geopolitical divination
with Court de Gébelin, so be sure to download that.
All right, now let’s get started!
According to Court de Gébelin, the Suit of Wands corresponds geographically to the Bread
Basket of the World.
The ten pips correspond with ten major regions in this area.
Ace of Wands is Upper Egypt.
Two of Wands is Lower Egypt.
Three of Wands is Middle Egypt.
Four of Wands is Ethiopia.
Five of Wands is Libya.
Six of Wands is Tunisia.
Seven of Wands is Morocco.
Eight of Wands is Algeria.
Nine of Wands is Mauritania.
And finally, Ten of Wands is West Africa, from Guinea to Nigeria.
The Suit of Cups corresponds with the North, which Court de Gébelin attributes to (quote)
“the origins of science and reason” (end quote).
The Ace of Cups is Armenia.
The Two of Cups is roughly where modern Georgia is today, in Eastern Europe right before West
Asia.
Wait, we need to shift the map over east.
The Three of Cups is Central Asia, the Islamic part of Inner Asia, that’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
The Four of Cups is Afghanistan to Pakistan, through India to Nepal to the Himalayas.
Five of Cups is modern day Turkey and also the nations around the Black Sea.
Wait, let’s move back to the previous map of the north.
The Six of Cups is Bulgaria and Romania, just north of Greece.
The Seven of Cups is from Serbia through Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine, also northward to include
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and all the way to Poland.
Eight of Cups is the Arctic, way North, where the giants live, says Court de Gébelin.
The Nine of Cups corresponds to Celtic Europe.
And finally, Ten of Cups is Greenland and Iceland.
Now we get to the Suit of Swords, the suit of great monarchies, great conquest, and great
revolutions.
The Ace of Swords is the Arabian Peninsula.
The Two of Swords is Israel and Jordan.
Three of Swords is Palestine.
The Four of Swords is Lebanon.
The Five of Swords is Syria.
Six of Swords is around where we now find modern-day Iraq and Kuwait.
Seven of Swords is western and northern Iran, or antiquity, the Median Empire.
Eight of Swords is the coastal area of Iran by the Persian Gulf.
Nine of Swords is the Persian Empire.
The Ten of Swords— doh—it’s not pictured on the map, but you can picture it in your
head, right?
East Indies.
East of India.
Finally, the suit of Coins, or Pentacles, which Court de Gébelin attributes to southern
Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ace of Coins is the island of Crete, part of the Greek islands.
The Two of Coins covers the other Aegean islands.
The Three of Coins is Greece mainland.
And now we’re headed West, toward Italy.
The Four of Coins is Italy, the boot.
Five of Coins is the island of Sicily.
The Six of Coins covers the Balearic Islands off of Eastern Spain, which includes the islands
of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera.
The Seven of Coins is southern region of the Iberian Peninsula, that’s Spain.
The Eight of Coins covers the central and eastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula.
While the Nine of Coins is the southwest region of the Peninsula.
The Ten of Coins… wait… hold on….
The Ten of Coins is modern-day Portugal and then the Canary Islands, which is just off
the coast of Morocco and the Western Sahara.
Bear in mind that the first printing of Court de Gébelin’s Monde Primitif was around
actually 1776, which is the time of the American Revolution.
So his geographic attributions are kind of within the physical scope of the political
regions he would have been most familiar with.
Later on in the 1900s, Aleister Crowley gives his geographic attributions for the tarot,
which cover much more of the world than Court de Gébelin’s.
One more layer of meaning for geopolitical divination with the tarot.
The Wands correspond with agriculture and artisans.
You may remember this from our episode on Papus.
The Cups correspond with the clergy and priesthood.
The Cups will denote the culture and religion of the nation.
The Swords correspond with lawyers, judges, nobility, and the military.
This is the civil law and policy of a people.
The Coins or Pentacles correspond with commerce and the occupations designated by money.
This is the economics of a region.
The four suits of the Minor Arcana are also layered with attributions to the four regions
of the world.
Okay fine, so Court de Gébelin does make some mention of my peoples in East Asia.
The suit of Wands or Batons is associated with the southern quadrant, namely Africa.
The suit of Cups is north, where the Celto-Sythians are from.
The suit of Swords denotes the occidental people, or East, as in the continent of Asia.
And the Suit of Coins, or Pentacles, is Europe, the West, which I suppose includes the Americas?
I’m not sure.
It’s not explicit in the text.
If we’re using racial terminology from the late 1700s, what Court de Gébelin would have
been familiar with, then, well, shall we say people of color fall somewhere either in the
suit of Wands or the suit of Swords, and the Caucasoids would be either Cups or Coins.
Some of you seasoned tarot readers might be scratching your head just a little bit because
yeah, these attributions are a little bit different from present day majority view.
The court cards of each suit represent heads of state or key political figures in the corresponding
regions.
The Kings of the tarot court represent either the heads of state from each of the noted
regions of the world that their suit corresponds with, or they represent an influential leader
in the occupational industry that the suit corresponds with.
The Queens, according to Court de Gébelin, represent religious thought, moral codes,
cultural customs, political sentiments, and general public opinion of their respective
regions, corresponding to their suits.
The tarot Knights represent the achievements, heroism, battles won, and the exploits of
the nations and peoples they represent.
The Squires, or tarot Pages, are the up and coming, the rising stars, the new talent,
new blood in the four respective occupational fields or, alternatively, their respective
geographic regions.
So the Page of Wands could signify rising stars in the environmental or agricultural
sciences.
The Page of Cups in spirituality and religion.
Page of Swords in law and policy, or the military.
And the Page of Coins in money, business, or the stream of commerce.
Encoded into the Major Arcana are the four stoic or cardinal virtues, and this will be
instructive in geopolitical divination.
Court de Gébelin notes the Four Virtues to be Key 8: Justice, Key 11: Fortitude, which
is needed to keep the peace and unity of the nations, Key 12: The Hanged Man, which he
says should be Prudence.
We’ll get to that later.
But here, it stands in for Prudence, the correction of abuse and the awaiting of the success of
our labors and trials.
And Key 14: Temperance, which is compromise and treaties between nations.
As for Key 12 being The Hanged One and the cardinal virtue of Prudence, Court de Gébelin
chalks it up to an unfortunate misinterpretation by the tarot card maker.
That’s convenient.
For the rest of the Majors, he attributes them largely to astrology that is then used
to forecast the fates of the nations.
Keys 3 and 4, Empress and Emperor, are the temporal leaders of the world, ordained by
Heaven.
Keys 2 and 5, High Priestess and High Priest, are the spiritual and religious leaders of
the world, ordained by Heaven.
Key 6 is titled Marriage, and here the three figures are the personification of Truth,
Honor, and Love.
Court de Gébelin emphasizes to us that Truth is definitely the woman here.
Key 7 is Osiris, Court de Gébelin tells us, and so we can infer that this key is the Key
of rebirth and afterlife.
Here, early on in tarot history, Court de Gébelin emphasizes the importance of sevens
in the tarot architecture.
In geopolitical divination, the Majors signify the political and moral status of the nations
that you’re divining on.
Key 16 is Avarice, or greed, the pursuit of money, status, power, and material gains.
This is the road to Fall.
Now, on the other end, Key 9 is the Philosopher-Sage, and Court de Gébelin goes on a bit about
this guy.
He really likes him.
This Hermit guy here is the most triumphant of them all, because he is self-aware, virtuous,
knowledgeable, and wise.
Oh, this is a little random, but fun fact!
Key 13, Death is assigned the pronouns she/her.
I don’t know why that amused me.
Okay.
Key 17 is the Dog Star, or Sirius, also known as the Big Dipper and the seven stars here
symbolize the Sacred Seven Planets.
Then you’ve got The Moon and The Sun, which Court de Gébelin says will help you to predict
timing when juxtaposed with the zodiac cards.
Key 20: The Last Judgment, is also the mark of Creation, says Court de Gébelin.
It’s the prophecy of a rising power.
Key 21, he tells us, is Time misnamed The World.
The eagle Court de Gébelin attributes to Spring.
The lion is summer.
The bull is autumn.
And The young man is winter.
We, then, are the Fool, in our folly.
Court de Gébelin doesn’t exactly leave us with detailed instructions on how to use
the tarot for a geopolitical divination.
He just says it can be done and he gives you his attributions.
That means I kinda have to, you know, make it up.
And that’s what I’m doing from this point on.
I’m making it up.
If you want to try out my made-up geopolitical divination method, first download the supplemental
handout.
So this is what I’ve made up.
Inspired by our previous Sightsee the Tarot episodes.
First, I’m going to deal out the deck into two piles, two cards here, one card there,
alternate until I’ve got two piles, in honor of MacGregor Mathers.
You remember this, don’t you?
Of course you do.
But once I get that first Pile #1, for Horseshoe #1 of 26 cards, I’m gonna stop there.
Then I make the Horseshoe from the 26 cards and read the cards in pairs, as were instructed
from our Mathers episode.
This time my intention is going to be for these 13 pairs of cards to be geopolitical
prophecies for the political climate I live in right now.
Or, to keep it simple, just do a three-card reading.
Ask to receive a geopolitical prophecy about your world right now and then pull three cards
to read as one cohesive divinatory message.
You remember the Mathers episode, right?
We talked about the three essential prongs of predictive tarot reading, or traditional
fortune-telling.
And that was card knowledge, intuition, and psychic ability.
We’re going to work with the geopolitical assignments from Court de Gébelin, then fine-tune
that with our own intuitive knowledge.
Once we’ve laid our foundation for interpretation, we can then try to reach beyond to get as
specific as possible with our prophecy and exert that psychic ability.
Let’s work with that three-card reading from earlier, the Page of Wands, Judgment,
and the Ten of Coins, or Ten of Pentacles.
We start with ascribed card meanings.
What did Court de Gébelin attribute these particular cards to, in terms of geopolitics?
We’re going to check the card meanings reference sheet for that.
But you’ll quickly see that it’s a little bit vague and may not make too much sense,
so we have to add on a layer of intuition and reach in to our intuitive knowledge to
better understand what these cards are trying to reveal.
If we had to deconstruct intuition, we might say it’s a combination of your gut feelings,
your emotional values, and then both sensations and your automatic impulses.
Let’s start with the Page of Wands.
We’re going to list out all possible attributions for this card, per Court de Gébelin.
Then we move on to Key 20, Judgment, and do the same thing.
List out all possible attributions.
Third, the Ten of Coins.
Again, list out all possible attributions.
And now we just meditate or scry in to the images and the brainstormed list of words
to see where our intuition takes us.
In other words, the beginner-level step one here for geopolitical divination is to set
down some baseline card knowledge.
Court de Gébelin reconstructed for us what he believed the ancient Egyptians used for
geopolitical divination.
Next, we layer on our intuition.
So here, trust your gut feelings.
Lean in to your emotions, trust them, and observe your own sensations and automatic
impulses.
So, for the Page of Wands, let’s say I can narrow down what I believe this card is indicating
by applying intuitive knowledge over the card knowledge.
Same with Key 20: Judgement.
And again, with the Ten of Coins.
I’m essentially using my intuition as a process of elimination.
Somewhere between intuition and psychic ability, I’m narrowing it down even further, chipping
away at the baseline card knowledge, especially if I’m reading the positioning of that Page
of Wands as being more “past” than “present” or “future.”
I’m reading Key 20 as revealing what’s happening right now to this Page of Wands,
this up and coming political figure, and the Ten of Coins will be the main prophecy for
what this Page of Wands public figure will be able to do for the economy of a nation-state
somewhere along the Atlantic coast.
So what we just did back there was use our intuition to round out card knowledge.
Now don’t expect me to share with you what I think that little three-card reading of
mine foretells about American politics!
But I’ve certainly got a very specific guess!
The Papus reading method we learned in a previous episode would also work great here.
Start with the first tier of four cards, which should all be from the same Minor Arcana suit.
Following Court de Gebelin’s suit attributions, if you want to read about one of the geographic
regions, nation-states, or just occupational industry related to the suit of Wands, then
you only read the first tier four cards with this pile.
Yeah, Court de Gebelin made some mention of Atlantis and the suit of Wands.
Nice, huh?
Northern Hemisphere, Scandinavian countries, Eastern Europe, Celtic Europe, go for the
suit of Cups.
Or if you’re reading about the global state of healthcare or religion and spirituality.
The suit of Swords corresponds with the Asian continent, or you can choose the Swords if
you want to read specifically about law and policy, or an international conflict.
The suit of Pentacles corresponds with the Western hemisphere, for Europe and the Americas.
This is Southern and Western Europe.
Then proceed with the first tier, or quarternary four-card reading using your selected suit,
drawing just from those 14 cards.
This will divine upon the state of affairs for that geographic region or the industry
you’re reading about.
For the three-card reading, the trinity within the quarternary, draw from the Major Arcana
to round out your reading for this region or industry.
And to really take it to the next level, the twelve-card zodiac reading to consider all
other relations, interactions, and influences.
And just a reminder, the Papus divination method came from our previous Tarot of the
Bohemians episode.
Now it’s your turn.
Follow these step by step guidelines for now, to train yourself with the deconstructed motions
of geopolitical tarot divination.
If you’re so inspired, expand upon and even revise the geographic, ethnic, and cultural
correspondences from Court de Gébelin, after all, he wrote this in the late 1700s, and
fine-tune your own method for using the tarot to forecast world politics.