In the 70s-80s of the twentieth century an unusual frenzy arose (or rather resurrected after at least 100 years of sleep): the taroccomania. Tarot cards in magazines, at newsstands, at the tobacconist's, on the beach; responses begged from greedy sellers of hope, with an exotic name and an often not very clairvoyant eye.

Defining tarot esoterically is not a difficult task: they are cards bearing more or less colored images, more or less valuable, handed down by tradition or signed by authoritative masters of drawing. They consist of 22 major or arcana cards or triumphs or trumps and 56 minor arcana (Cups, Coins, Swords and Wands) with a complementary function as they specify the fate determined by the majors.

They are cards of unknown origin, and already for this reason mythical, perhaps born in Italy, in Venice, perhaps in France or Spain or Germany; they are probably daughters, as far as the major arcana is concerned, of the "naibi", a didactic pack, intended to instruct children about the conditions of life, the muses, the sciences, the virtues and the planets, sisters or cousins, as regards the minors, dice, in relation to the series of numbers from 1 to 10 and chess, for the figures of the King, Queen, Jack, and Bishop.

There are those, like Court de Gebelin, who recognize in the tarot a fragment of the great book of the god Thoth, a mysterious inheritance of Egyptian wisdom, and those who, like Eliphas Levi, consider them the illustrations of the book of Enich, heirs of the ancient oracle Hebrew of Urim and Tummin and refers them to the 10 Sephiroth and 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Who, like Vaillant, defines them as the Bible of the gypsies and attributes to them a Bohemian origin, and who like Oswald Wirth and Stanislas de Guaita recognizes in them an initiatory series, full of symbolism. The tarot would represent only the human iter of birth, learning, choices, victories, temptations, fall, return to origins, death to the quality of profane, rebirth of the sacred.

The tarot cards, however, appear first of all an alphabet, an arcane language, a totality condensed into a few but pregnant images. Pagan and Christian, biblical and mythological images, Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology and magic coexist and are concentrated in these 78 innocent colored cards: there are the allegorical figures of the Magician, the Wheel and the Hanged Man, exquisitely medieval.

We find the Emperor, the Empress, the Priestess and the Pope, the virtues (Temperance, Strength, Justice), the celestial bodies (the Sun, the Moon, the Stars). There is a cheerfully pagan Eros ready to shoot arrows among the clouds, next to a universal judgment, all biblical, and to a tower that clearly alludes to Babel. There is the Devil with horns and the usual pitchfork and there are the symbols of the 4 Evangelists, the Lion, the Bull, the Angel and the Eagle depicted in the arcana of the World. All exquisitely mixed with the symbolism of the 7 colors of the iris, geometric shapes, alchemical elements, magical tools. A handful of cryptic signs, variously associated, sufficient to trace, in the most essential and profound lines, the history of the world, which is then the history of every man.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons or perhaps the only one why the tarot, beyond the skill of the fortune teller, beyond probability and chance fulfill their function. They speak through symbols that are intimately close to us, that are part of us, infinitesimal fragments of humanity: the archetypes, the nuclei of energy around which the beliefs and personality of the individual, of the family, of the tribe are built and built. , of the people, of the whole race.

Cartomancy is a form of precognition, clairvoyance and retrocognition, a system that through symbolic associations comes to reveal and define the present, past and future of the consultant. No other element is entrusted to the fortune-teller except a few cards, a handful of symbols with which he plays, in which he gets lost, with which he establishes relationships and subtle interdependencies.

The mechanism capable of triggering this ability appears, in this mantic, to be very complex. It is true that the psychic uses it as a support, a stick to cling to in order to reach the mental state indispensable for the emergence of the so-called "sixth sense". But it is also true that the knowledge that he draws, combines, and handles, are not the result of the suffused, fantastic figures recognizable in the coffee grounds, or of the faint, uncertain indications of the dream, but of precise, reasoned images, perfectly calibrated in their arcane symbolism. Images that stand in totality in a rigorous and perfect sequence just as all things, people, animals, and plants are arranged in the cosmos in a harmonious design.

Thus the phenomenon of clairvoyance is weaved on a web of archetypal symbols, linked to the drawn cards. But not even the extraction of the cards is said to happen randomly. The consultant, following a mysterious attraction, chooses from the cards that are presented to him face down and, with this choice, provides the psychic with the traces, the key points on which to trigger extrasensory perception, precognition, and the sight that ignores the eyes.

All things in the universe, Jung claims in his theory of synchronicity, are related to each other. The situation of the consultant is connected to the cards that he will extract, the cards extracted to the prediction of the fortune teller, the prediction back to the lived or future situation of the consultant. The arcana of the tarot, a tiny but immense book, which goes deeper and deeper step by step, and which never ceases to be decoded and understood, require to be meditated on, visualized, analyzed in all their elements, colors, in the minutiae, in the spatial relationships.

Equipped with a profound sacredness, conferred on them by the symbolism that imbues them, they demand seriousness, respect, and trust from those who handle them. The oracles of all times have always kept silent or lied to those who don't believe, to those who play or mock. Consulting the tarot cards is not a beach pastime nor the crutch of existence for the most insecure, nor a means of speculation nor a jukebox always ready to re-propose the hoped-for reason. The help, the advice that the ordered plots of the great architect of the universe allow to see is never repeated and does not come at all in the event of a futile, unjustified request.